Jordan, Barbara Charline

By: Merline Pitre

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Jordan, Barbara Charline

Sex:  Female

Born:  Houston, Texas, United States, First Ward
21 February 1936

Died:  Austin, Texas, United States
17 January 1996

Activity/Profession:  U.S. Representative, Lawyer, Educator

(b. 21 February 1936; d. 17 January 1996),
attorney, politician.

Barbara Charline Jordan was the first black woman to sit in the Texas Senate (1967–1973) and the first from the South to be elected to the United States House of Representatives (1973–1979). She was born in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas, to a Baptist minister, Benjamin Jordan, and a domestic worker, Arlyne (Patten) Jordan. Her early childhood was spent with her parents, her two older sisters, Bennie and Rose Mary, and her grandfathers, Charles Jordan and John Ed Patten.

Barbara Jordan speaking at the National Women's Conference in November 1977. Seated to her left are Bella Abzug (in a characteristic hat) and Rosalynn Carter (who was then the First Lady).

© Bettye Lane

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Jordan's outlook on life and politics, as well as her strength and determination, can be attributed to the influence of her maternal grandfather, John Ed Patten, the son of Edward A. Patten, one of the forty-two African Americans who sat in the Texas legislature during Reconstruction. As a child, Jordan spent most of her free time with Patten. While working with him in his junk business, she learned how to be self-sufficient, strong-willed and independent. He also instilled in her the value of an education.

Jordan received her early education from Atherton Elementary and Phyllis Wheatley high schools. As a student at Wheatley, Jordan participated in the Honors Society, the debate team, and other extracurricular activities. It was during her high school years that Jordan was inspired to become a lawyer. She was drawn to the legal profession by a career-day presentation given by a prominent African American attorney Edith Sampson.

In 1952, upon graduation from high school in the top 5 percent of her class, Jordan entered Texas Southern University, where she majored in political science and history and became involved in extracurricular activities such as Delta Sigma Theta sorority and the debate team. An orator in high school, Jordan sharpened her skills even more under the guidance and tutelage of the university's debate coach, Thomas F. Freeman. Freeman taught her how to formulate her words with her tone, which helped her become a great speaker. It was this involvement with the debate team that began for her a series of firsts that became the hallmark of her professional life. Jordan was a member of the first debate team from an historically black university to compete in the forensics tournament held annually at Baylor University in Texas, winning first place in oratory—one of the many first-place trophies in her career in forensics. Freeman not only influenced Jordan's speech pattern, but he also urged her to attend Boston University Law School in 1956. Three years later, Jordan became one of two African American women toreceive a law degree from that institution. By 1960 Jordan managed to pass the Massachusetts and Texas bar examinations.

After leaving Boston University, Jordan taught political science for one year at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In 1960 she returned to her native Houston to set up private law practice. Unsuccessful in her law practice, Jordan turned to politics. As she put it: “I had a law degree, but no practice, so I went down to Harris County Democratic Headquarters and asked them what I could do. They put me to work [on the John F. Kennedy Campaign] licking stamps and addressing envelopes.” While this task seemed mundane, Barbara Jordan's real talents, the power of her voice and the strength of her words, were not underestimated for long. One night while working on the Kennedy campaign, Jordan and some members of the Democratic party “went to a church to enlist voters and the woman who was supposed to speak didn't show up.” Jordan volunteered to speak in the woman's place, and the campaign immediately reassigned her from “stamps and envelopes” to speaker bureau. Shortly thereafter, she became intimately involved in politics. For four years, Jordan was very active in local and state Democratic politics and made two unsuccessful runs for the state legislature in 1962 and 1964. Her interest in politics was given a boost in 1965 when she received her first appointive position as administrative assistant to the Harris County Judge, Bill Elliott, and served as project coordinator of a nonprofit corporation to help the unemployed.

In 1966 redistricting and increased voter registration secured Jordan a seat in the Texas Senate, where she became the first African American since 1893 to serve in this august body. As Texas came in compliance with the Supreme Court's decisions in Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sam, which asserted that the state legislature must redistrict to conform to one man, one vote, Texans saw the beginning of the switch of political power from the rural areas to their larger urban counterparts. The result of this would be the creation of a new Eleventh State Senatorial District in Harris County, made up of wards that Jordan had carried when she ran for the Texas House of Representatives in 1964. She was encouraged to run in that district, and in 1966, Jordan won 65 percent of the Democratic primary vote. She ran unopposed in the general election.

Jordan's six-year record in the Texas Senate showed a sensitivity to issues affecting the working class, the disabled, racial minorities, and women. She championed the cause of each group, although she had to accept compromise to achieve her goal. While in the senate, she was appointed chair of the Labor and Management Committee, vice chair of the Judicial and Legislative Committee, and a member of other committees. Her most noted bill was the Worker's Compensation Act. This bill gave the state its first minimum wage law and increased workers' compensation coverage for on-the-job injuries. When the Texas legislature convened in special session in March 1972, Senator Jordan was unanimously elected president pro tempore. In June of that year, she was honored by being named Governor for a Day.

