ABSTRACT
Born in 1924, only four years after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote in national elections, Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm had to hurdle the barriers of racism and sexism all her life. Her parents, Ruby Seale and Charles St. Hill, welcomed their eldest child into a world where one was often judged on the basis on their skin color and not on the content of their character or abilities. It was a United States rampant with racial discrimination and violence. Blacks all over the country struggled to earn decent wages to support their families and many cowered in the face of white opposition that kept them from participating in the political process. Unlike many faced with the same challenges, Chisholm refused to allow sexism or racism to handicap her. In 1968, voters from the Twelfth Congressional District in Brooklyn, New York, elected her to represent them in the U.S. Congress. In fact, she considered it “foolish” that she was both famous and a national figure because she was “the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman. . . .” She was not in Washington long before she decided to seek the presidency of the United States, not because she thought she could win, but to shake things up a little.
