Buffalo is packed with history, and there are countless stories within the 269 acres behind the gates of Forest Lawn Cemetery. One of the first professionally designed cemeteries in the United States, Forest Lawn is almost as famous for its rolling hills and ornate masterpieces as it is for the remarkable residents now resting there. Among these extraordinaries is Shirley Chisholm, an American politician, writer, and teacher. Born in Brooklyn, Chisholm spent her 81 years of life changing our country before being laid to rest at Forest Lawn.

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was born on November 30, 1924 to a factory worker and a seamstress who had immigrated from the Caribbean. Because her parents struggled to work and raise their children, Chisholm and her sisters were sent to live with their grandmother in Barbados, where she studied at a strict Christian one-room schoolhouse, which she credited for her writing and oratory skills. Chisholm moved to Brooklyn in 1934 and earned her bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College in 1946, where she was applauded for her exemplary debate skills. While earning her master’s degree from Columbia University, Chisholm worked as the director of several nursery schools, establishing herself as an authority on the issues of child welfare and education. 

Running a daycare center drew Chisholm’s interest to politics, and she started work with the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League and the League of Women’s Voters in 1964. She was a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly from 1965 to 1968. While there, she sponsored the introduction of the SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge), which granted disadvantaged students the chance to attend college while receiving remedial education. One of her successes in the state legislature was the extension of unemployment benefits to domestic workers. 

In 1968,  running under the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed,” Chisholm became the first black woman elected to the US House of Representatives. She would serve until 1983.

In 1972, she became the first African American to run for US president on a major party line. She called for a “bloodless revolution” at the Democratic party’s national convention that year, and her candidacy drew a great deal of attention but little financial backing or electoral success: She won a total of 28 delegates to the Electoral College. But her candidacy afforded her and her followers a platform to discuss race and gender inequality, as well as social and economic injustice generally—the issues that had driven her to politics to begin with.

“When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black,” she said of her political career. “Men are men.”

In 1977 Chisholm married Arthur Hardwick, Jr., a former New York State Assemblyman who owned a liquor store in Buffalo. (A previous marriage had ended in divorce earlier that year.) After she left Congress in 1983, they made their home Williamsville. Chisholm resumed teaching as a college professor, teaching at Mount Holyoke, among other schools. In 1993, she was named to the National Women’s Hall of Fame. On January 1, 2005, Chisholm died of a stroke near Daytona Beach, Florida. 

She was laid to rest in the Oakwood Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery. Inscribed on her vault is the legend she left behind: “Unbought and Unbossed.”