Shirley Chisholm Quotes

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.

If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.

Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.

Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.

You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women have always had them; they always have and they always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while the poor women go to quacks?

I am and always will be a catalyst for change.

We must reject not only the stereotypes that others hold of us, but also the stereotypes that we hold of ourselves.

Be as bold as the first man or [woman] to eat an oyster.

The law cannot do it for us. We must do it for ourselves. Women in this country must become revolutionaries.” —Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress

…My present attitude toward politics as it is practiced in the United States: it is a beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years, whose practitioners exchange gilded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own, their votes. And who benefits most? The lawyers. (Chapter 4)

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power. Their first rule is “don’t rock the boat.” If someone makes trouble and you can get him, do it. If you can’t get him, bring him in. Give him some of the action, let him have a taste of power. Power is all anyone wants, and if he has a promise of it as a reward for being good, he’ll be good. Anyone who does not play by those rules is incomprehensible to most politicians.

Liberty and justice for all" were beautiful words, but the ugly fact was that liberty and justice were only for white males.

The next time a woman of whatever color, or a dark-skinned person of whatever sex aspires to be president, the way should be a little smoother because I helped pave it

One does not learn, nor does one assist in struggle, by standing in the sidelines.......

It is incomprehensible to me, the fear that can affect men in political offices. It is shocking the way they submit to forces they know are wrong and fail to stand up for what they believe. Can their jobs be so important to them, their pres- tige, their power, their privileges so important that they will cooperate in the degradation of our society just to hang on to those jobs?

Women in this country must become revolutionaries. We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles and stereotypes…We must replace the old, negative thoughts about our femininity with positive thoughts and positive action affirming it, and more. But we must also remember that we will be breaking with tradition, and so we must prepare ourselves educationally, economically, and psychologically in order that we will be able to accept and bear with the sanctions that society will immediately impose upon us.

I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud; I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman and I am equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people of America. And my presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.

When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation’s slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free - (Chapter 9).

The one thing you’ve got going: your one vote.

I have already moved away from being a moderate, a liberal. My frustrations at trying to operate through channels and following the prescribed procedures, and failing to get any action, have radicalized me.

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference. What can I say to a man who asks that? All I can do is try to explain to him why he asks the question. You have looked at us for years as different from you that you may never see us really. You don’t understand because you think of us as second-class humans. We have been passive and accommodating through so many years of your insults and delays that you think the way things used to be is normal. When the good-natured, spiritual-singing boys and girls rise up against the white man and demand to be treated like he is, you are bewildered. All we want is what you want, no less and no more. (Chapter 13).

Some fine men are in Congress, too few, trying to do a responsible job. But they are surrounded and almost neutralized by a greater number whose instinct is to make a deal before they make a decision.

The most tragic error into which older people can fall is one that is common among educators and politicians. It is to use youth as scapegoats for the sins of their elders.

Lincoln didn’t just end slavery. King didn’t just dream segregation away. Parks didn’t just get tired one day. It is often the unrecognized actions of previous generations that push a society to eventually embrace mantras such as hope, equality, change, and other ideals, which transform the political landscape. Chisholm's actions remind us that there are hundreds of forgotten foot soldiers in history that helped to bring these watershed moments to fruition. For

It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact. The warmth, gentleness, and compassion that are part of the female stereo- type are positive human values, values that are becoming more and more important as the values of our world begin to                                shatter and fall from our grasp.

The rest of the world sees through the sham, when we pour billions in “foreign aid,” which is really military assistance, into underdeveloped countries where the citizens continue to starve – as do millions of our own.

It is true that women have seldom been aggressive in de- manding their rights and so have cooperated in their own enslavement. This was true of the black population for many years. They submitted to oppression, and even condoned it. But women are becoming aware, as blacks did, that they can have equal treatment if they will fight for it, and they are starting to organize. To do it, they have to dare the sanctions that society imposes on anyone who breaks with its traditions. This is hard, and especially hard for women, who are taught not to rebel from infancy, from the time they are first wrapped in pink blankets, the color of their caste.

Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.

Following along the path of her role models, Shirley knew that if she waited for permission, she’d never receive her turn.

She didn’t need to be the Democratic Nominee in order to be a catalyst for change.

