THE INQUISITOR (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Beth Accomando
As a kid growing up in the 1970s, I distinctly remember three Black women making an impression on me outside of the movies: Angela Davis, Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan. Davis was a political activist outside the system stirring the pot and being an icon of resistance while Chisholm and Jordan attempted to change the system from within.
Davis has had at least two documentaries (Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom, Free Angela and All Political Prisoners) made about her; Chisholm was portrayed by Regina King in Netflix’s Shirley; and now Jordan is the subject of the documentary The Inquisitor that just premiered at Tribeca.
Angela Lynn Tucker’s “The Inquisitor” opens with Barbara Jordan stating: “What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.” Jordan spent her life and career trying to make good on that promise.
Jordan was many things: lawyer, lawmaker, teacher, mentor, and civil rights leader. She was born in Texas’s historically Black Fifth Ward, and in 1966 became the first African American senator in the state’s Senate since the end of Reconstruction in 1883. Then in 1972, she became the first Southern Black woman to join Congress, just another of the many firsts that she would add to her resume as a pioneering activist.
Although she never publicly came out (and one person in the documentary laments that Jordan never became an LGBTQ+ activist), her domestic partnership with a woman was revealed in her obituary in 1996. So she can be recognized as the first LGBTQ+ woman to serve in the U.S. Congress.
The documentary gathers archival materials and also conducts new interviews to create more of a tribute to Jordan than a biography. It’s not a documentary that digs in depth into Jordan’s life but rather it tries to give a broad overview to encompass as much as possible about her extensive legacy. We get a little bit on a lot of different aspects of her life rather than focusing in on just one.
Most of Tucker’s films have been short documentaries and here she struggles a bit with creating a narrative structure for a feature length film. She weaves in and out of Jordan’s life, not always providing clear context for some of the archival material.
But the strength of the film really lies in Jordan’s words, and Tucker always gives them the weight they deserve. During the televised Nixon impeachment proceeding, Jordan gave a fierce speech to the members of the House Judiciary Committee and said: “My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”
I wish there were members of Congress right now who could speak so passionately and forcefully, and with such respect for the Constitution. The Inquisitor is a much overdue tribute to Jordan and it arrives at a time when politicians like her are hard to find. Jordan was a trailblazer, a ferocious idealist, an untiring activist, and a pursuer of truth and justice. So glad her legacy is being preserved and made accessible in this documentary.
