In a country addicted to Historic Firsts, it was bound to be the opening line in her obituary: "Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress . . . ." But that distinction was only incidental in light of everything else Chisholm brought to the tenor of American politics in the 1970s, when politics could be as overdone as the rest of the styles. What a relief Chisholm was back then: Her manners were Victorian, her rhetoric old-fashioned even 30 years ago, and her values timeless. She fought for those values patiently, soberly, directly and with a dignity rare in those turbulent times. Her death at 80 reminds that it is possible for a public figure to rise above the general hubbub even when the country is deeply divided. That's good to know in these red-state, blue-state times. In short, Shirley Chisholm was a lady, not just another jive artist angling for a career as a professional agitator. She never forgot her manners, even when defying both her party's establishment and what was left of the country's old power structure by the 1970s. Seldom has propriety been wielded so effectively as a weapon. For how could anyone mistake Chisholm for a no-account radical, what with her prim ways? She may have been a champion of (overdue) change, but she spoke, acted and carried herself as did your fifth-grade teacher. Proving you could indeed fight City Hall, the lady defied the bosses and in 1968 won election to Congress from the Bedford-Stuyvesant area, which at the time was probably the poorest, toughest congressional district in Brooklyn, in New York and maybe in the whole country. Uncompromising on principle, Chisholm was the soul of conciliation personally. She didn't aim for popularity but respect, and so got both. She was more Church Lady than Al Sharpton. Early on, she set out to be a doer and a thinker - a reformer, not an entertainer. When she came to Congress for the first of her seven terms, and was offered a seat on the House Agriculture Committee, the lady declined. Politely but very firmly. Much like Rosa Parks' reaction on being told to give up her seat on the bus. Why in the name of good sense, she asked, would a congresswoman from urban New York be assigned to the House Agriculture Committee? The aging speaker of the House, John W. McCormack, told her to "be a good soldier," go along to get along and all the rest of that guff. Instead, she raised some parliamentary hell. "Apparently all they know here in Washington about Brooklyn," she complained, "is that a tree grew there." She was soon re-assigned to Veterans Affairs. Chisholm would move up to Education and Labor when she backed the better candidate - Hale Boggs - for House majority leader even if he was white and male. She really did believe in equal opportunity. And she would advance swiftly in Boggs' wake. Being a woman of principle never kept her from being a savvy politician, too. By 1972, the two leading presidential candidates were Richard Nixon and George McGovern. Chisholm considered the choices before her and decided the country could surely do better. So she briefly became a presidential candidate herself. That was the year her opposite number in every way, Alabama's George Wallace, was shot and crippled for life, knocking him out of the race. Chisholm visited him in the hospital and made a friend - and a political ally in time for the next session of Congress. One of the last of the old-time rhetoricians, Chisholm came by her clipped, almost British accent honestly. Her father, an unskilled laborer in a burlap-bag factory, was from Guyana, and her mother, a maid, came from Barbados, where little Shirley spent much of her childhood on Grandma's farm. It was on Barbados that she got a proper British education and her Caribbean enunciation. Both served her well. But it was her wit and ramrod posture, both physical and political, that marked Shirley Chisholm as an American type. She never bowed to anyone but her God. Agree or disagree with the congresswoman from Bedford-Stuyvesant, she looked you straight in the eye. And she wouldn't lie to you. Or to herself. She respected others because she respected herself. And didn't your fifth-grade teacher tell you something very much like that?