Barbara Jordan

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Representative, 1973–1979, Democrat from Texas

Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress

During the Watergate impeachment investigation, a time when many Americans despaired about the Constitution and the country, Barbara Jordan emerged as an eloquent and powerful interpreter of the crisis. Her very presence on the House Judiciary Committee, as one of the first African Americans elected from the Deep South since 1898 and the first black woman ever from that region, lent added weight to her message.

Barbara Charline Jordan was born in Houston, Texas, on February 21, 1936, one of three daughters of Benjamin M. Jordan and Arlyne Patten Jordan. Benjamin Jordan, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, worked in a local warehouse before becoming pastor of Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church, which his family had long attended. Arlyne Jordan was an accomplished public speaker. Barbara Jordan was educated in the Houston public schools and graduated from Phyllis Wheatley High School in 1952. She earned a B.A. from Texas Southern University in 1956 and a law degree from Boston University in 1959. That same year she was admitted to the Massachusetts and Texas bars, commencing practice in Houston in 1960. To supplement her income (her law office was, for a while, in her parents’ home), she worked as an administrative assistant to a county judge.¹

Barbara Jordan’s political turning point came when she worked on the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign in 1960. She eventually helped manage a highly organized get-out-the-vote program that served the 40 African-American precincts in Houston. In 1962 and 1964, Jordan ran for the Texas house of representatives but lost both times. So, in 1966, she ran for the Texas senate when court-enforced redistricting created a district largely consisting of minority voters. Jordan won, defeating a white liberal and becoming the first African-American state senator since 1883 and the first black woman ever elected to that body. The 30 other, male, white senators received her coolly. But Jordan won them over as an effective legislator who pushed through bills establishing the state’s first minimum wage law, antidiscrimination clauses in business contracts, and the Texas Fair Employment Practices Commission. On March 28, 1972, Jordan’s peers elected her president pro tempore of the Texas senate, making her the first black woman in America to preside over a legislative body.² In seconding the nomination, one of her male colleagues stood and singled Jordan out from across the chamber, spread his arms open, and said, “What can I say? Black is beautiful.”³ One of the functions of that job was to serve as acting governor when the governor and lieutenant governor were out of the state. When Jordan filled that largely ceremonial role on June 10, 1972, she became the first black chief executive in the nation.

In 1971, Jordan entered the race for the Texas congressional seat covering downtown Houston. The district had been redrawn after the 1970 Census and was composed of a predominantly African-American and Hispanic-American population. In the 1972 Democratic primary, Jordan faced Curtis Graves, another black state legislator, who attacked her for being too close to the white establishment. Jordan blunted Graves’s charges with her legislative credentials. “I’m not going to Washington and turn things upside down in a day,” she told supporters at a rally. “I’ll only be one of 435. But the 434 will know I am there.”⁴ Jordan took the primary with 80 percent of the vote. In the general election, against Republican Paul Merritt, she won 81 percent of the vote. Along with Andrew Young of Georgia, Jordan became the first African American elected to Congress from the Deep South in the 20th century. In the next two campaign cycles, Jordan simply overwhelmed her opposition, capturing 85 percent of the total vote in both general elections.⁵

Congresswoman Jordan’s political philosophy from her days in the state legislature led her to stick closely to local issues. Civil rights and women’s rights activists sometimes criticized her when she chose to favor her community interests rather than theirs. She followed this pattern in the House. “I sought the power points,” she once said. “I knew if I were going to get anything done, [the congressional and party leaders] would be the ones to help me get it done.”⁶ Jordan was reluctant to commit herself to any one special interest group or caucus, such as the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), of which she was a member. House women met informally too, but Jordan’s attendance at those meetings was irregular, and she was noncommittal on most issues brought before the group. She was especially careful not to attach herself too closely to an agenda over which she had little control and which might impinge on her ability to navigate and compromise within the institutional power structure. “I am neither a black politician nor a woman politician,” Jordan said in 1975. “Just a politician, a professional politician.”⁷

