Shirley (2024): a woman who fought to make History
An electoral year always offers us a good chance to look at the past and learn something. 2024 is a year for Presidential Election in the United States and this opportunity once more presents to us. We can look back with a movie that premiered on Netflix, about an inspiring figure who never stopped fighting for what she believed.
In a sea of white men, there she is: Shirley Chisholm (Regina King), the first black woman to be elected for the Congress, in 1968. She wouldn’t stop there. Four years later, she would become the first black woman to dispute the primaries in a big party to be candidate to the presidency of the United States.
Shirley was elected to represent Brooklyn, but is assigned by the Speaker of the House a position at the Agriculture Committee. It’s the first year of her first term, and yet she confronts the Speaker and manages to make him assign her a different committee — where, something not shown in the movie, she would fight for food supplying for the poor. She is not only persuasive, she’s a fighter.
The news of Shirley’s choice to dispute the nomination is met with enthusiasm by many. Author Betty Friedan — from “The Feminine Mystique” — declares in an interview that Shirley running for president is a sigh that times are changing. Her supporters are rejoicing, but her family isn’t: Shirley’s sister Muriel (Reina King, Regina King’s real-life sister) condemns her choice, saying that it’s a reflex of her bringing up: their father treated her differently and now she thinks she’s special and can become president. Muriel then refuses to be interviewed by The New York Times, the newspaper that is making a profile of Shirley that can be a game changer, but Muriel is fed up with the insults she and the rest of the family are hearing on a daily basis and wants nothing to do with Shirley’s campaign.
To a fellow Congressman who is also a bigot, Shirley says that she is there paving the way for more people like her to occupy that space. She is there to “represent the blacks, the women, the immigrants, the youth, the working class”. To a young woman named Barbara (Christina Jackson), Shirley talks about politics and says that voting is the first step for change, this coming after the woman said she doesn’t vote because of the burgeouis element of the electoral process, a process that isn’t fair for black people. Once more, Shirley was right: voting is how we have our voices heard, how we make a difference.
The three biggest TV networks of the time (ABC, CBS and NBC) don’t invite Shirley for the debates, but invite candidates that had worse performances in their primaries. Then Shirley asks youth campaign manager and future lawyer Robert (Lucas Hedges) to sue the networks, which ends up working: she takes part in the debates and even gains half an hour of an exclusive interview in one of the networks. Parts of this interview are shown in the movie.
Shirley’s adversary George Wallace, governor of Alabama and a notorious segregationist, suffers an assassination attempt and Shirley goes visit him in the hospital, where she says she was dealing with assassination threats at the time. Wallace served four terms as Alabama governor and tried four times to be president of the USA, three times running as a Democrat and once as an independent. He defended, since the beginning of his career, segregational ideas and is better remembered for those.
Shirley meets Huey Newton, then president of the Black Panthers, at Diahann Carroll’s house. Diahann was a famous actress who shocked the “good citizens” when she starred in the TV show “Julia”, where she played a nurse who didn’t need any men in her life to be happy and fulfilled. Diahann made history in 1962, when she became the first African-American woman to win the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, and again in 1968, when “Julia” premiered, for playing a non-stereotyped black woman lead in a TV show.
The United States had its first black male president, one that didn’t stop a bloody war in the Middle East, fairly recently. It would have had its first female president, if the confused Electoral College didn’t get in the way. This mechanism was created by the Founding Fathers to avoid demagogues from being elected, but so far it only allowed people who didn’t win the popular vote to become president — twice.
It’s not a spoiler to say that Shirley didn’t win the Democratic nomination. The nominee, George McGovern, lost the presidency to Richard Nixon in a landslide victory, and Nixon resigned in 1974 following the Watergate scandal. It could have been different with Shirley.
It’s almost impossible not to compare “Shirley” with “Rustin” (https://medium.com/cinesuffragette/rustin-2023-the-queer-man-behind-the-march-on-washington-761996757e00), another biopic of an important historical black figure in the History of the USA. Both were released on Netflix and both chose to tell only a vital slice of the subjects’ lives. They are both well-written and well-acted, but there is something missing from them, no matter what you call it. They seem to be harmless, but their inspiring content can make change happen.
Writer and director John Ridley, who won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2013 for the film “12 Years a Slave”, has also written seven novels. He has been a producer since 1997 and was involved in a polemic when he wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times asking HBO to remove the classic “Gone with the Wind” (1939) from its streaming service because the old movie glorified slavery and the racist way of life of the South.
When she asks campaign coordinator Arthur if she’s crazy, Shirley hears that “maybe this is the secret” to make change happen. Crazy people and their crazy dreams make the world go forward and we can always be inspired by their stories through biopics like “Shirley” that, although formulaic, are a great way to spend the time.