If this were a courageous country, it would ask Gloria to lead it since she is sane and funny and beautiful and smart and the National Leaders we've always had are not. When I listen to her talk about women's rights children's rights men's rights I think of the long line of Americans who should have been president, but weren't. Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth. John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo. Imagine President Martin Luther King confronting the youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine President Malcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President Stevie Wonder dealing with the "Truly Needy." Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, or Sweet Honey in the Rock dealing with Anything. It is imagining to make us weep with frustration, as we languish under real estate dealers, killers, and bad actors.

Doc McStuffins is to TV what Shirley Chisholm was to Congress or what producer Shonda Rhimes was to primetime television or what Oprah was to daytime talk shows . . . or what Oprah was to book clubs . . . or what Oprah was to a billion dollars.

From the beginning I felt that there were only two ways to create change for black people in this country — either politically or by open armed revolution. Malcolm defined it succinctly — the ballot or the bullet. Since I believe that human life is uniquely valuable and important, for me the choice had to be the creative use of the ballot. I still believe I was right. I hope America never succeeds in changing my mind.  

It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact.

If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict. It is the need to escape from a harsh reality. —SHIRLEY CHISHOLM

Shirley Chisholm’s quote, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

All I could think about was Shirley Chisholm’s quote, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

If they don’t give you a seat at the table,” Shirley Chisholm once said, “bring a folding chair.” Tyler did one better and built his own dining set, complete with all he needs to finance his storytelling.

America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity, the Christian love that it would take. It is perhaps unrealistic to hope that I can help give this nation any of those things, but that is what I believe I have to try to do.

One bill that I introduced should become law in every state, but unfortunately it did not succeed even in New York. It would have made it mandatory for policemen to success- fully complete courses in civil rights, civil liberties, minority problems, and race relations before they are appointed to a police department.

Thousands like me kept saying, "Let us in a little. Give us a piece of the pie." What hap- pened? Watts, Newark, Hartford. And what was the re- action? We started to hear a new jargon about "the urban crisis" and "law and order" and "crime in the streets.

The main thing I have in common with the kids is that we are tired of being lied to...If it is not too late for America to be saved, the young will save it – and the blacks, the Indians, the Spanish-surnamed,the young women, and the other victims of American society. They, if any, will become the conscience that the Country has lacked. They will try to force it to practice what it has preached.

Operation Diamond would neutralize antiwar protesters with mugging squads and kidnapping teams; Operation Coal would funnel cash to Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in an effort to sow racial and gender discord in the party; Operation Opal would use electronic surveillance against various targets, including the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; Operation Sapphire would station prostitutes on a yacht, wired for sound, off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention.

Botched abortions are the largest single cause of death of pregnant women in the United States, particularly among nonwhite women. In 1964, the president of the New York County Medical Society, Dr. Carl Goldmark, estimated that 80 percent of the deaths of gravid women in Manhattan were from this cause.

When I looked at the white people who were doing this, consciously or not, it made me angry because so many of them were baser, less intelligent, less talented than the people they were lording it over. But the whites were in control. We could do nothing about it. We had no power. That was the way society was. I perceived that this was the way it was meant to be: things were organized to keep those who were on top up there. The country was racist all the way through.

different women view different segments of the women's movement agenda as priority items. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

(The famous peace symbol, it is often forgotten, originally came from the semaphore code for N–D, meaning nuclear disarmament.)

One corrected an outrageous legal discrimination against women schoolteachers. If pregnancy interrupted their careers, they lost their tenure rights. My bill changed that.

You can't argue with someone whose premises are completely different from yours, where there is not even an inch of common ground

There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.

As one put it to me once, "I just wish white women would get as concerned about the health and well-being of black babies being born, as they are about me being able not to have babies.

The only criterion that matters in picking members for committee vacancies is their length of service in Congress. Congress calls it the seniority system. I call it the senility system.

That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

Their goals are the same. To ensure individual liberty and equality of opportunity and forever to thwart the tyrannous tendencies of government, which inevitably arise from the arrogance and the isolation of men, who are securely in power.

