“Fighting Shirley Chisholm — Unbought and Unbossed” was her campaign slogan for New York’s Twelfth Congressional District race in 1968. Chisholm won and then stayed true to her words throughout her political career. She opposed the Vietnam War and weapons development at a time when it was unpopular to do so, and fought relentlessly for the rights of women, children, minorities, and people with low incomes.

Chisholm introduced groundbreaking legislation to establish publicly supported daycare centers and to expand unemployment insurance to cover domestic workers. She was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, holding it accountable as “the conscience of Congress.” In 1972, Chisholm announced her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, the first African American woman to do so. Although she didn’t receive the nomination, she won twenty-eight delegates and gathered 152 votes at the Democratic National Convention.

The daughter of immigrant parents from Barbados and Guyana, Chisolm grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where she remained passionately committed to her constituency. Before entering politics, she was a nursery school teacher, daycare center director, and a consultant for the New York Department of Social Services, where she became well acquainted with the struggles of the poor and disenfranchised.  She chronicled her political career in two autobiographical books, Unbought and Unbossed (1970) and The Good Fight (1973).

Chisholm continued her advocacy after she retired from Congress in 1983, going on to cofound the National Political Congress of Black Women, to teach at Mount Holyoke College and Spelman College, and to lecture around the country. At every turn, she invited others to join her in fighting for a more just society. “We need men and women … who will dare to declare that they are free of the old ways that have led us wrong, and who owe nothing to the traditional concentrations of capital and power that have subverted this nation’s ideals.”