What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Shirley

Before there was Hillary Clinton, before even Geraldine Ferraro, there was Shirley Chisholm.

She was the first woman to run, in 1972, for the Democratic presidential nomination (Margaret Chase Smith had run for the Republican nomination in 1964) as well as the first Black candidate of either sex to seek a major-party nomination, and she managed to come in fourth (out of 15) in terms of delegates, despite a total campaign budget of $300,000. She did, however, become the second Black person elected to the New York State Legislature and, in 1968, the first Black woman elected to Congress.

Chisholm was never a mainstream party insider like Clinton, but she had much more in common with her fellow determinedly independent Brooklyn College alum Bernie Sanders, focusing as much on economic and social injustice as on identity politics. As a member of Congress, she introduced more than 50 pieces of legislation aimed at helping women, children, immigrants, people with low incomes, and people of color. Today her policies would probably label her as a member of the progressive Squad, although with her stiff dresses, bouffant updo, upright posture, and crisp diction (legacies of her Barbadian upbringing), the small and wiry Chisholm was a far cry from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s media-friendly hip beauty. Chisholm looked and sounded like what she was—a no-nonsense West Indian church lady.

Despite her trailblazer status, Chisholm’s profile has receded, largely due to her being somewhat marginalized by the Congressional Black Caucus and the leadership of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, dominated as it was by socially conservative Southern Baptist ministers, both because she plowed her own furrow and because of her gender. “When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men,” she said in 1982.

However, like Bayard Rustin, similarly marginalized by the civil rights leadership for being unapologetically gay, Chisholm’s intersectional legacy has been reclaimed by a later generation with a Netflix biopic. And just as Rustin focuses on one pivotal political moment, his organizing of the 1963 March on Washington, Shirley focuses on Chisholm’s 1972 nomination bid (there was also a 2004 documentary on the same subject, called Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed, Chisholm’s campaign slogan), so be prepared for West Wing–like impassioned discussions about delegate counts. Here, we follow Chisholm on the campaign trail to sort out what’s fact and what’s fiction.

Elected in 1968 to represent the 12^th Congressional District, which encompasses Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Shirley (Regina King, who also produced and shepherded the project for 15 years) is assigned to the Agriculture Committee. Ignoring the House’s strict seniority rules, she storms off to confront the powerful speaker of the House, protesting that agriculture is irrelevant to her urban constituents and asking to be transferred to a different, more appropriate committee, like Veterans’ Affairs. Her advisers and mentors are horrified, but amazingly, she pulls it off and gets a different, more congenial committee assignment.

This is largely true, although it didn’t happen quite as quickly as the movie suggests. Chisholm was assigned to the Agriculture Committee, which she was incensed about, and, undeterred by being not only a newbie but one of only 11 women and nine Black representatives out of 435 members of Congress, she did decide to confront John W. McCormack, the powerful speaker of the House. Fortunately, she confided her upset to a constituent, Rebbe Menachem M. Schneerson, the head of Brooklyn’s Hasidic Lubavitch sect. He suggested that she could use her position on the committee to address food poverty. This led to her working with Republican Sen. Bob Dole to expand the food stamp program and, later, to her becoming a leading force in creating the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program—an outgrowth of her awareness of the effects of poor nutrition on children gained while working in early years education and as an educational consultant in New York’s Bureau of Child Welfare.

It was only after she learned that her next assignment would be to the Rural Development and Forestry Subcommittee that she confronted McCormack. To add to the pressure, she released a public statement that said, “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.” McCormack urged her to “be a good soldier” and accept the placement, but instead she escalated her complaint by writing to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur D. Mills, who handed out the committee assignments. This led to her being reassigned to the Veterans’ Affairs Committee. (“There are a lot more veterans in my district than there are trees,” she observed.) Eventually, she made it to her goal, the Education and Labor Committee, where she was the third-highest-ranking member by the time she retired.

