Shirley Chisholm

After becoming the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. congress in 1968, Shirley Chisholm stunned her fellow lawmakers when she declared that her placement on the House Forestry Committee was a waste of her time and demanded that she be reassigned, which she was. The following year, she helped to found the Congressional Black Caucus. And in 1972, she made a bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, garnering more than 150 delegate votes, and announcing that she had run “in spite of hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.” Her book, published in 1970, was entitled, appropriately enough, Unbought and Unbossed.