Barbara Jordan

Attorney Barbara Charline Jordan (1936-1996), who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1972 to 1976, was a prominent member of the House Judiciary Committee when it held President Richard M. Nixon's impeachment hearings.

Barbara Jordan was born in Houston, Texas, to parents with strong convictions about the behavior of their three daughters. Jordan's father, a Baptist preacher, was probably the most important influence in her life. He valued God, the Bible, his family, good music, and the spoken and written word. Although the Jordans were poor, their lot was not very different from that of other African Americans in the Houston area. Jordan's parents made every effort to provide adequately for her and her sisters and to shield them from the detrimental effects of the racially segregated society in which they lived by regularly exposing them to the most positive aspects of their own African American community. They attended schools and churches led by prominent members of the African American community and conducted their business with African American-owned establishments. It was Jordan's parents who made contact with the white world when it was necessary.

All of the Jordan girls played musical instruments, and two of them decided that they wanted to become music teachers. Barbara, however, was more ambitious. She was not sure what she wanted to do, but she knew she wanted to achieve something great. Her father had taught her that race and poverty had nothing to do with her brain power or her ability to achieve lofty goals if she had the drive to work for them.

Young Jordan Decides To Become a Lawyer

At first Jordan thought about being a pharmacist, but as she researched that profession, she noted that she had never heard of a famous pharmacist and, consequently, she decided to abandon that field. When a African American female lawyer from Chicago, Edith Sampson (who later became a judge), visited Jordan's high school on "career day," Jordan was so impressed with her that she made a definite decision about her life work. That evening she announced to her parents that she wanted to be a lawyer. Jordan's mother was reluctant about her daughter's choice - after all, African American women lawyers were a rarity in the South - but her father supported her, reassuring her that she could excel in any endeavor.

Money was certainly an important consideration when Jordan was choosing a college. After many family conferences, she decided to enroll at Texas Southern University (TSU), an inexpensive school for African American students, in order to save money for law school. At TSU Jordan, already a skilled orator, joined the debating team. In a bout with Harvard University debators, the TSU team, with Jordan at the helm, was jubilant when the match ended in a tie. After Jordan graduated magna cum laude from TSU in 1956 she went to Boston University Law School. She was an excellent and extremely disciplined student who often worked long into the night. Because her family made tremendous financial sacrifices to pay for her education, Jordan did not want to disappoint them in any way. She graduated in 1959 and in the same year passed both the Massachusetts and Texas bar examinations.

Early Practice and Senate Years

After she returned to Houston in 1959 Jordan began her law practice on her parents' dining room table. When she was finally able to convince friends and neighbors that she was indeed a competent attorney her clientele grew, enabling her to open an office downtown. Since the civil rights movement was in full swing by the time Jordan had established herself, she decided that she might be able to do her part in the unweaving of the web of segregation laws by becoming a member of the Texas State House of Representatives. She waged two unsuccessful campaigns, one in 1962 and another in 1964, on a shoestring budget. Although she lost both elections, she was gaining popularity. When the lines of Houston's voting districts were redrawn, Jordan found that most of those who had voted for her were united in a single district. She decided to run for the Texas Senate in 1966 and won. She was the first African American woman ever to be elected to the Texas Senate and the first African American person to serve since the Reconstruction period. In 1972, after six years in the Texas Senate, where she sponsored important labor legislation, Jordan decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives. She was not the first African American woman to be seated in the U.S. Congress; that honor went to Shirley Chisholm of New York, who had been elected in 1968. She was, however, the first African American woman from the South.

Service as Member of House Judiciary Committee

Jordan was particularly interested in becoming a member of the House Judiciary Committee. A word from a man she admired - former President Lyndon B. Johnson - helped to bring that desire to fruition. Thus, when the difficult question of President Richard M. Nixon's collusion in the Watergate Hotel burglary in an effort to secure his 1972 election victory was brought before the Judiciary Committee, Jordan was among its members.

The committee, seeking evidence to determine whether Nixon had committed an impeachable offense, commanded so much public attention that its hearings were televised. The viewing audience was interested in the questions raised by all of the committee members, but it was Barbara Jordan, who riveted the attention of the viewers with her oratorical ability, clarity of presentation, and thorough knowledge of constitutional issues. As more and more damaging information was uncovered, it seemed that President Nixon's impeachment was inevitable. Before the committee made its final decision, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, the first president in U. S. history to do so. The televised impeachment hearings catapulted Jordan to national fame.

