In 1964, Chisholm ran for and was elected to the\u00a0New York State Legislature. In 1968, she ran as the\u00a0Democratic\u00a0candidate for New York’s 12th District congressional seat and was elected to the\u00a0House of Representatives. Defeating\u00a0Republican\u00a0candidate\u00a0James Farmer, Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. Chisholm joined the\u00a0Congressional Black Caucus\u00a0in 1969 as one of its founding members.
\nAs a freshman, Chisholm was assigned to the House Agricultural Committee. Given her urban district, she felt the placement was irrelevant to her constituents and shocked many by asking for reassignment. She was then placed on the\u00a0Veterans’ Affairs Committee. Soon after, she voted for\u00a0Hale Boggs\u00a0as\u00a0House Majority Leader\u00a0over\u00a0John Conyers. As a reward for her support, Boggs assigned her to the much-prized\u00a0Education and Labor Committee, which was her preferred committee. She was the third highest-ranking member of this committee when she retired from Congress.
\nAll those Chisholm hired for her office were women, half of them black. Chisholm said that during her New York legislative career, she had faced much more discrimination because she was a woman than because she was black.
\nIn the\u00a01972 U.S. presidential election, she made a bid for the\u00a0Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. She survived three assassination attempts during the campaign. George McGovern\u00a0won the nomination in a hotly contested set of\u00a0primary elections, with Chisholm campaigning in 12 states and winning 28delegates\u00a0during the primary process. At the\u00a01972 Democratic National Convention, as a symbolic gesture, McGovern opponent\u00a0Hubert H. Humphrey\u00a0released his black delegates to Chisholm, giving her a total of 152 first-ballot votes for the nomination. Chisholm’s base of support was ethnically diverse and included the\u00a0National Organization for Women. Chisholm said she ran for the office “in spite of hopeless odds… to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.” Among the volunteers who were inspired by her campaign was\u00a0Barbara Lee, who continued to be politically active and was elected as a congresswoman 25 years later.\u00a0Betty Friedan\u00a0and\u00a0Gloria Steinem\u00a0attempted to run as Chisholm delegates in\u00a0New York.
\nChisholm created controversy when she visited rival and ideological opposite\u00a0George Wallace\u00a0in the hospital soon after his shooting in May 1972, during the 1972 presidential primary campaign. Several years later, when Chisholm worked on a bill to give domestic workers the right to a\u00a0minimum wage, Wallace helped gain votes of enough Southern congressmen to push the legislation through the House.
\nFrom 1977 to 1981, during the\u00a095th Congress\u00a0and\u00a096th Congress, Chisholm was elected to a position in the House Democratic leadership, as\u00a0Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus.
\nThroughout her tenure in Congress, Chisholm worked to improve opportunities for\u00a0inner-city\u00a0residents. She was a vocal opponent of the\u00a0draft\u00a0and supported spending increases for education,\u00a0health careand other social services, and reductions in military spending.
\nIn 1970, she authored a\u00a0child care\u00a0bill. The bill passed the House and the Senate, but was vetoed by President\u00a0Richard Nixon, who called it “the Sovietization of American children”.
\nIn the area of national security and foreign policy, Chisholm worked for the revocation of\u00a0Internal Security Act of 1950. \u00a0She opposed the American involvement in the\u00a0Vietnam War\u00a0and the expansion of weapon developments. During the\u00a0Jimmy Carter\u00a0administration, she called for better treatment of\u00a0Haitian\u00a0refugees.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Shirley_Chisholm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1964, Chisholm ran for and was elected to the\u00a0New York State Legislature. In 1968, she ran as the\u00a0Democratic\u00a0candidate for New York’s 12th District congressional seat and was elected to the\u00a0House of Representatives. Defeating\u00a0Republican\u00a0candidate\u00a0James Farmer, Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. Chisholm joined the\u00a0Congressional Black Caucus\u00a0in 1969 as one of its founding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1428],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people","category-politics-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}