The most tragic error into which older people can fall is one that is common among educators and politicians. It is to use youth as scapegoats for the sins of their elders. Is the nation wasting its young men and its honor in an unjust war? Never mind — direct your frustration at the long-haired young people who are shouting in the streets that the war must end. Curse them as hippies and immoral, dirty fanatics; after all, we older Americans could not have been wrong about anything important, because our hearts are all in the right place and God is always on our side, so anyone who opposes us must be insane, and probably in the pay of the godless Communists. Youth is in the process of being classed with the dark- skinned minorities as the object of popular scorn and hatred. It    is   as  if  Americans  have  to  have  a  "nigger,"  a  target                             for its hidden frustrations and guilt. Without someone to blame, like the Communists abroad and the young and black at home, middle America would be forced to consider whether all the problems of our time were in any way its own fault. That is the one thing it could never stand to do. Hence, it finds scapegoats. Few adults, I am afraid, will ever break free of the crippling attitudes that have been programmed into their personalities – racism, self-righteousness, lack of concern for the losers of the world, and an excessive regard for property. One reason, as I have noted, is that they do not know they are like this, and that they proclaim ideals that are the reverse of many of their actions. Such hypocrisy, even if it is unconscious, is the real barrier between them and their children.

Power and influence in Congress," he explained, "are not obtained by promoting one's own measures. They come either from blocking measures others want enacted or sup-                                     porting measures others oppose. As a member of the Agricul- ture Committee, Mrs. Chisholm would have been in an ideal position to make her presence felt. Without offending her own constituents, she could have voted against all of the bills introduced for the benefit of farmers. At the same time she could have introduced bills to scuttle price supports and other farm programs. Before long, farm belt congressmen would have been knocking on her door, asking favors." That kind of long-range Machiavellian strategy may be fine for a white, mid-western congressman whose district has more cows than voters, and who has all the time in the world to try to work himself up to that comfortable share of power that a House member can achieve if he plays by the rules, makes his district "safe," and lives long enough. What I can never forget, and what my friend the reporter apparently never knew, is that there are children in my district who will not live long enough for me to play it the way he proposes.

Shirley Chisholm will always stand out in history as an ordinary person who had the audacity to take hold of the opportunities of her time and act extraordinarily...Relegating Chisholm to a 'first' positions her as immortal, thereby erasing the effort and guts it took to act out on her principles. It also takes her out of context of historical struggles and activism. Chisholm prefers to be cast as a fighter, a 'catalyst for change,' because that is the lesson that she wants to share with future generations.

Richard Nixon won in forty-nine states by, for one thing, appealing to the inherent racism of the American people. Voters saw him—a Harris poll two months after the election showed this plainly—as the candidate who would put a stop to school busing and the encroachment of blacks and other minorities on white jobs

The law cannot do the major part of the job of winning equality for women. Women must do it themselves. Against them is arrayed the weight of centuries of tradition, from St. Paul's "Let women learn in silence" down to the American adage "A woman's place is in the home." Women have been persuaded of their own inferiority.

It is going to have to be the have-nots — the blacks, browns, reds, yellows, and whites who do not share in the good life that most Americans lead — who somehow arouse the conscience of the nation and thus create a conscience in the Congress. My role, as I see it, is to help them do so, working outside of Washington, perhaps, as much as inside it.

We Americans have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are always the good guys, everywhere-in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kemer Commission told white Amerca what black America had always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintain them and profit by them, white America would not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies of poverty and racism in our own country and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed as hypocrites in the eyes of the world when we talk about making other people free. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

Nikhilananda’s birthday. Maybe we’d Morris dance, naked, around the base of an old-growth California redwood, its branches lavishly festooned with the soiled hammocks and poop buckets of crunchy-granola tree sitters mentoring spotted owls in passive-resistance protest techniques. You get the picture. In place of Santa Claus, my mom and dad said Maya Angelou kept tabs on whether little children were naughty or nice. Dr. Angelou, they warned me, did her accounting on a long hemp scroll of names, and if I failed to turn my compost I’d be sent to bed with no algae. Me, I just wanted to know that someone wise and carbon neutral—Dr. Maya or Shirley Chisholm or Sean Penn—was paying attention. But none of that was really Christmas. And none of that Earth First! baloney helps out once you’re dead and you discover that the snake-handling,