Jordan As Teacher and Orator

Jordan did not seek reelection after her second term. Part of her reason for leaving politics was that she was suffering poor health due to leukemia and multiple sclerosis, which eventually caused her to rely on a wheelchair or a walker. Her ill health did not keep her from many honorable accomplishments in her later years, however. She held several teaching positions, including professor at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs in Houston, Texas, where her ethics course was so popular that students entered a lottery to enroll. In 1976, she became the first African American selected to deliver the keynote address at a national convention of the Democratic Party. She was the keynote speaker again in 1992 for the Democratic Convention which nominated Bill Clinton. Jordan was such a skilled and respected lecturer and speaker that in 1985 she was named Best Living Orator.

President Clinton appointed her to the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform in 1994. Here Jordan denounced hostility toward immigrants, and opposed a plan which would deny automatic citizenship to children of immigrants born in this country. That same year she received the Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. Jordan died on January 17, 1996 in Austin, Texas from viral pnemonia caused by complications from leukemia. President Johnson's widow, Lady Bird Johnson was quoted in Jet in February 1996, saying, "I feel a stabbing sense of loss at the passing of a good friend."

Further Reading

There are several biographies of Jordan available, including her own Barbara Jordan, A Self Portrait (1979); James Haskins, Barbara Jordan (1977); Ira Bryant, Barbara Charline Jordan (1977); Linda Jacobs, Barbara Jordan (1978); and Naurice Roberts, Barbara Jordan, the Great Lady from Texas (1984); also, "Barbara Jordan, former congresswoman and educator dies at 59 in Austin, Texas," Jet, February 5, 1996; and "Jordan's rules," from The New Republic, February 12, 1996, vol. 214, no. 7.

politician; lawyer; educator

Personal Information

Born Barbara Charline Jordan, February 21, 1936, in Houston, TX; daughter of Ben (a preacher and warehouse worker) and Arlyne (Patten) Jordan.
Education: Texas Southern University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1956; Boston University, J.D., 1959.

Career

Admitted to the Bar of the States of Massachusetts and Texas, 1959; attorney, 1959--; elected to Texas State Senate, 1966, reelected to four-year term, 1968; U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC, congressional representative from the 18th district of Texas, 1972-76; served on Judiciary Committee during President Richard M. Nixon's impeachment hearings, 1974; speaker at Democratic National Conventions, 1976 and 1992; University of Texas, Austin, professor, 1979--. Author, with Shelby Hearon, of Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, Doubleday, 1979; host of Voices of the Electorate: The African-American Voter, PBS, 1992.

Life's Work

With spellbinding oratory, political savvy, and a self-sufficiency that raised her above petty partisanship, former U.S. congresswoman and celebrated black leader Barbara Jordan blazed a trail up the electoral ranks in the 1970s, overcoming institutional bias to become one of the most respected representatives of the downtrodden in the United States. Having enjoyed as many political firsts as any other officeholder in the twentieth century, Jordan was catapulted to national fame during the presidential impeachment hearings of 1974 and seemed poised to take on the highest elected and appointed posts in the land. But in 1978, to the surprise of admirers and critics alike, Jordan retired from the insulated world of Washington D.C., believing that bureaucracy and partisan dogfights would forever hinder the forward-thinking activism that had drawn her to politics in the first place.

Barbara Charline Jordan was born February 21, 1936, in the largest black ghetto in Houston, Texas. Her father, Ben, a Baptist preacher and warehouse laborer, instilled in his three daughters an expectation for academic success and discipline that would later fuel Barbara's legendary studiousness and thirst for knowledge. Her mother, Arlyne, a dazzling church speaker herself, impressed upon her children the raw power of rhetoric. Perhaps the dominant early influence on Barbara Jordan was her grandfather John, who encouraged her burgeoning streak of independence, and, by reading to her from a pronunciation dictionary, reinforced her mother's lessons. It was his own maddening experience of being railroaded by the Houston legal system--he was convicted of trumped-up charges of assault and intent to murder--that first illuminated for Jordan the flagrant double standards applied to whites and blacks in a country gripped by segregation.

