Shirley Chisholm

Shirley Anita St. Hill was born in Brooklyn, New York, on the thirtieth of November 1924, the daughter of immigrants from Barbados and British Guiana. She took her master's at Columbia in early childhood education and worked twenty years as a teacher and administrator before entering politics in 1964 as a New York State Assemblywoman.

In 1968 she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the new Twelfth Congressional District in Brooklyn — the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. She would serve seven terms.

In January 1972 she announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States — the first Black major-party candidate for the presidency, the first woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, and the first woman to participate in a U.S. presidential candidates' debate. Her campaign won one hundred and fifty-two delegates and survived multiple assassination attempts. She said: "I ran because someone had to do it first."

In Congress she co-founded the Congressional Black Caucus, fought for the establishment of WIC — the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children — and was instrumental in the establishment of the National Commission on Working Women. She left the House in 1983 and taught at Mount Holyoke College for the next four years.

She is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, New York. The epitaph on her gravestone reads: "Unbought and Unbossed."

She died in Florida on the first of January 2005, age eighty.

She is honored here as the candidate who, asked why she ran, replied: "Someone had to do it first."