MAN AS “NIGGER”? In the early years of the women’s movement, an article in Psychology Today called “Women as Nigger” quickly led to feminist activists (myself included) making parallels between the oppression of women and blacks.29 Men were characterized as the oppressors, the “master,” the “slaveholders.” Black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s statement that she faced far more discrimination as a woman than as a black was widely quoted. The parallel allowed the hard-earned rights of the civil rights movement to be applied to women. The parallels themselves had more than a germ of truth. But what none of us realized was how each sex was the other’s slave in different ways and therefore neither sex was the other’s “nigger” (“nigger” implies a one-sided oppressiveness). If “masculists” had made such a comparison, they would have had every bit as strong a case as feminists. The comparison is useful because it is not until we understand how men were also women’s servants that we get a clear picture of the sexual division of labor and therefore the fallacy of comparing either sex to “nigger.” For starters . . . Blacks were forced, via slavery, to risk their lives in cotton fields so that whites might benefit economically while blacks died prematurely. Men were forced, via the draft, to risk their lives on battlefields so that everyone else might benefit economically while men died prematurely. The disproportionate numbers of blacks and males in war increases both blacks’ and males’ likelihood of experiencing posttraumatic stress, of becoming killers in postwar civilian life as well, and of dying earlier. Both slaves and men died to make the world safe for freedom—someone else’s.

Other experiences sharpened my feeling for how racism was woven through American life. I belonged to the Political Science Society, which naturally thought itself progressive. Some of its speakers, I became aware, looked at my people as another breed, less human than they. Politicians came to talk and gave us such liberal sentiments as, "We've got to help the Negro because the Negro is limited," or, "Of course, the Negro people have always been the laborers and will continue to be. So we've got to make it more comfortable for them.

The black community had less sense of brotherhood in those days, and, worse yet, black people were almost all afraid. They feared, and justly, the power the white man had over their lives. "The Man will get you," they would warn. "You can't win." The few black people who had jobs through city appointments were the worst of all. If they showed the slight- est sign of opposing the system, they were warned, sometimes                          subtly and sometimes overtly, "Don't bite the hand that's feeding you." Many black men who could have become leaders were neutralized that way. Their jobs were the most important things to them; they held on to what they had.

The movement has, for the most part, been led by educated white middle-class women. There is nothing unusual about this. Reform as movements are usually led by the better educated and better off. But, if the women's movement is to be successful you must recognize the broad variety of women there are and the depth and range of their interests and concerns. To black and Chicana women, picketing a restricted club or insisting on the title Ms. are not burning issues. They are more concerned about bread-and-butter items such as the extension of minimum wage, welfare reform and day care. Further, they are not only women but women of color and thus are subject to additional and sometimes different pressures. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

Mr. Nixon had said things like this: "If our cities are to be livable for the next generation, we can delay no long. er in launching new approaches to the problems that beset them and to the tensions that tear them apart." And he said, "When you cut expenditures for education, what you are doing is shortchanging the American future.” But frankly. I have never cared too much what people say. What I am interested in is what they do. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

Apparently launching those new [domestic social] programs can be delayed for a while, after all. It seems we have to get some missiles launched first. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

Two more years of fantastic waste in the Defense Department and of penny pinching on social programs (From Voices of Multicultural America)

I did this [ran for president as a democrat instead of third party] because I feel that the time for tokenism and symbolic gestures is past. Women need to plunge into the world of politics and battle it out toe to toe on the same ground as male counterparts. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

for those who thought I was the best candidate but chose to work for someone else because they viewed my campaign as hopeless, they will need to reexamine their thinking for truly, no woman will ever achieve the presidency as long as their potential supporters hold this view. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. I ask–when is he going to make a "Trip to Peking" in regard to the basic problems facing us in the United States this year? He is willing to go halfway 'round the world--yet he doesn't have time to walk ten blocks from the White House in Washington and look at the lives people are living under Phase II. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

A sales tax is the enemy of the poor person. It is the enemy of the elderly couple who live on fixed income. And it is the enemy of the everyday American consumer, poor or not. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

What we need in this country today is leadership which has the courage to call for income tax reform to put the burden where it must be placed, on those who can afford to pay. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