While at the Phillis Wheatley High School, Jordan racked up several debating and oratory awards but recognized that talk alone would never conquer the injustices heaped upon blacks. "I did not think it right for blacks to be in one place and whites in another place and never the two shall meet," she wrote in her autobiography Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, coauthored by Shelby Hearon. "There was just something about that that didn't feel right to me. And I wanted that to change, but I also had those feelings that it was going to be this way for a long, long time, and that nobody was going to be able to do anything to change it." She had at first intended to be a pharmacist but soon saw that such a professional path would never enable her to right the social wrongs of a segregated world. After hearing a black woman lawyer speak at a school career-day event, Jordan decided to enter the arena of law.

While at Texas Southern University, a school created for blacks who were not allowed to attend the prestigious University of Texas, Jordan excelled on the debating club, often arguing with sober, analytical logic and fiery emotional appeals for integration. Touring with the club, Jordan frequently bested white debaters but was consistently put down by the rampant discrimination of Jim Crow laws that relegated blacks to the backs of buses and restaurants. She had wanted to attend Harvard Law School--in her view the best such institution in the country--but was told by her debating coach that this pillar of higher education would not welcome a black girl from an obscure southern school. Eager to leave the world of segregated education, Jordan enrolled at Boston University Law School, becoming one of two black women in the freshman class. She knew she had entered a more enlightened world when she met her roommate, a wealthy white woman whose father was chairman of the National Democratic Committee, an organization, ironically, that would later court her.

After graduation, Jordan returned to Houston, where she set up a makeshift office in her parents' house and practiced law, focusing mainly on domestic relations. Her interest in politics had been growing since the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, which found segregation in public education unconstitutional and rejected the "separate but equal" defense offered by segregated school districts. Jordan, who was deeply resentful of the inequitable educational opportunities available to blacks and whites, was frustrated that the Brown decision had not translated into the immediate integration of schools. She recognized politics as the singular vehicle of change. Campaigning for the Democratic party's presidential ticket of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson--the latter would eventually become a beloved political mentor--Jordan delivered impassioned speeches throughout her Houston district, making a name for herself as an orator and getting to know the movers and shakers of the local democratic machine.

In 1962, ambitious and confident, Jordan ran for the Texas House of Representatives. She adopted the political buzzwords "reform and retrenchment" to characterize her campaign, spoke eloquently on the moral necessity of welfare, and read textbooks, that, she felt, taught the rules of the game of Texas politics. She didn't realize at the time that many of the unwritten rules favored white, conservative men (like her opponent), over liberal, black women. "I felt that the black and the woman stuff were just side issues, and that people were going to ignore that," she wrote in her autobiography. She lost the election, garnering the black vote in her district but failing to attract the white voters who constituted the majority--a condition that also held true for her second unsuccessful stab at state representative in 1964.

Disheartened by the losses and worried that gender and race would forever restrict her political future, Jordan was given a third chance in 1966, after a Supreme Court decision affirmed the "one man, one vote" principle of participatory democracy. As a result of that ruling, a Texas State Senate seat covered a newly redistricted area including blacks, migrant workers, and pro-labor whites--groups that Jordan had won handily during her previous campaigns. Jordan faced the vexing decision of running against a respected white incumbent who boasted a strong liberal record and whose views jibed with her own. But she believed that her gender and race, once viewed as liabilities, offered a welcome new vision and perspective. She won the election by a margin of two to one, made national news as the first black woman in the Texas legislature, and became one of a small group of the first blacks elected in the South since the late nineteenth century.

Taking advantage of a growing political acuity and maximizing her chances of accomplishing her goals while working within the system, Jordan entered the Texas Senate as an open-minded and conciliatory freshman, not as a dissenting rebel waving the banner of black power. She quickly earned the respect of conservatives and liberals alike by not only tackling issues fairly, but by mastering the rough-and-tumble world of Texas politics. A former editorial writer for the Houston Chronicle was quoted in Ebony magazine as saying: "If one wanted to think up the three handicaps with which one could enter a know-nothing, reactionary state senate of those days, it would be a person of liberal persuasion, a woman, and a black. Yet her intelligence and her commanding personality got her to the point where she had the senate eating out of her hand."

