The True History Behind Netflix’s ‘Shirley’ Movie | History

Pelican Press · March 22

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’s ‘Shirley’ Movie | History

During her 1968 congressional campaign,

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was at home in New York City when she heard a knock. Outside her door, she found a woman holding a ****** envelope full of nickels, dimes and quarters—campaign contributions, the visitor explained. She and her friends had raised $9.62.

“Their gesture moved me to tears,” Chisholm later

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. It also fortified her resolve. On November 5, she

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the first ****** woman elected to the ******* States Congress.

This was Chisholm’s origin story, and she told it often, so often that the details weren’t always consistent. In some accounts, she found an

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at her door on a winter night. In others, it was a

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with an envelope; sometimes the knock came on a

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.

Chisholm announces her presidential campaign at the Concord ******** ******* in Brooklyn, New York, on January 25, 1972.

Don Hogan Charles / New York Times Co. / Getty Images

“The story varied slightly in different published versions,” writes historian

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in

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. “More important than the details of the story was Chisholm’s repetition of it. She wanted it known that she was the people’s candidate. ****** women of small means wanted her to represent them in the national government.”

A few years later, Chisholm started sharing a similar story: People kept asking her to run for president. She kept telling them to be realistic. “You don’t run for the presidency of this country on the basis of a moral feeling or moral commitment,” she

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saying. “You need money.” Voters in Florida and Minnesota took her words as a challenge,

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$10,000 for her campaign. It was too late to back out.

On January 25, 1972, Chisholm called a press conference at a ******** ******* in her Brooklyn district. She

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at a podium, her face slightly obscured by a tangle of microphones, smiling and waving at a cheering audience. As the applause faded, she briefly lowered her head; when she looked back up, her gracious smile replaced with a firm gaze, she announced that she was running for president.

“My presence before you now,” she

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, “symbolizes a new era in ********* political history.”

Chisholm speaks at the Democratic National Convention after losing her bid for the presidential nomination in 1972.

Bettmann via Getty Images

Who was Shirley Chisholm?

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, a new biographical drama written and directed by

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(writer of the 2013 film

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), fictionalizes Chisholm’s history-making political career. Arriving on

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on March 22, Shirley begins with the politician’s election to Congress but focuses primarily on her 1972 bid for the Democratic nomination, which made her the first ****** woman to pursue a presidential nomination on a major party’s ticket.

“Her resilience was impressive,” says Academy Award-winning actress

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, who stars in the film as Chisholm. “Every photograph you see of her, every interview you watch, she always has such a commanding presence about her.”

When King and her sister,

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(both co-producers on the film), began working on the project about 15 years ago, they realized how many people had never heard of Chisholm. They weren’t historians themselves, and “there was so much that we didn’t know,” says King, but “at least we knew that there was an awesome being named Shirley Chisholm [who] existed.” King later

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with the idea while they were working together on the anthology series “

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.”

SHIRLEY | Official Trailer |

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Born to immigrant parents in Brooklyn in November 1924,

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was the oldest of four sisters. Her father, Charles St. Hill, was a factory worker from British Guiana, while her mother, Ruby Seale St. Hill, was a seamstress from Barbados. As the family grew, the young couple struggled to make ends meet. They decided to send the ****** to live with their maternal grandmother, Emmeline Seale, in Barbados while they saved money.

These years were formative for Chisholm, a headstrong child who had been regarded as

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back in Brooklyn. Two thousand miles away, she formed a deep bond with her grandmother, who nurtured her independence. (Chisholm would later name her grandmother as one of her role models, alongside the illustrious civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune and first lady

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.) She also attended Barbados’ “strict, traditional, British-style schools,” where she learned to read and write before her fifth birthday, as she later recalled in her 1970

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. “If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason.”

The ****** returned to Brooklyn in 1934, when Chisholm was 9. She felt stifled by her parents’ strict rules and the city’s cold winters. But she was a top student throughout high school, ultimately becoming the first person in her family to go to college. She turned down scholarship offers to Vassar College and Oberlin College—her family couldn’t afford room and board—and enrolled at

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, graduating with a degree in sociology in 1946.

Chisholm, a diminutive 22-year-old who looked much younger than her actual age, had trouble finding work. Eventually, a Harlem child care center took a chance on her, and she rose quickly through the ranks. During those years, she married Conrad Chisholm, a private investigator from Jamaica, and took night classes at

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, where she earned a master’s degree in elementary education in 1951.