I know a lot of Americans who would be glad to settle for better bus service from their home to their jobs, or from poor neighborhoods to areas of the city where jobs are to be found. Repeated studies of riots in urban ghettos show that lack of adequate transportation was a big factor in the discontent and bitterness which caused riot conditions to erupt, but President Nixon's answer is to build a space shuttle or an SST with precious public funds, to serve a tiny elite of the population or to stimulate the economy of a state or region by creating massive and useless technological publicworks projects. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

As a teacher, and as a woman. I do not think I will ever understand what kind of values can be involved in spending nine billion dollars–and more, I am sure–on elaborate, unnecessary and impractical weapons when several thousand disadvantaged children in the nation's capital get nothing. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

The truth is I have never been a strong advocate of busing, as the bureaucrats put it, "to correct racial imbalance." The root cause of segregated schools is racism—economic and social discrimination against dark-skinned citizens. One school is crowded with black children because their parents have been herded into that neighborhood by the bigoted white majority; busing some of the blacks to a white school is not doing anything to erase the real problem. The only good I could ever see in it was the chance that, when white children in turn are bused into formerly black schools, the school board would suddenly see the wisdom of improving those schools and giving them a fair share of the annual budget.

Busing," I told audience after audience,"is an artificial way of solving the segregation problem." Open housing is the real answer, I said. But as long as the problem exists, an artificial solution is better than none. Then I would let them have it. "Where were you," I asked the whites," when for years black children were being bused out of their neighborhoods and carried miles on old rattletrap buses to go down back roads to a dirty school with a tarpaper roof and no toilets? If you believed in neighborhood schools, where were you then? I'm not going to shed any crocodile tears for you now that you've discovered the busing problem." If there was any other candidate in the Florida primary who was taking a similarly strong stand in the face of public agitation over the phony busing issue, I have yet to read about it. Jackson lined up with Wallace; Humphrey took so many stands that no one could pin him down, but the impression he left was that he was against busing; McGovern, Lindsay and Muskie equivocated. It was a sorry performance, and one that George Wallace did not fail to seize on—all the Northern liberals suddenly talking out of both sides of their mouths when they came down South looking for votes. Shirley Chisholm, he was to say repeatedly, was the only other candidate who said the same things in the South that she said in the North.

Muskie, Lindsay, Humphrey, and Jackson were pouring about half a million dollars each into the campaign. In the end, I would spend less than $10,000. It was all I had; there was no alternative to depending on volunteers.

We never did lack for eager volunteers, but there was no one who could give them [Florida volunteers] clear-cut directions. Some work was duplicated while other chores were left undone. The national office in Washington was in the same plight. In the confusion, local jealousies and rivalries thrived. Compared with the professional and well-financed campaigns of the other candidates, mine did not inspire confidence. There were countless damaging results; a trip to St. Petersburg was rescheduled five times and finally cancelled four days before the last date agreed on, but no one in Tampa thought to tell the St. Petersburg TImes, and its reporter went out and waited for me to arrive. It was not a good way to treat one of the state's leading newspapers.

Some of the black and brown women on the NWPC Policy Council became the strongest and most valuable supporters I had—Fannie Lou Hamer, Lupe Anguiano, Gwen Cherry and Carol Taylor, among others. They did not have the one problem with my candidacy that many white women did: the whites knew I couldn't be elected, and so their support, even when it was given, seemed a little tentative, because they felt they were fighting for a lost cause. But women like Fannie Lou, Lupe and the rest, having been long active in the civil rights movement and other minority causes, were used to taking up seemingly impossible challenges. Their whole experience had taught them that they might not win the ultimate objective, but they would increase the chance that success would come, someday.

When Governor Wallace was reported recovering and able to receive visitors at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland, I went to pay him a call. No two candidates, perhaps no two people, could differ more vehemently on many issues of public policy, but I could not see that this ought to have any relationship to our private behavior toward each other. With one of my Congressional staff aides and several Secret Service men, I drove out and spent twenty minutes with him. Governor Wallace seemed sincerely touched. He cried for a moment, and so did I. "Is that really you, Shirley?" he asked. "Have you come to see me?" What we talked about was nothing earthshaking; it was like almost any other sick call. I did say at one point, "You and I don't agree, but you've been shot, and I might be shot, and we are both children of American democracy, so I wanted to come and see you.