In her six-year tenure as state senator--she was reelected in 1968--Jordan used hard work and political know-how so expertly that half the bills she submitted were enacted into law, including the Texas Fair Employment Practices Commission, an improved workman's compensation act, and the expansion of minimum wage provisions to cover domestics, farm laborers, and laundry workers. She was elected Outstanding Freshman Senator by her colleagues and, in 1972, was given the honor of "Governor for a Day," making her, albeit temporarily, the first black woman governor of any state. By this point, she had already been discovered by the National Democratic party, having participated in a much-ballyhooed White House meeting with President Johnson on his proposed Fair Housing legislation and having been invited to attend a gala fund-raiser in Miami.

In 1972, after a census had given Texas an additional U.S. House of Representatives seat covering Houston, Jordan became the first black woman elected to Congress from the South. She recalled in her autobiography the glowing endorsement that fellow-Texan and former President Lyndon Johnson had given her at a 1971 campaign fund-raiser. "Barbara Jordan proved to us that black is beautiful before we knew what that meant." In her three congressional terms, as in her tenure in the Texas Senate, Jordan demonstrated her independence, forging alliances with conservatives who others might have viewed as her ideological opponents and always following her conscience rather than the narrow dictum of any political party. And again, as in Texas, she was able to succeed, pushing through legislation that eliminated price-fixing, expanded voting rights to non-English-speaking residents, and prohibited discrimination in industries that received public funding.

Although Jordan considered herself a politician first, a black person second, and a woman third, she spiritedly championed women's causes, arguing forcefully for the Equal Rights Amendment, the availability of abortion services, and the entitlement of homemakers to receive social security benefits. "Few members in the long history of the House have so quickly impressed themselves upon the consciousness of the country," Irwin Ross wrote in Reader's Digest in 1977.

This moral authority was showcased for the world in 1974 during the impeachment hearings of President Richard Nixon. As a member of the powerful Judiciary Committee, Jordan was entitled to deliver a 15-minute televised speech concerning the Watergate scandal that had brought shame and ruin to the Nixon presidency. (The Watergate affair centered on the Nixon re-election campaign committee's break-in at Democratic party offices--an incident that ultimately led to the president's resignation.) In keeping with her view that the hearings were a somber, painful moment in American politics, Jordan delivered an eloquent, melancholic ode to the Constitution, the document which, she felt, had been sullied by the administration's crimes. "My faith in the Constitution is whole," she said, as recalled in her autobiography. "It is complete. It is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution."

After this emotional monologue, and later, after an impassioned keynote address at the 1976 Democratic Convention, Americans of all political bents pinned hopes on Jordan's assuming the highest offices in the country. Although President Jimmy Carter, for whom she campaigned, made several overtures about appointed positions, Jordan stated that she only would be interested in that of attorney general, a post that had been filled. In 1978, frustrated by the inherent slowness of government action and convinced that the quest for a position of greater political power--namely, the office of the president--was beyond her reach, Jordan did not seek reelection to the House of Representatives. "In Congress, one chips away, one does not make bold strokes," she was quoted as saying in Ms. magazine in 1985. "After six years I had wearied of the little chips that I could put on a woodpile."

Jordan returned to Texas as a full professor at the University of Texas in Austin, teaching political values and ethics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Her classes, emphasizing public service as the highest purpose of government work, became so popular that a lottery was needed to handle the legion of students who wanted to attend them. Ultimately she became a special counsel on ethics to Texas governor Ann Richards, charged with screening the moral strength and sensitivity of political appointees.

When asked in a Time magazine interview about the cynicism staining many Americans' views of politics and those who seek elected office, Jordan commented: "I am very disheartened by the public perception of politicians not having the public welfare at heart because I absolutely believe politics is an honorable profession. I wish more people would see politicians as public servants, because that's what they are." During the 1992 Democratic National Convention, she urged the Democratic party to sharpen its vision of the future and help the U.S. economy progress from a philosophy of "taxing and spending" to one of "investment and growth." That same year, Jordan received the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Awards

Named "One of the 10 Most Influential Women in Texas" and "One of 100 Women in Touch With Our Time" by Harper's Bazaar; elected Outstanding Freshman Senator by the Texas Senate; named Democratic Woman of the Year by the Women's National Democratic Club and Woman of the Year in Politics by Ladies' Home Journal; Eleanor Roosevelt Humanities Award, 1984; Charles Evans Hughes Gold Medal, National Conference of Christians and Jews; Spingarn Medal, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1992. Received honorary degrees from numerous institutions, including Harvard University, Howard University, and Tufts University.

