Shirley Chisholm, R.I.P.

Shirley Chisholm has passed away:

Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and an outspoken advocate for women and minorities during seven terms in the House, died near Daytona Beach, friends said Sunday. She was 80.

"She was our Moses that opened the Red Sea for us," Robert E. Williams, president of the NAACP in Flagler County, told The Associated Press late Sunday. He did not have the details of her death on Saturday. Chisholm, who was raised in a predominantly black New York City neighborhood and was elected to the U.S. House in 1968, was a riveting speaker who often criticized Congress as being too clubby and unresponsive.

"My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency," she told voters. She went to Congress the same year Richard Nixon was elected to the White House and served until two years into Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) tenure as president. She also was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969.