The Life of Queen Latifah

"It was always important for me to be able to make my own decisions — to be my own boss." This is the brilliant career of Queen Latifah.

Transcript

00:00It's important that our stories are told.

00:02It's important that our voices are heard.

00:05It's important that a woman's voice is heard, period, around the world.

00:21I've been fortunate enough to be part of a burgeoning music, a new music called hip-hop.

00:27So I was part of that genre of music being created.

00:41The women in my family are like the most significant people in my life.

00:44My friends who support me, who I support, you know.

00:57For me, the hip-hop era that I come from was able to speak about everything going on socially.

01:14Everything, whether you just wanted to party all night or whether you wanted to bring down apartheid in South Africa.

01:27If the women on this earth were together and strong, then this earth would be a completely different place.

01:39I started out as a rapper, but shortly thereafter became a manager.

01:45We opened up a management company, my partner Shaquem and I, and I was 18 and he was 20.

01:50So it was always important for me to be able to make my own decisions,

01:54to be my own boss and not to have to follow or take direction from someone.

01:59My brother was killed in a motorcycle accident when I was 22, he was 24.

02:28My mother is a teacher and we wanted to create something that was a positive thing out of a tragedy.

02:32Education is really important in my family.

03:28Walking down this street means hope, it means inspiration.

03:32One of the reasons for me to be here is to inspire other young women, young African-American women,

03:39young wannabe rappers or wannabe actors or wannabe entrepreneurs or full-figured sexy women.

03:46You know, anyone who sees me, I hope they see me there and feel inspired and feel like if I could do it, they could do it.

03:57Anytime you sing about America, to me it should have more responsibility.

04:08This is like a moment where for a change we kind of all get to come together and feel a sense of pride

04:15and not really worry about anything else that goes on Monday morning.

04:28It's just the fact that you don't have enough films that look like us, with us starring.

04:45Hopefully we'll see more women of color stepping into animation, sci-fi, fantasy, of course romance and comedy, you name it.

04:55Documentaries, we just want to keep seeing those numbers rise.