In 1968 Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress; she served in the House of Representatives from 1969 – 1983. In 1972 she became the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States, the first Black candidate for a major party nomination.
Shirley Chisholm had spunk. Unlike Lou Grant (who told Mary Richards in one classic scene from the Mary Tyler Moore Show: Mary, you’ve got spunk – I hate spunk) I admire spunk so Rep. Chisholm is on my list of most admired people. I hear her voice with its crystal clarion calling out of truth to power echoing through the halls of the US Capitol today as surely as her footsteps walked those halls more than a half century ago:
“It is incomprehensible to me, the fear that can affect men in political offices. It is shocking the way they submit to forces they know are wrong and fail to stand up for what they believe. Can their jobs be so important to them, their prestige, their power, their privileges so important that they will cooperate in the degradation of our society just to hang on to those jobs?”
Yep. Sure sounds like it, Shirley.
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