In her 30s, Chisholm worked as the director of child care centers in Brooklyn and Manhattan before becoming a consultant in New York City’s Bureau of Child ********. Along the way, she developed a reputation as a fierce advocate for early learning, pushing back against experts who believed young children’s eyesight wasn’t developed enough for reading. “I say baloney, because I learned to read when I was 3 1/2,” Chisholm

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, “and I learned to write when I was 4.”

Around this time, she started thinking about politics, volunteering with groups like the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League, the League of Women Voters and the Democratic Party club in Brooklyn. In 1964, she ran for an open seat in the New York State Assembly—

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. Just after her 40th birthday, her political career began in earnest.

Chisholm in a voting booth in Brooklyn on November 5, 1968

Charles Frattini / NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Chisholm with her first husband, Conrad Chisholm, in their home in 1968

Leroy Jakob / NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Chisholm’s historic congressional victory

During her nearly four years in the assembly, Chisholm established a political agenda,

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such as unemployment insurance for domestic workers and access to higher education for low-income students. The experience also taught her valuable lessons about navigating complex political systems. “In Albany, I learned how the processes of representative government work—or do not work,” she wrote in her memoir. “Often it was their ******** that I saw.”

Nevertheless, Chisholm believed that at this point in her career, exposure to this “cumbersome, obsolescent legislative apparatus geared to the 19th century” was vital. “All this prepared me consummately well for Washington,” she wrote. “The lesson was what I needed before I became a congresswoman.”

In 1968, lawmakers redrew Brooklyn’s 12th Congressional District. The new district covered the majority-****** Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, which had previously been split up into several surrounding districts. The incumbent white congresswoman,

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, opted to run for re-election elsewhere, and onlookers

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the open seat to go to a ****** candidate.

Chisholm wanted to be

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. The local Democratic Party chapter publicly declared its neutrality, but she believed it was unofficially backing another candidate, State Senator

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. Chisholm attempted to turn the party bosses’ lack of support into a selling point, running under the slogan “

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.”

“Chisholm did not have access to the cash that the party’s candidate did, but neither was she beholden to any party leadership,” writes Curwood in her biography. “She was literally a free agent and set about turning the party’s snub into an asset that would define her career.”

With very little money, Chisholm “campaigned the hard way, in the streets,” as she wrote in her memoir. “Indoors, with a selected audience, you have control. But out on the street corners with the people, in the housing projects, in parks, you are under ***** constantly. If you are insincere or have something to hide, you will be found out.”

Chisholm ran on a

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that included low-cost housing, equality in education and federal support for day care centers. The newly redrawn 12th District had roughly

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than men, and she built her campaign around them, courting her base over “endless little house parties and teas,” according to her memoir. Thompson, meanwhile, was “so sure he would win with the organization behind him that he was up at Cape Cod vacationing.”

Shirley begins with Chisholm’s election to Congress.

Glen Wilson /

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In the summer of 1968, Chisholm scraped out a

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in the Democratic primary. She then set her sights on the general election, where she would face off against

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, a ****** civil rights leader who didn’t live in Brooklyn. “I had to ****** to win the primary,” Chisholm told

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in 1969, “but once I beat Senator Thompson and the machine, I knew I could take on anyone.”

But soon after the primary, Chisholm’s husband started to worry that something was wrong. She wasn’t sleeping. She got up repeatedly throughout the night. When Conrad pushed her to go to a doctor, she learned she had a pelvic tumor. She would need to put her campaign on hold.

A biopsy quickly revealed the tumor was benign, but it had been growing for as long as two years. Chisholm would need a hysterectomy right away. Despite her protests, she was told the operation couldn’t wait until after the election.

When she arrived for surgery in late July, “I was so determined not to have the operation that I refused to go to sleep,” she wrote in her memoir. The surgical team then administered “such a large dose of anesthetic that I didn’t come to for 13 hours.” The hospital didn’t discharge her until August.

Later, recovering at home, she could

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broadcasting pro-Farmer messages outside. Rumors circulated that she had *******. That she was dying. Without her doctors’ permission, she returned to her campaign. One day, Chisholm, who normally weighed about 100 pounds, layered a beach towel under her clothes to hide the 17 pounds she’d lost and drove around with her team in her own truck, shouting from the loudspeakers that she was “

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.”