While completing her term in office at the state level, Jordan achieved another first when she was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1972. As a result of the 1970 census and redistricting, the 18th Congressional District was established and virtually assured African Americans a seat in Congress. When apportionment occurred in Texas, Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes named Senator Barbara Jordan vice chair of the redistricting committee, which meant that Jordan took part in drawing the boundaries that guaranteed her own election. When the election was held, she defeated State Representative Curtis Graves in the Democratic primary and, subsequently, Republican Paul Merritt.

As a member of the United States House of Representatives, Jordan's reputation was that of a skilled politician and a forceful, dynamic individual. She left an impressive record in the Ninety-Third Congress when she attached civil rights amendments to legislation authorizing cities to receive direct Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grants, rather than apply to state governments for the money. Jordan also questioned the civil rights record of House Republican leader Gerald Ford when he wasnominated for vice president and joined seven other Judiciary Committee members in voting against his confirmation. In 1975 she secured passage of the Consumer Goods Pricing Act, a bill which repealed antitrust exemptions that kept consumer prices artificially high. Jordan also favored a $25 billion extension of the general federal revenue sharing program and worked to toughen its antidiscrimination provisions.

Probably the most important bill that Jordan sponsored as a congresswoman was one to extend the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Texas and other western states in order to cover individuals with language barriers. In June 1975, the House voted to extend the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for ten years. Jordan sponsored legislation extending the Act to include Spanish-speaking, American Indian, Alaskan Native, and Asian American language minorities, while opposing amendments that would have permitted states and localities covered or partially covered by the act to apply for exemption. This bill was opposed by most Texas officials, as well as President Gerald Ford, but Jordan did not capitulate. Equally important was Jordan's role in convincing the House Judiciary Committee to extend the time allowed by Congress to win state ratification for the Equal Rights Amendment, a statute that would have placed equality of the sexes in the constitution.

Having already caught the attention of Lyndon B. Johnson while she was in the Texas Senate, Jordan sought the former president's advice on the type of committee that she should join when she got to Congress. Subsequently, she became a member of the Judiciary Committee and the Ways and Means Committee. Jordan's membership on the Judiciary Committee gained her notoriety during the 1974 Watergate scandal, when her oratorical brilliance was demonstrated in a speech she made on committee in favor of impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon. In fact, she received national acclaim for her eloquent reaffirmation of faith in the Constitution while voting for all five articles of impeachment. In the deep, resonant voice that was her trademark, Jordan declared: “My faith in the Constitution is whole. It is complete, it is total!” Her televised speech was the center of media attention and critique for days to come.

Barbara Jordan's popularity and eloquence as an oratorical speaker reached its zenith in 1976 when she was asked to serve as the keynote speaker for the Democratic National Convention—the first black woman in the convention's 144-year history to receive such honor. When Jimmy Carter won the presidency, there was a rumor among her supporters that she would become Carter's vice president. Instead, Carter offered her the post of secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, but she declined; she would have preferred the post of attorney general.

Barbara Jordan retired from public office in 1978 and gave her senatorial and congressional papers and her memorabilia to her alma mater, Texas Southern University. She then went on to become a visiting professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. There, she taught courses on intergovernmental relations, political values, and ethics. While teaching, she published her autobiography, Barbara Jordan: A Self Portrait (1979) and served as ethics adviser to Texas governor Ann Richards in the early 1990s.

Along with and because of her political accomplishments, Jordan received fifteen honorary doctorate degrees and numerous honors from twenty-five colleges and universities, including Texas Southern University, Tuskegee Institute, Princeton University, and Harvard University. Other honors included the selecting of Jordan as Democratic Woman of the Year in 1975 by the Women's National Democratic Club; Woman of the Year in Politics (1975) by Ladies Home Journal; and one of Ten Women of the Year by Time magazine (1976). After becoming a member of Texas Women's Hall of Fame, Jordan was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1990. In 1992 she was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP. In 1994 she served as chairwoman of the United States Commission on Immigration Reform and also received a Presidential Medal of Freedom award. Jordan suffered from a number of ailments in her later years, including a form of multiple sclerosis, and was confined to a wheelchair. In 1996 Barbara Jordan succumbed to pneumonia and leukemia in Austin, Texas, in the home she shared with her longtime companion, Nancy Earl. Her funeral was graced by attendance and tributes from dignitaries across the country, including President Bill Clinton. In death, she received yet another honor, as she became the first African American to be buried in the State Cemetery in Austin.

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