▄Chisholm, Shirley Anita St. Hill1924╨public officialBorn on November 30, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York, Shirley St. Hill was the daughter of parents from British Guiana (now Guyana) and Barbados. She passed part of her childhood in Barbados and then returned to Brooklyn, where she attended high school and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1946. While teaching nursery school and later serving as director of the Friends Day Nursery in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, she studied elementary education at Columbia University and received an M.A. degree in 1952. During that period, in October 1949, she married Conrad Q. Chisholm. In 1953 she became director of the Hamilton╨Madison Child Care Center in Manhattan, and in 1959 she became a consultant to the division of day care of the New York City Bureau of Child Welfare. Her interest in neighborhood and city problems led her into political activity, and her work in local organizing, along with her outspoken independence and her command of Spanish, made her popular with the predominantly black and Puerto Rican people of her district. In 1964 Chisolm ran as an independent Democrat for the state legislature and won, and in reelection campaigns in 1965 and 1966 (the district was reapportioned in that period) she increased her appeal at the polls. Her effectiveness in the state assembly prompted her to run for Congress in 1968 from the newly created Twelfth District centered on the impoverished Bedford╨Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. After a victory in the Democratic primary she handily defeated Republican╨Liberal candidate James L. Farmer, former chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, in November. In January 1969 Chisolm became the first African-American woman to enter Congress. There she continued an effective spokesman for minority rights and urban needs. She was reelected in 1970, 1972, 1974, 1976, and 1978. In 1972 she entered several Democratic presidential primaries and at the party╒s national convention received 151 delegate votes for the nomination. She was the author of Unbought and Unbossed (a campaign slogan of hers), 1970, and The Good Fight, 1973, and was the recipient of numerous honors and awards.She retired from Congress in 1982 but remained active on the lecture circuit. She held the position of Purington Professor at Mount Holyoke College, took a year as a visiting scholar at Spelman College in 1985, and retired from teaching in 1987. She continued to be involved in poltics, working on Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, and founding the National Political Congress of Black Women in 1984. President Clinton nominated her as Ambassador to Jamaica in 1993, but she withdrew her name citing a progressive eye disorder. &styl ` ! ¬ ! 5¬ ' 5¬ 8 !I S 5¬ T !I ƒ 5¬ á !I ) !I > !I f !I t !I ▒ 5¬ ▓ !I link `
