Shirley Chisholm did not take the easy road. The film doesn't really go into her motivations, so we don't now why she took on the double whammy of being not just black, but female at a time the country, even the nascent feminists, were trying to wrap their heads around what it meant to have equality of the sexes.
We don't see that she had much of an organization, but the congresswoman from Bed-Sty had some aides and she traveled. Surely she needed financing to pay for the plane tickets, the hotel rooms an the salary, but it is not explained to us how she got it. The footage, both archived and contemporary, shows her with an immense amount of dignity and calm. Her uninhibited and justified comments after she is double-crossed by an old friend shows us another side. Her reflections during an interview for the film inform us that she didn't want to be remembered as the first black woman to do what she did, but rather someone who tried to make a difference. There wasn't a long line after her doing what she did. The laudatory film shows that there wasn't much future in it, even 32 years later in 2004 when Carol Mosley Braun tried it.