January 25 · This Day in America
In a Baptist church in Brooklyn, a congresswoman from her own district stands up and says she is running for President of the United States. Shirley Chisholm — the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, the first Black woman ever elected to Congress — is now the first Black candidate, and the first woman, to seek the Democratic nomination. She knows the math. She is underfunded, dismissed, run against by men who share her cause. She runs anyway. "I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud," she tells the room. "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." She will win 152 delegates and no nomination. But the door she walks through does not swing shut behind her. Somebody had to be first to ask the country to imagine it.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1890
A young newspaperwoman steps off a train in New Jersey at 3:51 in the afternoon, and the country erupts. Nellie Bly has circled the globe in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes — outrunning the eighty days of Jules Verne's fictional Phileas Fogg, whom she stopped to meet in France along the way. No human being had ever moved around the earth so fast. She did it alone, with one bag, on assignment.
Source: www.smithsonianmag.com
“I am the candidate of the people of America. And my presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.”Shirley Chisholm, 1972