[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 1 (Tuesday, January 4, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E28]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      REMEMBERING SHIRLEY CHISHOLM

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, January 4, 2005

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, today I'm filled with great sadness that on 
the eve of the 109th Congress we mourn the passing of my longtime 
friend and colleague, Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American 
woman elected to Congress and the first of her race to seek a major 
party nomination for the Presidency. She died at her Ormond Beach, FL 
home on New Year's Day at the age of 80.
  I commend to my colleagues the following article describing a time in 
the life of Shirley Chisholm written by Wil Haygood in the Washington 
Post on January 4, 2005.

                [From the Washington Post, Jan. 4, 2005]

                         A Woman of the People


              Shirley Chisholm took a back seat to no one

                            (By Wil Haygood)

       There was something so plain and yet so defiant about her. 
     Studious and yet a little jazzy, especially in front of those 
     Brooklyn church ladies.
       Shirley Chisholm, the former congresswoman who died New 
     Year's Day in Florida at age 80, came along at a moment in 
     the 1960s when there was a bubbling symmetry between the 
     women's liberation movement and the civil rights movement. 
     She was holding two candles in the wind.
       At church podiums in Brooklyn, she'd talk about babies 
     eating paint they had peeled from the walls, and she'd talk 
     about malnourished schoolchildren, and she'd raise her fist, 
     and her big mound of cloudlike hair would bob, and she would 
     start to crying, tears rolling from beneath those beatnik-era 
     glasses. She would turn her back to the audience--as if she 
     couldn't stand her own tears--and then turn around to face 
     the folk in the pews, and they'd be stomping.
       ``I used to say to her, `You should go into drama,' 
     ``recalls Edolphus Towns, a Democratic congressman from 
     Brooklyn. ``She could drop tears at any time.''
       Chisholm began her working life in 1950s Brooklyn. She was 
     the director of a day-care center and worked as an 
     educational consultant for the city. The tots had parents and 
     she befriended them and got herself elected to the New York 
     State Assembly in 1964. She was headed to Albany, the same 
     place that launched the national political careers of 
     Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey, Franklin D. Roosevelt and 
     many others.
       In the '60s, the talk in New York of black political 
     figures focused on names such as Basil Patterson, Percy 
     Sutton, Charlie Rangel. They were young lions who belonged to 
     Harlem political clubs. (There was also Adam Clayton Powell, 
     the once-powerful congressman who had crawled back to 
     Congress in 1969 after an expulsion and scandalous headlines. 
     But his day was now gone.)
       But Patterson and Sutton and Rangel suddenly had to yank 
     their heads and look across the bridge, to Brooklyn.
       Shirley who?
       ``Shirley came out of Brooklyn, and that was one of the 
     roughest political arenas you can come out of--even today,'' 
     says Rep. Rangel (D), who knew Chisholm for decades. ``For 
     her to succeed, she had to be a little strange--and certainly 
     extraordinary.''
       In addition to being a woman and from Brooklyn, Chisholm 
     was also--unlike Powell, Sutton, Rangel and Patterson--dark-
     skinned. Given the history of skin color, she had an extra 
     ladder to climb, and did so with relish, carrying herself 
     with the insouciance of the world's most attractive woman.
       So there she'd be, needing a ride to Albany and getting 
     herself over to Harlem so that Sutton, who was also in the 
     assembly, could pick her up.
       ``Shirley would meet us on the corner of 125th and 
     Seventh--now Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard--and ride with us 
     to Albany,'' says Sutton. ``We did that for two years.''
       Sutton noted something about Chisholm on those rides. She 
     was hungry for debate: ``Even if she agreed with you, she'd 
     want to debate you!''
       With the '60s drawing to a close, Chisholm was swimming in 
     the waters of history. ``She had the imagination,'' says 
     Rangel, ``of being first--and tenacious.''
       So she announced in 1968 that she was running for Congress. 
     There were howls of laughter, though not from the church 
     ladies, who saw themselves in the reflection of her beatnik 
     eyeglasses.
       In 1968, she became the first black woman elected to 
     Congress. She grinned and gave the peace sign. It wasn't 
     black power. It was Shirley power. She wound up serving seven 
     terms.
       She pushed for antipoverty legislation and became a star. 
     Ebony magazine wanted her, and so did Ms. magazine. She 
     appeared with Reps. Barbara Jordan and Bella Abzug. She was 
     known as honest and honorable. ``Chisholm would not set up 
     any kind of a side deal for her mother, brother, or cousin,'' 
     says William Howard, who served as her financial adviser.
       When Chisholm announced a run for the presidency in 1972, 
     it seemed a little strange. She was the first black to 
     conduct a large-scale presidential campaign within one of the 
     major parties. The Congressional Black Caucus hardly had the 
     numbers then that it has now, but she rolled her eyes when 
     its members asked why she hadn't discussed her presidential 
     plans with them. ``Shirley had a lot of self-confidence,'' 
     says Rangel.
       ``I Am Woman'' by Helen Reddy was humming on the jukebox 
     that year.
       ``Black people needed somebody,'' says Sutton. ``We had 
     lost Martin and Malcolm.'' He raised the first $25,000 for 
     her presidential campaign.
       At the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, she 
     was smiling from the podium--those glasses, that hair, the 
     dark skin. Simply getting there was a huge victory.
       ``The next time a woman runs,'' she wrote in her 1973 
     autobiography, ``The Good Fight,'' ``or a black, a Jew or 
     anyone from a group that the country is `not ready' to elect 
     to its highest office, I believe he or she will be taken 
     seriously from the start. The door is not open yet, but it is 
     ajar.''
       And, in time, they came: Geraldine Ferraro, Jesse Jackson, 
     Joseph Lieberman.
       The last time William Howard saw Chisholm was a year and a 
     half ago in Manhattan. She had wanted to go dancing. She was 
     peering at him, through those beatnik glasses, out on the 
     dance floor, imploring him to tell the band to play something 
     jazzy.

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