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Barbara Jordan

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Barbara Charline Jordan
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Texas's 18th district
In office
1973–1979
Preceded byBob Price
Succeeded byMickey Leland
Personal details
Political partyDemocratic
ProfessionAttorney

Barbara Charline Jordan (February 21, 1936 – January 17, 1996) was an American politician from Texas. She served as a congresswoman in the United States House of Representatives from 1973 to 1979.

Early life and career

Jordan was born in Houston's Fifth Ward to Rev. Benjamin M. Jordan and Arlyne (Patten) Jordan.

Barbara attended Wheatley High School, where one of the nation's few African-American female attorneys, Edith S. Sampson, spoke and inspired Jordan to become a lawyer.[1] This was a difficult ambition at the time, because only one law school in Texas admitted African-Americans.[1] With the support of her father, Jordan graduated magna cum laude from Texas Southern University in 1956 and from Boston University Law School in 1959.[1] She passed the bar exams in Massachusetts and Texas before returning to Houston to open a law practice, only the third African-American woman to be licensed in Texas.[1]

Political career

Active in the Kennedy-Johnson presidential campaign of 1960, Jordan was recruited to give speeches and after her success with that endeavor, she was recruited by the local Democratic party to continue on the speaking circuit.[1]

Jordan unsuccessfully ran for the Texas House of Representatives in 1962 and 1964.[1] Her persistence won her a seat in the Texas Senate in 1966, becoming the first African American state senator since 1883 and the first black woman to serve in that body.[1] Re-elected to a full term in the Texas Senate in 1968, she served until 1972. She was the first African-American female to serve as president pro tem of the state senate and served for one day as acting governor of Texas in 1972.

In 1972, she was elected to the United States House of Representatives, becoming the first black woman from a Southern state to serve in the House. She received extensive support from former President Lyndon Johnson, who helped her secure a position on the House Judiciary Committee.

In 1974, she made an influential televised speech before the House Judiciary Committee supporting the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. Jordan was mentioned as a possible running mate to Jimmy Carter in 1976.[1] Her speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention is considered by many historians to have been the best convention keynote speech in modern history.[citation needed] She was the first African-American woman to deliver the keynote address.[1]

Jordan retired from politics in 1979 and became an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. She again was a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 1992. In 1995, Jordan chaired a Congressional commission that advocated increased restriction of immigration and increased penalties on employers that violated U.S. immigration regulations.

Her seat in Congress is currently held by African-American Democrat Sheila Jackson-Lee.

Many of her speeches have been collected in a new volume from the University of Texas Press, Barbara Jordan: Speaking the Truth with Eloquent Thunder (http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/shebar.html). Edited by Barbara Jordan's friend and colleague, Senator Max Sherman, the book also includes a DVD of many of her most famous speeches.

Legislation

She sponsored the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, legislation that required banks to lend and make services available to underserved poor and minority communities. She supported the renewal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and expansion of that act to cover language minorities. This extended protection to Hispanics in Texas and was opposed by Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe and Secretary of State Mark White.

Personal life

In 1973, Jordan began to suffer from multiple sclerosis. She had difficulty climbing stairs, and she started using a cane and eventually a wheelchair. She kept the state of her health out of the press so well that in the KUT radio documentary Rediscovering Barbara Jordan, former president Bill Clinton stated that he wanted to nominate Jordan for the United States Supreme Court, but by the time he could do so, Jordan's health problems prevented him from nominating her.[2]

Jordan was a lesbian with a longtime companion of more than 20 years, Nancy Earl; Jordan never publicly acknowledged her sexual orientation, but in her obituary, the Houston Chronicle mentioned her longtime relationship with Earl.[3][4] After Jordan's initial unsuccessful statewide races, advisers warned her to become more discreet and not bring any female companions on the campaign trail.[1][5]

In the late 1960s, Jordan met Earl, an educational psychologist who would become an occasional speechwriter in addition to Jordan's partner, on a camping trip.[1]

Awards and honors

Jordan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994. It was only one of many honors given to her, including election into both the Texas and National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1995, she was awarded the prestigious United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award, becoming only the second female awardee. Upon her death on January 17, 1996, Jordan lay in state at the LBJ Library on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin. She was buried in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, and was the first black woman interred there. Her papers are housed at the Barbara Jordan Archives at Texas Southern University.

The main terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport is named after her.

The Kaiser Family Foundation currently operates the Barbara Jordan Health Policy Scholars, a fellowship designed for people of color who are college juniors, seniors and recent graduates as a summer experience working in a congressional office.

Quotations

  • "We, the people". It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed, on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that "We, the people". I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in "We, the people."
  • "My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution."
  • "The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform decries hostility and discrimination against immigrants as antithetical to the traditions and interests of the country. At the same time, we disagree with those who would label efforts to control immigration as being inherently anti-immigrant. Rather, it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest."
  • "If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that 18th-century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th-century paper shredder."
  • "Don't call for black power or green power. Call for brain power."
  • "It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision."
  • "There is no way that I can equate discrimination on the basis of sexual preference with discrimination on the basis of skin color."
  • "Many seek only to satisfy their private work — wants; to satisfy their private interests. But this is the great danger America faces — that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual; each seeking to satisfy private wants. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good?"
  • "We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the Republic. There is no way to improve upon that. But what we can do is to find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny."
  • "I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it."
  • "You must attend to liberty."

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Stateswoman Barbara Jordan — A Closeted Lesbian". Planet Out. Retrieved 2007-07-12.
  2. ^ Rediscovering Barbara Jordan, KUT, February 8, 2006. Transcript online on the KUT web site, accessed 4 November 2006.
  3. ^ Rosa Maria Pegueros, Barbara Jordan, E. Bradford Burns and Me: Coming Out in Public Life, for "Setting Out II: URI's Annual Symposium on Lesbian, Gay and Transgender Issues," April 10-12, 1996. Accessed July 12, 2007 at Women's Studies Online Resources, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
  4. ^ Clay Smith, Two Bios of Barbara, Austin Chronicle, Volume 18, Number 24, February 12, 1999.
  5. ^ "Barbara Jordan: The other life" Moss, J Jennings. The Advocate. Los Angeles: Mar 5, 1996. , Iss. 702; pg. 38
Template:TXSenateSuccession boxTemplate:USRepSuccession box
Preceded by Time Magazine's Person of the Year (Representing American Women alongside Betty Ford, Carla Hills, Ella Grasso, Susie Sharp, Jill Conway, Billie Jean King, Susan Brownmiller, Addie Wyatt, Kathleen Byerly, Carol Sutton and Alison Cheek)
1975 		Succeeded by
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