Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholmwas an American politician, educator, and author. In 1968, she became the first African American woman elected to the United States Congress, and represented New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States, and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth30 November 1924
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
We Americans have a chance to become someday a nation in which all racial stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically.
Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.
I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That’s how I’d like to be remembered.
I had met far more discrimination because I am a woman than because I am black.
Some members of Congress are among the best actors in the world.
... all Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice.
There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.
My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference.
I love America not for what she is, but for what she can become.
At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.
Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time... its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission.
It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.
Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live...They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them.
Be as bold as the first man or [woman] to eat an oyster.