[Deathwatch] Shirley Chisholm, first black woman elected to Congress, 80

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Shirley Chisholm dies at age 80
First black woman elected to Congress fought for women, minorities
Monday, January 3, 2005 Posted: 1:24 AM EST (0624 GMT)

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/obit.chisholm.ap/index.html

MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected
to Congress and an outspoken advocate for women and minorities during
seven terms in the House, has died, friends said Sunday. She was 80.

"She was our Moses that opened the Red Sea for us," Robert E. Williams,
president of the NAACP in Flagler County, Florida, told The Associated
Press late Sunday. He did not have the details of Chisholm's death,
which occurred Saturday near Daytona Beach.

Chisholm, who was raised in a predominantly black New York City
neighborhood and was elected to the U.S. House in 1968, was a riveting
speaker who often criticized Congress as being too clubby and
unresponsive.

"My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is
my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn't always
discuss for reasons of political expediency," she told voters.

She went to Congress to represent New York the same year Richard Nixon
was elected to the White House and served until two years into Ronald
Reagan's tenure as president. She also was a founding member of the
Congressional Black Caucus in 1969.

"Anyone that came in contact with her, they had a feeling of a
careness, and they felt that she was very much a part of each
individual as she represented her district," William Howard, her
longtime campaign treasurer, said Sunday.

Newly elected, she was assigned to the House Agriculture Committee,
which she felt was irrelevant to her urban constituency. In an unheard
of move, she demanded reassignment and got switched to the Veterans
Affairs Committee.

Not long afterward she voted for Hale Boggs, who was white, over John
Conyers, who was black, for majority leader. Boggs rewarded her with a
place on the prized Education and Labor Committee and she was its
third-ranking member when she left.

She ran for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1972. When
rival candidate and ideological opposite George Wallace was shot, she
visited him in the hospital -- an act that appalled her followers.

"He said, 'What are your people going to say?' I said: 'I know what
they're going to say. But I wouldn't want what happened to you to
happen to anyone.' He cried and cried," she recalled.

And when she needed support to extend the minimum wage to domestic
workers two years later, it was Wallace who got her the votes from
Southern members of Congress.

Pragmatism and power were watchwords. "Women have learned to flex their
political muscles. You got to flex that muscle to get what you want,"
she said during her presidential campaign.

When Bella Abzug challenged Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1976
Democratic Senate primary, Chisholm caused a stir by backing Moynihan.
"Where was Abzug when I ran for president?" she asked, when questioned
about her choice.

In her book, "Unbought and Unbossed," she recounted the campaign that
brought her to Congress and wrote of her concerns about that body:

"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."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson called Chisholm a "woman of great courage."

"She was an activist and she never stopped fighting," Jackson said from
Ohio, where he is set to lead a rally on Monday in Columbus. "She
refused to accept the ordinary, and she had high expectations for
herself and all people around her."

Chisholm's leadership traits were recognized by her parents early on,
she recalled. Born Shirley St. Hill in New York City on November 30,
1924, she was the eldest of four daughters of a Guyanese father and a
Barbadian mother.

Her father, an unskilled laborer in a burlap bag factory, and her
mother, a domestic, scrimped to educate their children.

At age 3, Shirley was sent to live on her grandmother's farm in
Barbados. She attended British grammar school and picked up the clipped
Caribbean accent that marked her speech.

She moved back to New York when she was 11 and went on to graduate cum
laude from Brooklyn College and earn a master's degree from Columbia
University.

She started her career as director of a day care center, and later
served as an educational consultant with the city's Bureau of Child
Welfare. She became active in local Democratic politics and ran
successfully for the state Assembly in 1964.

She was an Assemblywoman from 1964 to 1968 before besting James Farmer,
the former national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, to
gain the House seat.

"I am the people's politician," she said at the time. "If the day
should ever come when the people can't save me, I'll know I'm
finished."

When she left 14 years later, she complained that many of her
constituents misunderstood her, that she was a "pragmatic politician"
whose influence was waning in conservative times. And she said she
wanted more time for her family life.

After leaving Congress, Chisholm was named to the Purington Chair at
Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she taught
for four years. In later years she was a sought-after speaker on the
lecture circuit.

"She was a tremendous leader and a voice in politics when she was in
office, as well as when she left office," Manhattan Borough President
C. Virginia Fields told the AP.

Chisholm was married twice. Her 1949 marriage to Conrad Chisholm ended
in divorce in February 1977. Later that year she married Arthur
Hardwick Jr. She had no children. Hardwick died in 1986.

"Whether you agree with her politics or not, she had a moral compass
and was an advocate for the underdog," said Shola Lynch, director of
"Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed," a documentary on her 1972
presidential campaign.

Once discussing what her legacy might be, Chisholm commented, "I'd like
them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That's how I'd like to be
remembered."