When populist Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who is also on the campaign trail seeking the Democratic nomination, is recuperating after being shot and paralyzed by a would-be assassin, Shirley says she wants to visit him in the hospital. Her staff is horrified—Wallace is an arch-segregationist who personally blocked the way of two Black students seeking to enroll at the University of Alabama as part of the federal government’s mandate to integrate the school—and it will mean that her faltering campaign will lose the support of the Black Panthers and numerous other Black voters. But Shirley is determined and goes anyway.

Chisholm did indeed visit Wallace in the hospital. Her motive, she said, was to illustrate her belief in the importance of respecting contrary opinions in a democracy. Plus, she may have had a sneaking feeling of kinship with another outspoken outsider willing to stick by his principles (even deplorable ones), although the film suggests that this feeling of kinship arose from her own experience of being physically attacked by a (foiled) knife-wielding assailant while on the campaign trail. It is a measure of just how wide-open the 1972 race was that figures seen as so far on the fringes—Chisholm to the left and Wallace to the right—were contenders. And even the eventual nominee, Sen. George McGovern, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, was very much toward the left end of the spectrum, in the Bobby Kennedy mold.

From the vantage point of 50 years later, it may also seem odd that a white supremacist was running for the Democratic, as opposed to Republican, nomination. The party had always been divided between Northeastern and coastal liberals and Southern Dixiecrats who had never forgiven the Republicans for being the party of Lincoln. After Johnson’s Great Society and civil rights initiatives of 1964, accelerated by the Nixon administration’s subsequent dog-whistling “Southern strategy,” the segregation die-hards began migrating to the Republicans. Wallace was one of the last holdouts.

“Black people in my community crucified me,” Chisholm recalled of the visit to Wallace. “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.’ ” The film shows Wallace weeping in response and, according to Wallace’s daughter Peggy, this actually happened. “It was after her visit that [he] started to change,” she recalled. Being forced to “sit still and reflect on his politics and his own mortality” led to “a real awakening, a change of heart.”

Beginning in 1979, Wallace began to publicly seek the forgiveness of Alabama’s Black community, telling a 1982 meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership conference, “I did stand, with a majority of white people, for the separation of the schools. But that was wrong, and that will never come back again.” And in 1974, Wallace was one of the few Southerners to vote for Chisholm’s bill to raise the minimum wage for domestic workers.

Shirley’s young aide and protégée Barbara Lee (Christina Jackson)—a member of the Black Panther Party, the Oakland-based group that represents the more militant end of the Black Liberation movement—offers to set up a meeting with Huey Newton, the Panthers’ “Minister of Defense,” in the hope of getting their endorsement. The meeting takes place at the beautiful Los Angeles home of the equally beautiful Diahann Carroll, star of Julia (the first U.S. television series to feature a Black woman in a non-stereotypical role) and the first Black woman to win a Tony.

Newton (Brad James) comes to the meeting diametrically opposed to much of what Chisholm stands for, including conventional party politics. But Shirley, whose motto is “If they won’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair,” convinces him that if she can create a coalition of delegates, she can influence the eventual nominee to support more rights for women, Black Americans, and other underrepresented groups. Newton is also deeply skeptical about her visit to Wallace’s bedside. “I would break bread with the devil if it made him more Christian,” Chisholm responds. She gets the Panthers’ endorsement.

This is largely true. Lee did set up a meeting between Newton and Chisholm at Carroll’s house, and Chisholm did get the Panthers’ endorsement. However, in the film, Lee is presented as a somewhat directionless single mother who does community work with the Panthers but is not all that interested in conventional politics, which she regards as “bourgeois,” until Shirley takes Lee under her wing and gets her to volunteer for the campaign.

In reality, Lee was already a student at Mills College taking a course that required some campaign fieldwork. She was also politically active as president of the Mills Black Student Union and, in this capacity, had invited Chisholm to speak at the college. But she was disillusioned with the established parties and wasn’t registered to vote until Chisholm had a word with her. “The Democrats didn’t bring anything to what I thought they should in terms of an agenda for everyone, for the people, and neither did the Republicans, so I said, ‘Forget it, I’ll be Black Student Union president and a community worker with the Black Panther Party.’ That was my political work,” she recalled in 2021. “And here comes Shirley Chisholm, and she convinced me that she thought I had something that I could contribute to the political system, and the rest is history!”