In both her Texas legislative career and in the U.S. House, Jordan made the conscious decision to pursue power within the established system. One of her first moves in Congress was to establish relations with Members of the Texas delegation which, itself, had strong institutional connections. Her attention to influence inside the House was demonstrated by where she sat in the House Chamber’s large, theatre-like arrangement. CBC members traditionally sat to the far left of the chamber. But Jordan chose the center aisle because she could hear better, be seen directly by the presiding officer, and save an open seat for colleagues who wished to stop and chat. Her seating preferences, as well as her loyalty to the Texas delegation, agitated fellow CBC members, but both fit perfectly into Jordan’s model of seeking congressional influence.⁸

Jordan also believed that an important committee assignment, one in which she would be unique because of her gender and race, would magnify her influence. She, thus bypassed suggestions that she accept a seat on the Education and Labor Committee and pursued an assignment to the Judiciary Committee. Jordan, who had been a guest of fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson at the White House during her time as a state legislator, used that connection to secure this plum committee assignment. Securing President Johnson’s intercession with Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, chairman of the Committee on Committees, she landed a seat on the Judiciary Committee, where she served for her three terms in the House. In the 94th and 95th Congresses (1975– 1979), she also was assigned to the Committee on Government Operations.

It was as a freshman Member of the Judiciary Committee, however, that Jordan earned national notoriety. In the summer of 1974, as the committee considered articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon for crimes associated with the Watergate Scandal, Jordan delivered opening remarks that shook the committee room and moved the large television audience tuned into the proceedings. “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total,” Jordan said. “I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.” She then laid out her reasoning behind her support of each of the five articles of impeachment against President Nixon. If her fellow committee members did not find the evidence compelling enough, she concluded, “then perhaps the eighteenth-century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth-century paper shredder.”⁹ Reaction to Jordan’s statement was overwhelming. Jordan recalled that people swarmed around her car after the hearings to congratulate her. Impressed by her articulate reasoning and knowledge of the law, many people sent letters of praise to the Texas Congresswoman, with one person even resorting to a series of billboards in Houston declaring, “Thank you, Barbara Jordan, for explaining the Constitution to us.”¹⁰ The Watergate impeachment hearings helped transform Jordan into a recognizable and respected national politician.

From her first days in Congress, Jordan encouraged colleagues to extend the federal protection of civil rights to more Americans. She introduced civil rights amendments to legislation authorizing law enforcement assistance grants and joined seven other Members on the Judiciary Committee in opposing Gerald R. Ford’s nomination as Vice President, citing what they considered to be a mediocre civil rights record. In 1975, when Congress voted to extend the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Jordan sponsored legislation which broadened the provisions of the act to include Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. Although she voted for busing to enforce racial desegregation in public schools she was one of the few African-American Members of Congress to question the utility of the policy.¹¹

Jordan’s talent as a speaker contributed more and more to her national profile. In 1976, she became the first woman, as well as the first African American, to keynote a Democratic Party National Convention. Appearing after a subdued speech by Ohio Senator John Glenn, Jordan energized the convention with her oratory. “We are a people in search of a national community,” she told the delegates, “attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal.…We cannot improve on the system of government, handed down to us by the founders of the Republic, but we can find new ways to implement that system and to realize our destiny.”¹² Amidst the historical perspective of the national bicentennial year, and in the wake of the shattering experiences of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Jordan’s message, like her commanding voice, resonated with Americans. She campaigned widely for Democratic presidential candidate James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, who defeated President Ford in the general election. Though Carter later interviewed Jordan for a Cabinet position, he was not prepared to give her the one post she said she would accept: U.S. Attorney General.

By 1978, downplaying reports about her poor health, Jordan nevertheless declined to run for what would have been sure re-election to a fourth term. She cited her “internal compass,” which she said was pointing her in a direction “away from demands that are all consuming.”¹³ She also said she wanted to work more directly on behalf of fellow Texans. Jordan was appointed the Lyndon Johnson Chair in National Policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin, where she taught into the early 1990s. She continued to speak widely as a lecturer on national affairs. In 1988 and 1992, she delivered speeches at the Democratic National Convention. Her 1992 keynote address took place in the midst of a lengthy battle with multiple sclerosis; she delivered her speech from a wheelchair. And, in 1994, President William J. Clinton appointed her to lead the Commission on Immigration Reform, a bipartisan group that delivered its findings in September of that year. Jordan received nearly two dozen honorary degrees and, in 1990, was named to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York. She never married and carefully guarded her private life. Jordan died in Austin, Texas, on January 17, 1996, from pneumonia as a complication of leukemia.