Can Hollywood Handle A Queen? Examining Netflix's Take On Shirley Chisholm

Eventually, she and her sister Reina King — another producer on the film — met up with 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley. Slowly the idea for a biopic began to take shape.

Her parents were immigrants from British Guiana and Barbados: her mother Ruby was a seamstress and her father Charles was a factory worker. Money was tight, just as it was for many working-class families.

In Barbados she was given a strict but top-quality education which set her on the path to scholarly achievement. She also bonded a lot with her grandma, whom she’d later consider one of her role models.

She was offered scholarships at both Vassar College and Oberlin College, but unfortunately she couldn’t afford the required fees. So instead she went to Brooklyn College, and was successful there.

And she also found the time to get married: in 1949 she wed Conrad O. Chisholm, a Jamaican migrant and private investigator. Two years later she graduated with her Master of Arts. The biopic, though, doesn’t delve into this period of her life much.

But she was also interested in politics. She began volunteering with political groups, including the Democratic Party in Brooklyn, and she turned out to be very good at that too. In 1964 she won an open seat in the New York Assembly.

She adopted the slogan “unbought and unbossed” to inform potential voters of what she was all about and aimed her campaign at women and working-class people. It paid off, and she won the Democratic primary… and then the general election. She had made it to Congress.

Now her real work had to begin. She was up against racism and sexism, and even though she had the smarts to defeat her enemies, it was far from an easy ride.

“Vanish until I take my seat so that you won’t have to confront me with this.” And the Shirley movie duly includes a scene where Chisholm expresses anger towards a man who makes fun of her equal paycheck.

This conflict really did happen in real life, just differently — and more slowly — to the way it’s portrayed in the movie. As is widely known, most biopics tend to condense events, simply because faster pacing helps the movie.

So Chisholm set about doing that. She worked with Senator Bob Dole to extend the food-stamp program, and after that created the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.

She confronted the speaker of the House, John W. McCormack, and asked to be reassigned. She also released a statement saying, “Apparently all they know here in Washington about Brooklyn is that a tree grew there. Only nine Black people have been elected to Congress, and those nine should be used as effectively as possible.”

He had her reassigned to the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, a much better fit, and from there she was able to make it to the committee she’d wanted in the first place, the Education and Labor Committee.

“I really want to run this country.” For a Black woman in the United States in that era, that was pretty much an impossible dream. But Chisholm was determined to try to see it through anyway.

On January 25, 1972, Chisholm held a press conference. She got in front of the mics and announced, “My presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.” And she wasn’t wrong.

Some white women and Black men supported her, but not nearly enough of them. Even some prominent white feminists of the time failed to get behind her, choosing instead to back Senator George McGovern.

He went on, “And everybody, all interest groups, were grappling with, ‘How do you deal with such a changed landscape?’ People were not comfortable with having a Black woman. And she often said, between being Black and being a woman, the biggest problem was being a woman.”

The movie fails to mention that Lee already was politically active when Chisholm met her. The real Lee doesn’t seem to mind, though; she appears at the end of the movie speaking about Chisholm’s legacy. And she also spoke about it in the media to mark the film’s release.

“At the time, I was also volunteering as a community worker with the Black Panther Party. It may come as a surprise to some that at the time I wasn’t registered to vote, nor did I want to get involved in the two-party political system. Back then I didn’t think the government worked for people like me.”

“Seeing this tiny woman with this towering vision was an inspiration, a revelation.” Lee is now in Congress herself and she sponsors the Shirley Chisholm Congressional Gold Medal Act. Its credo is a “posthumous recognition of Congresswoman Chisholm’s activism, independence, and groundbreaking achievements inside and outside of politics.”

As the movie shows us, because of her strong Christian beliefs, and despite the pleas of the people around her, Chisholm really did go visit him in the hospital. This was even though everyone knew that her being seen visiting a racist in hospital wouldn’t help her campaign.

“He said to me, ‘What are your people going to say?’ I said, ‘I know what they're going to say. But I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone.’ He cried and cried and cried.”

By the ’80s Wallace was actually going to Black churches in Alabama and asking for their forgiveness for his past political beliefs. His own daughter believed Chisholm was the catalyst for that.

Newton and Chisholm discussed many issues at the meeting. In the film, she explains her motivation for going to see Wallace — “I would break bread with the Devil if it made him more Christian,” — and gets an endorsement from the Black Panthers.

“We chose Shirley because we realized there were far too many people who didn’t even know her name. We felt it was important that people not only know her name, but why she was important, relevant, and inspiring,” King told Entertainment Weekly.

She may not have won her presidential nomination, but she was still a trailblazer, and after the race for the presidency she was elected Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus.

“We did our share of acting as little girls, but this is the first time on screen, big or small, together, so it was a long time coming,” Reina told Entertainment Weekly.

“I remember her sharing with me after she had spoken to Muriel of how much it meant for her to have her sister’s story told, and to hear that knowing that they had some time in their lives where they weren’t so close, and just having that little bit of knowledge that Muriel did have pride in her sister and what her sister accomplished gave us a place to go.” Sadly, Muriel died before the movie was finished.

“Barbara [wants] to help and doesn’t know how. Shirley gives her that chance,” Jackson said to Entertainment Weekly. “To see the start of Barbara’s career and to be able to walk in that space and be her for a little while has been an opportunity of a lifetime.”

“In bringing Barbara along, it was an opportunity to look at the world through fresh eyes and have a pulse on what’s happening in the country, but also somebody to instill what [Shirley] had learned,” she said. “There’s this push and pull between them you see in the film, but you’re also seeing the groundwork being laid for a friendship that extends until Shirley’s passing.”

“Mrs. Chisholm was an outspoken, steely educator-turned-politician who shattered racial and gender barriers as she became a national symbol of liberal politics in the 1960s and 1970s,” the newspaper said.

“Barbara Lee and Shirley’s goddaughter told us that they’ve never seen anyone that can curse someone out so well without using curse words.” And King also read books and news articles about her subject.

“Working with the dialect coach we said, ‘You’re not trying to mimic Shirley. What we need to do is find where Regina and Shirley intersect,’ because that’s what Shirley was always doing. She was always finding how she was going to meet whoever she was talking to where they were.”

“Barbara represents just how someone can come into your life and not only inspire you, but kind of put a lightbulb in your head to let you know, ‘Oh, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. There is something within me that I have to give way beyond just this moment.’ Shirley lit that fire in Barbara by example.”

And Variety said, “Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet force you can’t look away from… King endows her with unwavering eye contact and a knowing lilt, along with a sense of purpose that’s unbending, at once fearless and stubborn.”

“Instead, it’s a rather rote retelling of a near-historic achievement, one that doesn’t tell us nearly enough about the woman at the center of it all.” The reviewer did, though, describe King’s performance as “steely and disarmingly frank.”

“With education around Black American history still so lacking in the U.S. school system, and racial ignorance as prevalent as ever, film has become a de facto medium to teach people about the successes and stories of Black people,” the publication explained.

And HuffPost thought this was “not great storytelling or a good way to teach history.” That’s fair comment, although you could equally argue that the film is a gateway for audiences to learn more for themselves without having every detail of Chisholm’s life shown to them.

“You learned about Malcolm X, and you learned about Martin Luther King in U.S. history classes, but not this great, powerful woman,” Reina told Netflix’s Tudum. “Why aren’t students being told about that? When I would mention Shirley’s name, no one seemed to know who she was, and [that] lit a fire under us even more. We were like, ‘The world should know, the country should know, women should know, people should know, kids should know.’”