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
Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deepseated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.
At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.
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.
That's what's wrong with the country. There are too many 'good soldiers' accepting too many bad decisions.
When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation’s slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free - (Chapter 9).
I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States. I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or special interests. I am the candidate of the people.
We Americans have the chance to become someday a nation in which all radical 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. We can become a dynamic equilibrium, a harmony of many different elements, in which the whole will be greater than all its parts and greater than any society the world has seen before. It can still happen.
Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.
Of my two "handicaps," being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black
Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.
In the end antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing - antihumanism.
To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.
My God, what do we want? What does any human being want?
One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian.