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Viola Davis To Star In Barbara Jordan Biopic

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Viola Davis is set to star in a biopic about the life of American civil rights activist/Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

The Help star, who was recently Oscar-nominated for Best Actress and for Best Supporting Actress, will play the lead in the upcoming film.

Jordan’s film will be based on her trials and tribulations on her path to becoming the first African American from the South to be elected to Congress. Her story has been well documented by Mary Beth Rogers in the biography Barbara Jordan: American Hero. The movie will be centered around the book.

Barbara Jordan was the first African American to serve in the Texas Senate since Reconstruction, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South, and the first to deliver the keynote address at a national party convention. Yet Jordan herself remained a mystery, a woman so private that even her close friends did not know the name of the illness that debilitated her for two decades until it struck her down at the age of fifty-nine (Barbara Jordan: American Hero).

Paris Barclay will direct the film.

Image of Barbara Jordan below:

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