Further Reading

Books

• Jordan, Barbara, and Shelby Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, Doubleday, 1979.

Periodicals

• Atlantic, March 1975.
• Ebony, February 1975.
• Good Housekeeping, June 1978.
• Jet, August 17, 1992.
• Ms., April 1985.
• Reader's Digest, February 1977.
• Time, June 3, 1991.
• Additional information for this profile was taken from Democratic National Convention highlights broadcast on ABC-TV during the week of July 13, 1992.

— Isaac Rosen

For more information on Barbara Charline Jordan, visit Britannica.com.

Jordan, Barbara Charline, 1936–96, African-American lawyer, public official, and educator, b. Houston. After graduating from Boston Univ. Law School (1959), she practiced law in Houston. In 1966 she became the first African American to be elected to the Texas senate, and six years later, the first to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the South since Reconstruction. As a Democratic member of Congress, she achieved national renown on the House Judiciary Committee when it investigated (1974) the Watergate affair. Her keynote address at the 1976 Democratic national convention further enhanced her stature, but she decided to retire from politics the following year. From 1979 until her death, she taught at the Univ. of Texas.

Bibliography

See biography by M. B. Rogers (1998).

Barbara C. Jordan, attorney, legislator, and educator, was the first African American woman from a southern state to win election to the U.S. Congress.

Jordan was born February 21, 1936, in Houston, Texas, the third and youngest daughter of the Reverend Benjamin Jordan and Arlyne Jordan. In 1952 she graduated at the top of her class from Phyllis Wheatley High School and enrolled in Texas Southern University (TSU), an all-black college, where she joined the debate team and traveled to competitions throughout the United States. The team was restricted to blacks-only motels and restaurants in many of the states bordering Texas.

In 1956 Jordan graduated magna cum laude from TSU with a bachelor's degree in history and political science. She enrolled in Boston University, in Massachusetts—one of six women, including two black women, in the law school's first-year class. During her first year of law school, Jordan realized how inadequate her education had been in the all-black schools of Houston. But Jordan was successful at Boston, and upon her graduation in 1959, she returned to Houston and opened a law practice.

Jordan was also drawn to politics. She became involved in the 1960 presidential campaign and went to work for John F. Kennedy and for fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, both Democratic party nominees. In 1962 she made her first unsuccessful bid for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, running from Harris County. She ran again in 1964, and again was defeated. Jordan decided to make a third attempt at winning public office and in 1966 she was elected to the Texas Senate. She was the first black state senator elected in Texas since 1883.

Shortly after her election, Jordan was invited to the White House by President Johnson to discuss his upcoming civil rights legislation. In 1972 Jordan was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first black woman from a southern state to serve in Congress. She immediately enlisted former president Johnson's assistance in winning an appointment to the House Judiciary Committee, where she gained national recognition for her remarks at the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon.

Jordan gained additional prominence in July 1976 when she gave a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Her speech about the Democratic party and the meaning of democracy in the United States brought her a standing ovation. A movement to put Jordan on the ticket as vice president gained tremendous support but, Jordan held a press conference to announce that she did not wish the position.

Jordan served three terms in the House of Representatives and sponsored landmark legislation to expand the Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C.A. §1973 et seq., to require printing of bilingual ballots, and to toughen enforcement of civil rights laws. She resigned from Congress in 1972 and became a professor at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs, at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1982 she was appointed to the university's Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair in National Policy, where she taught courses on ethics and national policy issues.

In December 1990, Governor Ann W. Richards, of Texas, appointed Jordan as a special adviser to her administration on ethics in government. Richards had made ethics a primary focus of her campaign, and she asked Jordan to author ethics legislation and work with gubernatorial appointees on guidelines for ethical behavior in their public service.

Jordan died in Austin, Texas on January 17, 1996.

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