Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and the first African American to seek a major party nomination for president, has died. She was 80.
Chisholm died Saturday night at her home in Osmond Beach, Fla. The cause of death was not immediately known, but she had been in failing health for some time.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday January 06, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 28 words Type of Material: Correction
Chisholm obituary -- The obituary in Tuesday's California section of former U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm misstated the city in which she lived, Ormond Beach, Fla., as Osmond Beach.
"She was an activist ... and a woman of great courage," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a statement Monday that was posted on the Operation PUSH website. "She refused to accept the ordinary. She had high expectations for herself and the people around her."
A strong, independent voice for the underprivileged in New York City's 12th Congressional District, which she represented for 13 years, Chisholm was elected to the House of Representatives in 1969.
In 1972, she ran a largely symbolic campaign for the Democratic Party's nomination for president, pressing her antiwar and aid for the disenfranchised agenda.
She won no primaries but stayed in the race into the party's convention and ended up with 152 delegates before withdrawing. George McGovern, the South Dakota senator, was the party's standard bearer that year but lost in a landslide to President Nixon.
Chisholm later wrote in her memoir, "The Good Fight," that she made her historic campaign because "someone had to do it first."
"In this country everybody is supposed to be able to run for president, but that's never really been true. I ran because most people think this country is not ready for a black candidate, not ready for a woman candidate."
The eldest of four children, Chisholm was born Shirley Anita St. Hill in Brooklyn on Nov. 30, 1924. When she was 3, her financially strapped parents sent Chisholm and her two sisters to live with their maternal grandmother in Barbados. Chisholm would later write that her time there was precious to her because of the excellent education she received in "strict traditional, British-style schools."
"If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason," she said.
Even though her family's financial situation was still not good, she and her sisters returned home seven years later. By then a fourth sister had been born.
Chisholm's father, a well-read man who worked in a factory, tutored her in the teachings of the early black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Her mother, who worked as a domestic, sought to make her daughters Renaissance women.
