Shirley Chisholm did not look like a politician. At least not what people in her time believed politicians should look like. The first Black woman elected to Congress, Chisholm arrived in Washington in 1969 sporting bouffant hair, cat-eye glasses, and chic, tailored dresses. She did not and could not simply blend in with the 410+ White men who served alongside her in the House of Representatives.

Chisholm’s remarkable story is featured in a fascinating new biopic, “Shirley,” which is streaming on Netflix. Written and directed by John Ridley (whose 2013 “12 Years a Slave” may be the best cinematic depiction of slavery), “Shirley” focuses on Chisholm’s quixotic but inspiring run for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1972.

Chisholm was famously “unbought and unbossed,” as her campaign posters (and autobiography) proclaimed. Born to Barbadian immigrants in New York City in 1924, she spent several years living in Barbados as a child, where she learned a lifetime’s worth of West Indian aphorisms along with a lilting Barbadian accent that endured throughout her life. After graduating from Brooklyn College, she taught nursery school and directed a child care center before entering politics.

Chisholm was in her second term in Congress when she announced her entry into the presidential race. In words that would echo in Barack Obama’s famous speech at the Democratic National Convention more than three decades later, she announced: “I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people, and my presence before you symbolizes a new era in American political history.”

Intellectual and nuanced, Chisholm struggled to fit her message into the straitjacket of national politics. She bristled at advice from politicos who counseled her to speak in soundbites, and she refused to cater to big-money donors who could have boosted her meager, $300,000 campaign budget. She met resistance from across the political spectrum. In politics, she later recalled, “I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black.”

Chisholm challenged not only the establishment but also her own supporters. She worked diligently to win the youth vote – 1972 was the first presidential election in which 18-year-olds could vote – but she did not pander to them. In one scene from “Shirley,” she scolds 25-year-old Barbara Lee, who hesitates to join the Chisholm campaign because she thinks “bourgeois politics” is old-fashioned. “If all you’re doing is outside yelling and screaming, that’s all you’re ever going to be,” she tells Lee. “A yeller and a screamer.” Lee signed on to help the California campaign, beginning a lifetime in politics (she retired this year after 27 years as a U.S. congresswoman).

Chisholm’s deep faith in humanity extended to her opponents. After Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch segregationist, was severely wounded in an assassination attempt on the campaign trail, Chisholm visited him in the hospital. “Black people in my community crucified me,” she remembered. Barbara Lee recalls being “livid” at the idea of consoling a man who had inflicted so much damage on Black people. She confronted Chisholm about the visit, and the congresswoman “took me to task and she used to shake her finger at me – she called me little girl – and she said you’ve got to stop and you have to be human.” Wallace’s daughter later credited Chisholm with having helped her father reject the racism of his past and seek forgiveness from Black voters in the 1970s.

When she left Congress in 1983, Chisholm said that she did not want to be remembered simply as “the nation’s first black congresswoman.” She wanted something more basic. “I'd like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That's how I'd like to be remembered.” Watch “Shirley” and you’ll see what having guts looks like.

Sources

· Barron, James. “Shirley Chisholm, ‘Unbossed’ Pioneer in Congress, Is Dead at 80.” New York Times, Jan. 3, 2005.

· Smith, David. “’Unbought and Unbossed’: The Incredible, Historic Story of Shirley Chisholm.” The Guardian, March 25, 2024.