Shirley Chisolm RIP

Some great quotes below and info about Shirley Chisolm, the first 'woman congressman who happened to be black' who passed away peacefully this week.

~C

Shirley Chisholm (November, 1924 - Jan 2005 )

Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman to serve in the United States Congress. An early education expert, Shirley Chisholm was elected to the New York Legislature in 1964 and to Congress in 1968. She ran for president in 1972, winning 152 delegates before she withdrew. Shirley Chisholm served in Congress until 1983. During her congressional career, Shirley Chisholm was noted for her support for women's rights, her advocacy of legsislation to benefit those in poverty, and her opposition to the Vietnam war.

Selected Shirley Chisholm Quotations

I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin. When you put it that way, it sounds like a foolish reason for fame. In a just and free society it would be foolish. That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black and a woman proves, I think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

Of my two "handicaps" being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.

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.

Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deepseated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.

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.

In the end antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing - antihumanism.

The United States was said not to be ready to elect a Catholic to the Presidency when Al Smith ran in the 1920's. But Smith's nomination may have helped pave the way for the successful campaign John F. Kennedy waged in 1960. Who can tell? What I hope most is that now there will be others who will feel themselves as capable of running for high political office as any wealthy, good-looking white male.

At present, our country needs women\'s idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.

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.

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.

... rhetoric never won a revolution yet.

Prejudice against blacks is becoming unacceptable although it will take years to eliminate it. But it is doomed because, slowly, white America is beginning to admit that it exists. Prejudice against women is still acceptable. There is very little understanding yet of the immorality involved in double pay scales and the classification of most of the better jobs as "for men only." (1969)

Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.

Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth. (attributed -- also attributed to Marian Wright Edelman)

I am not antiwhite, because I understand that white people, like black ones, are victims of a racist society. They are products of their time and place.

The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It\'s a girl.

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom profit that loses.

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.

~C

CD of the moment: Groove Armada - "Another Late Night"