Shirley Chisholm, was born in 1924 in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 1968 she became the first black woman ever to be elected to Congress and the first black person to run for the presidential nomination of a major political party, paving the way for Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. to run in 1976.

Chisholm won more than 430,000 votes in fourteen states and 28 delegates at the Democratic Convention in Miami. As a reporter I was with her when black men excoriated for making the run and then many white women deserted her when she did; but she was a tough tireless fighter.

In my book she tells how the double lash of racism and sexism affected her and how she managed to let neither break her. She authored two books, Unbought and Unbossed and The Good Fight. You will be surprised at what religion she claims gave her the most strength and why she doesn’t want to be remembered as the first black to make a bid for the presidency. Rep. Chisholm, a New York Democrat who served in Congress for 15 years, died in 2005.

You can see our full length interview from August 26th, 2987 in the book below!

The first black woman elected to Congress and the first black person to seek presidential nomination from a major political party, Shirley Chisholm spent 26 years in politics.

My Life, My Love, My Legacy: The Memoirs of Coretta Scott King

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Authentic Autograph by the Author Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds

Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose. While enrolled as one of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, she became politically and socially active and committed to the peace movement. As a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music, determined to pursue her own career as a concert singer, she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs as well as shared racial and economic justice goals, she married Dr. King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, and so much more.

As a widow and single mother of four, she worked tirelessly to found and develop The King Center as a citadel for world peace, lobbied for fifteen years for the US national holiday in honor of her husband, championed for women’s, workers’ and gay rights and was a powerful international voice for nonviolence, freedom and human dignity.

Coretta’s is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an extraordinary black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who, in the face of terrorism and violent hatred, stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful every day of her life.