GospelCity Black History Month Salute to Political Figures

Shirley Chisholm retired from public office in 1983, receiving the Purington Chair at Mount Holyoke College, where she taught for four years. And she was a much sought after speaker on the lecture circuit.

She retired to Florida and passed away on January 1, 2005. Shirley Chisholm was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, NY.

Barack Obama

“My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.”

Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. is on the verge of making history in one of the most controversial and historical presidential campaigns in the United States of America. Born to a teen mother who was white and American and to an educated, Muslim father from Kenya, Barack Obama is becoming a bridge builder in a nation whose history is marred by racial division.

A graduate of two Ivy League universities, Columbia and Harvard respectively, Obama was an active community organizer who left Chicago to attend law school at Harvard, where he would become the first African American president of the school’s Law Review in its 104-year history.
In 1996, he was elected to the Illinois State Senate and served until 2004 to run for a U. S. Senate office, which he won. For a considerable time, Obama denied that he was interested in running for president of the U.S., though those denials turned into veiled interest and finally in February 2007 he officially stepped into the pool of candidates vying for the highest office in the land, as a Democrat.

The author of two books, Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope, Obama walks in an audacity that enables him to publicly test for HIV/AIDS to demonstrate its value and shamelessness; discuss being multicultural in a country that is still divided along race and class lines; and demonstrate an image of a black man who loves his God (he is Christian), his wife and children, and who is living the American dream.