On November 5, Chisholm beat Farmer by a two-to-one margin, becoming the first ****** woman ever elected to Congress. She was also the only woman in the freshman class of 1969. Two other ****** congressmen,

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of Ohio and

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of Missouri, entered the House of Representatives that year, bringing the total number of ****** members to nine.

Chisholm and her congressional staff in 1970

Bob Peterson / Getty Images

Chisholm hired a devoted staff in Washington, D.C. But she struggled to find her footing in an environment that was largely hostile to her presence. For instance,

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voiced his amazement that she was making a $42,500 salary, just as he was, every time he saw her on the House floor. Finally, she confronted him with a suggestion: “First of all, since you can’t stand the idea of me making [$42,500] like you, when you see me coming into this chamber each day, vanish,” she told him. “Vanish until I take my seat so that you won’t have to confront me with this.”

Soon after taking office, Chisholm, like all new members, was assigned to a committee. While members can state a preference—her first choice was the

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—assignments are typically allocated based on seniority. Chisholm understood the process, but she was still surprised when she learned she would be serving on the

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. (Shirley dramatizes this moment near the beginning of the film: “Corn? Wheat? Cows? I represent Brooklyn.”)

She decided to challenge the decision and approached the House speaker,

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, who told her nothing could be done. Undeterred, she

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, insisting that the assignment made no sense for a member from an urban district. These efforts paid off, and she was eventually assigned to the

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. She later made it onto Education and Labor—eventually becoming the committee’s

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—and was a founding member of both the

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and the

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.

******* King as Shirley Chisholm and Lucas Hedges as Robert Gottlieb in Shirley

Glen Wilson /

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A divisive presidential campaign

Two years into her time in Congress, Chisholm was already publicly floating the idea of running for president, and people wanted to know why. What was the “real reason” to ****** a battle she knew was doomed to fail? She didn’t like this question. “People don’t understand that I really want to be president of the ******* States,” she told

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in December 1971. “I really want to run this country.”

Despite the initial $10,000 that convinced Chisholm to throw her hat into the ring, her campaign ran on a tight budget. She raised about $250,000, but the final cost added up to $300,000, which left her in debt for several years.

These sums

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to the

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by her top Democratic competitors. Senator

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, who ultimately snagged the nomination, spent $12 million on the primaries. Senator Hubert Humphrey, who’d lost to Richard Nixon in the previous presidential election, spent $4.7 million; Senator

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, Humphrey’s running mate in 1968, spent $7 million; Alabama Governor

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spent $2.4 million; and Senator

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spent $1.5 million.

Without the funds for a nationwide campaign, Chisholm made strategic decisions about which primaries to enter, skipping states she didn’t have a shot at. She decided, for example, not to try for New Hampshire, where Muskie had widespread support. Florida, on the other hand, would be a priority. California, which was a winner-take-all state, was also out. “We tried to be rational and orderly about it, but decisions about where to go and what to do were almost always made on a spur-of-the-moment, last-minute basis,” she wrote in her second book,

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. “It was a ***** of a way to run a railroad, but it was the only way we had.”

Chisholm struggled to secure support from some of the groups she’d built her campaign around, particularly white women and ****** men. Some feminist leaders gave Chisholm only equivocal support, offering a more serious endorsement to another candidate. For instance, Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms. magazine,

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but said McGovern was the “

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” in the running. Then there was

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, author of The Feminine Mystique, who announced a campaign event for Chisholm in Harlem in the form of a “

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,” apparently unaware of the well-known

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.

“Feminists were split over her candidacy,”

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, the student coordinator for Chisholm’s presidential campaign (played by

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in the film), told Smithsonian magazine in 2016. “Having a woman run for president was like having somebody from Mars run for president. And you then have a ****** woman running for president, and everybody, all interest groups, were grappling with, ‘How do you deal with such a changed landscape?’ People were not comfortable with having a ****** woman.”

L to R: Thomas Eagleton (vice presidential nominee) with presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey, Shirley Chisholm, George McGovern, Henry Jackson, Edmund Muskie and Terry Sanford at the Democratic National Convention in July 1972

Bettmann via Getty Images

****** men seemed similarly uncomfortable with Chisholm’s candidacy. There were exceptions, such as the ****** Panther Party, which

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her in April 1972. But in Washington, many ****** politicians saw her as an obstacle to their own goals. “I recall hearing about a great deal of tension between certain male members and Mrs. Chisholm,” Gottlieb added. “There clearly was within the [Congressional] ****** Caucus a significant degree of sexism that she felt.”

