Can Hollywood Handle A Queen? Examining Netflix's Take On Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm is a name you ought to know: she was a groundbreaking politician and the first Black woman to run for president. Her campaign was unsuccessful in the end, but that didn’t stop her efforts from changing lives. And now Netflix has released a movie about her, Shirley, starring Regina King. Here we take a deep dive into it and see how well it succeeds in portraying its subject.
The project
King had always wanted to make a film about the life of Chisholm. In fact, she’d been working on the project on and off for 15 years. She was determined that more people should know about the pioneer’s life.
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.
The woman
The biopic delves into Chisholm’s extraordinary life and the obstacles she faced as she went into politics. And there were obstacles right from the beginning. Chisholm was born with the surname St. Hill in 1924 in Brooklyn; it was a hard time to be a Black person and a hard time to be female.
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.
Family history
To save the family money, she and her sisters were sent to live with their grandmother Emmeline in Barbados for a while. Chisholm was a mere five years old at the time, but the experience changed her life.
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.
Scholarships
Chisholm returned to the USA when she was nine years old and fast became a model student at her Brooklyn high school. She ended up becoming the first in her family to go to college.
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.