The decline of civility and the mounting crudeness of language in our public life could also be another reason for the disgust of people with politicians and government officials and the contempt manifested toward them. The consequences for public debate and the rational, civilized conduct of public affairs are grave. This collapse in communication is terribly sad. It is a steady tearing asunder of the few threads which bind us together in a society undergoing massive change. It is sad, too, that so many of our public personalities lack size, that tolerance and generosity that spring from self-confidence and goodwill.

But it was true that there was a parallel between George Wallace's candidacy and mine, and there were places—such as northern Florida and North Carolina—where we seemed to be the only two candidates in the field. Although we represented opposite poles on many questions of policy, we both spoke for groups who felt dispossessed by the establishment and alienated by the course our society is taking.

Somehow (and I am not sure the full story of how it happened ever became public) the three networks—CBS, ABC and NBC—wound up donating their weekly half-hour public affairs interview programs to the two candidates. "Meet the Press", "Face the Nation", and "Issues and Answers" were all stretched to an hour and rescheduled to provide, in effect, three one-hour debates between Humphrey and McGovern during the last full week before the California primary. Tom Asher filed a protest on my behalf with the Federal Communications Commission, citing section 315 of the Federal Communication Act, which says that if any broadcasting station permits itself to be used by any legally qualified candidate for an office, it must permit equal opportunities to all other candidates. The networks claimed that the three programs were regular interview shows, and exempt from the rule. The Federal Communications Commission upheld the networks, and Asher went to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Within hours after the FCC ruling, the court issued an order reversing the commission and ordering ABC and CBS each to provide me with one half-hour of prime air time. NBC had conceded earlier and scheduled me on one half-hour of its morning program, "Today.

The other candidates," I would say, " are going to be coming in here, or their campaign workers are and saying, 'Don't vote for Shirley Chisholm, because she has no chance to be President. Vote for somebody who can win.' Well if I can't be President, I can be an instrument for change. Why do you think people are running around saying I can't be President? They know I have the intellect and creative ability to put it together. That's why they are afraid. They know that I can't be bought; they know I can't be bossed. They know I can't be controlled. I am asking my brothers and sisters to give me a chance. The time has come when we no longer have to be passive recipients of whatever politicians of this nation may decree for us. We no longer have to remain disillusioned, apathetic, helpless and powerless. We now have a person who is willing to accept the snubs, the snide remarks, the humiliation and abuses because she dares to go against the tradition in this country—a country in which only white males can run for the Presidency. I am willing, because I understand.

Black women - the world knows that we are strong because our strength is legendary. We are Harriet Tubman, Michelle Obama, and Rosa Parks. We are Oprah Winfrey, Nanny, and Mae Jameson. We are Shirley Chisholm, Portia Simpson and Maya Angelou. We have birthed a nation, rescued slaves, built empires, traveled to space and written our place in history. Survival is not enough; we were built to rise.

If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair

To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.

In 1972, we Americans need the best collective abilities of all our people. We Americans need to lift the burdens of unfairness and discrimination from the shoulders of so many of our fellow countrymen, of both sexes, all ages, and all races. This is why I call for tax reform, to ensure that each man pays his fair share based on his income; that is why I call for welfare reform and a national system of day care centers, to minimize the number of families in the aid-to-dependent children (ADC) category of state social services budgets. And that is why I call for equal justice before the law, for young as well as old, black as well as white, and poor as well as rich. . . .

As long as the nation permits doctors to run the show, that

There must be a new coalition of all Americans - black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor - who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else for any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made nearly 200 years ago. That every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now. If time has not run out, it is surely, ominously short.

You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas” Shirley Chisholm

(I do not exaggerate; key votes have been lost because members whose votes were being counted on were in the gym).

But before that end the Nixon White House had abused power with awesome ingenuity. They had set up an extensive “enemies list” that ranged from political opponents like Jane Fonda, Shirley Chisholm, and Edmund Muskie to the heads of eastern universities and foundations, along with media figures, actors, even athletes, and included a mistake or two—non-enemy Professor Hans Morgenthau made the list because he was confused with enemy Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney in New York City. They conducted a private investigation of Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1969 automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in which a woman drowned. They tapped their foes and one another with wild abandon. They tried to subvert the IRS, the CIA, the FBI for political purposes.