As Chisholm’s profile rose, she also became the target of alarming threats. For a while, she relied on her husband as her unofficial bodyguard. That security arrangement would come to an end when all candidates were given Secret Service protection, after a gunman

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during a campaign event in Maryland on May 15.

Wallace survived the *******, which left him paralyzed in both legs. As he recovered in the hospital, Chisholm made the controversial decision to visit the governor, who was known as the staunch segregationist who

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“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

“****** people in my community crucified me,” she later told the

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. “But why shouldn’t I go to visit him? Every other presidential candidate was going to see him. 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.”

In his later years, Wallace would renounce his ******* beliefs, offering

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and asking ****** Americans for forgiveness. His daughter Peggy Wallace Kennedy thinks Chisholm may have helped inform that decision. As she told Smithsonian in 2022, “It was after her visit that [Wallace] started to change.”

Chisholm’s name appeared on ballots in about

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. By the end of the primaries, she had won

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out of the

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needed to secure victory. When McGovern’s nomination was all but certain, Humphrey made his exit with a surprising symbolic act: He

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his ****** delegates to Chisholm, who consequently finished at

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, putting her in fourth place after McGovern, Jackson and Wallace.

Chisholm delivers a Women’s Rights Day speech on April 4, 1981.

Nancy Shia / Archive Photos / Getty Images

A “lonely politician”

After the primaries, Chisholm continued building her legacy in Congress, where she supported the Equal Rights Amendment; opposed the Vietnam War; and fought for access to education, health care and legalized *********. She also helped pass legislation that

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to domestic workers—which she considered one of her biggest victories.

“She always stood ****** and always looked and felt confident and felt like she was always ready for the ******,” says King. “She was a strategist. She understood the importance of optics, the way she dressed, the way she accessorized.”

Still, the work took a toll.

“She was tired,” King adds. “She did feel like she was fighting an uphill battle by herself.”

When Chisholm announced her retirement in 1982, the

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called her a “lonely politician” who was “willing to ****** all alone” but frustrated about the ways her decisions were interpreted.

After leaving Washington, “I’ll be in Buffalo most of the time,” she told the

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. “I will be at Mount Holyoke College teaching for three days a week for eight months. I will be doing a lot of things to take my mind off the aches and pains of being so misunderstood.”

Chisholm addresses the Democratic National Convention in 1988, several years after her retirement.

Dirck Halstead / Getty Images

Chisholm

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in 2005 at age 80. In the years since, the public has grown to better understand her legacy. She was posthumously awarded the

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in 2015. “Shirley Chisholm’s example transcends her life,” President Barack Obama

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at the ceremony. “When asked how she’d like to be remembered, she had an answer: ‘I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts.’ And I’m proud to say it: Shirley Chisholm had guts.”

Since Chisholm’s history-making congressional victory,

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****** women have been elected to the House, and two have been elected to the Senate (including Vice President Kamala Harris). Today,

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****** women serve in the House, though

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currently holds a seat in the Senate.

Ridley’s Shirley movie is being released in an election year. King says this was not intentional, but she’s glad the timing turned out that way. She hopes that telling Chisholm’s story will inspire civic engagement among viewers.

The film concludes with a short interview with

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(played by

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), who

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working on Chisholm’s presidential campaign. Before meeting Chisholm, Lee was so disillusioned with the political process that she hadn’t even registered to vote. Since 1998, she has been a congresswoman from California.

“[Chisholm’s] legacy is directly connected to today,” says Lee in the film. “So many of us have felt like we could take that baton and keep running.”

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******** ********* History, ********* History, ********* Presidents, ********* ******** History Initiative, Based on a True Story, Congress, Film, Government, Government Leaders, History, Movies, Political Leaders, Politics, Racism, US Government, ******** History
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Who was Shirley Chisholm?

Chisholm’s historic congressional victory

A divisive presidential campaign

A “lonely politician”

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The True History Behind This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up ’s ‘Shirley’ Movie | History

Who was Shirley Chisholm?

Chisholm’s historic congressional victory

A divisive presidential campaign

A “lonely politician”

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’s ‘Shirley’ Movie | History