A brief biography of Shirley St.Hill Chisholm, who became the first black United States Congresswoman in 1969, representing the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York.
Shirley Anita St. Hill was born in 1926 in New York City. Her parents were Caribbean immigrants: her mother a seamstress, her father a burlap factory worker. While her mother and father worked in New York to save money for their children's educations, Shirley spent much of her early life living with her grandmother in Barbados in the West Indies. She attended British schools there.
At age eleven she came home to live with her parents and went to public schools in Brooklyn. She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1946 with a BA in sociology. She worked at the Mount Calvary Child Care Center in New York from 1946 until 1952. While working at Mount Calvary, Shirley St. Hill married Police Detective Conrad Chisholm in 1949.
In 1952, Shirley Chisholm left Mount Calvary to become the Director of the Friend in Need Nursery in Brooklyn. She quickly moved on, and from 1953 until 1959 she worked as the Director of the Hamilton-Madison Child Care Center in New York. In 1959 she went to work as an educational consultant for the New York Department of Social Services in the Division of Day Care.
Shirley Chisholm was a good and respected teacher and loved her work. But it was joining the Department of Social Services that changed her career. She was deeply concerned about the living conditions of the poor minority women and children she came into contact with in her work. She made it her goal to see that their lots improved.
Chisholm took an active role in local Democratic politics so that she could have more of a say in policies that affected these minority women and children. In 1964 she ran for a seat on the New York State Assembly, Twelfth District, and won. In 1968 she vacated that position to run for Congress to represent the newly formed Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Despite running against the popular civil rights activist, James Farmer for the primary seat on the Democratic ticket, and against Conservative Party candidate Ralph Carrano, she won the election by a 3 to 1 margin.
Her win came as a result of her ebullient style, her teaching history, advocacy of minority women and children and her fluency in Spanish. In 1969 she was sworn in as the first African American congresswoman in United States history.
Her service occurred during the turbulent years of the VietNam war, and she quickly established herself as a champion of women and minorities. She once said in a McCall's magazine interview that she believed sexism was a greater difficulty than even racial prejudice- and she had suffered both. She was vocally opposed to participation in the Viet Nam war and lead and participated in marches and rallies against it. She was an avid supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment for women.
Chisholm fought against and helped change the way committee appointments were in Congress. The seniority placements had often placed people in areas where their expertise was of minimal use. She, for example, was assigned to the Committee on Agriculture and its Rural Development and Forestry
Subcommittee. She believed that was inappropriate for a representative of an inner city district.
In her early years in office, Chisholm worked on projects which ended the draft, increased consumer and product safety, and the automatic interment of suspected subversives. She supported embargos on arms sales to South Africa, day care funding increases, and co-sponsored the Adequate Income Act of 1971 which guaranteed families a minimum income.
She staged a run for President of the United States with another woman, Cissy Farenthal of Texas, as her running mate. Knowing full well that she would not win, she nonetheless was able to focus national attention on the issues that mattered to her. She would become a powerful spokesperson for the Democratic Party thereafter.
In the following years she helped to convince Congress to override Ford's veto of support to states so that they could meet minimum daycare requirements. She worked for fair housing programs, and against the creation of a Department of Education, fearing that it would result in lessening of programs for minority children. She stood against credits to defray the cost of going to private schools fearing it would diminish the quality of public schools.
Due in part to the conservative swing in government, Chisholm returned to her first love, teaching, in 1982, as an instructor at Mount Holyoke College. But she remained vocal politically. In 1984 she co-founded the National Political Congress of Black Women. In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed her Ambassador to Jamaica.
