Shirley Temple Black

Shirley Temple Black is well known for bringing smiles to American households as a dancing and singing child star with her trademark bouncy red curls, but in her later years Black became a national diplomatic figure who used her spotlight in the fight against communism.

After shifting from movies that had uplifting, light-hearted themes during one of the nation’s worst economic recessions, she dedicated her energy and name-recognition abroad, first accepting the post of U.S. delegate to the United Nations by President Richard Nixon in 1969, and later U.S. Ambassador to Ghana by President Gerald Ford.

In 1989, Black became U.S. ambassador to the former Czechoslovakia where she witnessed and sought to help the country’s transformation from communism to a democratic government during the “Velvet Revolution.”

Black had only served in the role for a few months before the revolution began, but she had openly voiced support for the opposition movement before her appointment.

Former Czech Ambassador to the United Kingdom Michael Žantovský — who served in 1990 as a spokesman for the last Czechoslovakian president, Václav Havel — recalled how Black, just two weeks before the revolution, was sending diplomatic cables expressing impatience at the slowness of the protests. 

But the revolution soon got under way as students and dissidents protested the one-party system under the Communist Party, which successfully became a nonviolent transition of power.

Havel, who had formed a good working relationship with Black, went on to become the first president of the new Czech Republic and the two continued to work together during the early days of the new democratic government.

“Afterward, [Black] became one of the architects of the relationship between the new Czechoslovakia and the United States,” Žantovsky told Public Radio International in 2014. 

Black also didn’t shy away from needling communists when she could. At times she would appear on her balcony in a T-shirt that had STB printed on it. While STB are her initials, they also are an acronym for the former Czech secret police.

According to a July 1991 Daily Gazette paper, when Black was asked what the STB agents were doing following the change in government, she replied: “Most of them are driving the taxis you ride around in.”

— Olivia Beavers