More than once in “The Inquisitor” someone compares Barbara Jordan — the esteemed congresswoman and professor who died at 59 in 1996 — to God. Every time Jordan speaks in Angela Lynn Tucker’s rousing biography, she sounds up to the task, resonating with moral authority, bracing rhetoric and a sly humor that came from knowing the score.
Jordan’s voice, in every sense, is the film’s lifeblood. Born in Houston’s Fifth Ward during segregation, she went on to excel at law school in Boston. She overcame racial gerrymandering to be Texas’s first Black senator in decades, championing the Equal Rights Amendment. Building bridges through coffee dates and good-old-boy hunting trips, she rose to the U.S. Congress in 1973. When she testified at Nixon’s impeachment hearings, she famously declared herself “an inquisitor.”
Tucker wisely front loads clips of Jordan (with some texts spoken by Alfre Woodard in voice-over). Jordan seems to be speaking to us today as a voice of conscience and reason in a nation in crisis struggling to fulfill its promise. But the sometimes wonkily whirlwind film doesn’t shy away from challenges, like Jimmy Carter’s failure to appoint her as attorney general, or her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
Luminaries like Ruth Simmons, Elizabeth Holtzman and Dan Rather weigh in, and Jordan’s relationship with her companion, Nancy Earl, leads to musings over whether she could have been an L.G.B.T.Q. spokesperson. But the film illustrates Jordan’s strategies of engagement as a political force while she remained, in her words, “militant in my insides.”
The Inquisitor Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on PBS.
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