Barbara Jordan: Education, Career, and Legacy

Barbara Charline Jordan (1936-1996) was an American politician, lawyer, and educator whose career broke barriers and whose words inspired a nation. From her early education in segregated schools to her rise as a national figure, Jordan's life was marked by dedication to public service and a commitment to upholding the Constitution. She is remembered as one of America's greatest orators and a staunch advocate for social equity.

Early Life and Education: Laying the Foundation

Barbara Charline Jordan was born on February 21, 1936, in Houston, Texas, to Arlyne Patten Jordan and the Reverend Benjamin M. Jordan. She was the youngest of three daughters in a close-knit family. Her father was a Baptist preacher, and her mother was a teacher in the church. Both parents were active in the Baptist church, with Benjamin serving as a minister and Arlyne known for impassioned gospel rhetoric. Benjamin also worked nights in a warehouse to support Jordan’s college education. Through her mother, Jordan was the great-granddaughter of Edward Patton, who was one of the last African American members of the Texas House of Representatives prior to disenfranchisement of Black Texans under Jim Crow.

Jordan's grandfather John, a self-reliant man who loved learning and was once framed for murder by Houston law-enforcement authorities, also shaped Jordan’s character. John’s life provided an example of a racially biased legal system that Jordan resolved to change.

Jordan attended Roberson Elementary School and graduated from Phillis Wheatley High School in 1952 with honors. She received debating awards at Houston’s Phillis Wheatley High School. As a high school student, she became a skilled public speaker, winning a national debate contest in 1952. At Wheatley, Jordan's oratorical abilities were developed through the support of her teachers and curriculum. Major influences included her English teacher Mrs. D. B. Reid, elocutionist Ashton J. Oliver, and speech and drama teacher Robert T. Holland. Jordan credited a speech she heard in her high school years by Edith S. Sampson for her interest in law.

Educated in Houston's public schools before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Jordan grew up amid segregation. Houston civil rights activists in the NAACP won important victories that also shaped her early life, including a successful local campaign to equalize salaries for Black and white teachers in 1943. Smith v. Allwright, a 1944 Supreme Court case that overturned the white primary, began in Houston. In 1946, Houstonian Heman Sweatt challenged segregation in higher education by applying to law school at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). The state of Texas denied his admission on account of race and instead created a separate law school for Black students at Houston's Texas Southern University. In 1950, the Supreme Court ruling in Sweatt v. Painter ordered UT to admit Sweatt to its law school.

She attended Texas Southern University in Houston, becoming a member of the debate team that tied Harvard University in a debate-one of her proudest college moments. She graduated magna cum laude from Texas Southern University in 1956. College experiences as a teenager made Jordan more acutely aware of Jim Crow's injustices. Following graduation, she attended Boston University Law School, where she was one of only two women-both African Americans from Houston-to graduate. She graduated from Boston University Law School in 1959.

Early Career and Political Beginnings

Next, she obtained licenses to practice law in Massachusetts, Texas, and the District of Columbia and taught briefly at Alabama’s Tuskegee University. Jordan taught political science at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for a year. She then returned to Houston to open her own law practice. Jordan returned to Houston to work as a private attorney in the early 1960’s, using a room in her parents’ house as her first legal office. During that time, the 24-year-old Jordan was one of only two black women attorneys in Texas. To start off her career, Jordan became the first Black woman to work as an administrative assistant to a county judge, Bill Elliott.

Working as a volunteer for the Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and his running mate, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson inspired Jordan to enter politics. The African American Civil Rights movement and John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential run motivated Jordan to become politically active. She saw Democratic Party membership as a path to ending racial discrimination and fostering equal opportunity. In 1960, Jordan, in addition to beginning her legal career, worked on John F. Kennedy’s Democratic presidential campaign. She eventually helped manage a highly organized get-out-the-vote program that served Houston’s 40 African-American precincts.

Texas State Senate: Breaking Barriers

After volunteer work for the Kennedy campaign, Jordan focused on the Texas state senate. She was unsuccessful in bids for the Texas House of Representatives in 1962 and 1964. Jordan campaigned unsuccessfully in 1962 and 1964 for the Texas House of Representatives. However, in 1966, reformed voting laws and Jordan’s appeal to a coalition of African American, Latino, and working-class white voters carried her to victory. Along with Curtis Graves and Joe Lockridge, she was one of three African American members elected in 1966 to the Texas Legislature, the first ones since 1896. She won a seat in the Texas Senate in 1966, becoming the first black state senator in Texas since 1883. No woman had ever won a Texas senate seat; no black candidate had won in more than eighty years. With Jordan elected to the Texas Senate, she became the first black woman to serve in that body. She served the Eleventh Senate District in Houston, which had just been created after Kilgarlin v. Martin.

Jordan received a cool welcome from the other 30 White and male senators. The Texas Senate in 1966 consisted of thirty white men and Jordan. With Jordan experiencing racism and sexism from her colleagues, Houston community members were unsure of how much of a difference Jordan could make serving in the Senate. Aware of the challenges she would face, Jordan's goal was to be respected by the white conservatives in the Senate. Undeterred, Jordan quickly established herself 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.

During six years in the Texas state senate (1966-1972), Jordan was a flexible, bipartisan legislator who sponsored laws that helped blue-collar and middle-class constituents. As a senator, she sponsored Workman’s Compensation Act, which increased the maximum benefits paid to injured workers. On March 28, 1972, Jordan was elected president pro tempore of the Texas senate, making her the first Black woman in America to preside over a legislative body. Reelected in 1968, she served until 1972. Near the end of her senate term, Jordan held the post of president pro tempore and received ceremonial recognition as “Governor for a Day.” One of Jordan’s responsibilities as president pro tempore was to serve as acting governor when the governor and lieutenant governor were out of the state. Jordan was the first African-American woman to serve as governor of a state.

Additionally, Jordan was nominated to serve on federal commissions by President Lyndon Johnson after she was elected to the Senate; the commissions worked on housing and income maintenance. During her time in the Texas Legislature, Jordan sponsored or cosponsored some 70 bills. Jordan was an advocate for her constituents and the working class while in the Texas Senate.

U.S. House of Representatives: A National Stage

While thriving in the tough Texas political culture, Jordan also attracted the attention of the national Democratic Party and prepared for a role in Washington, D.C. Lyndon B. House of Representatives. In 1972, she was elected to the United States House of Representatives and became the first black woman from a southern state to serve in that body. House of Representatives, the first woman elected in her own right to represent Texas in the House. She garnered a stunning 80 percent of the vote to become the first southern African American woman in Congress. 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 in the twentieth century elected to Congress from the Deep South. In the next two campaign cycles, Jordan overwhelmed her opposition, capturing 85 percent of the total vote in both general elections.

While representing the Eighteenth Texas District, which included her hometown of Houston, Jordan surpassed her previous achievements. House, Jordan pursued influence and change within existing systems. “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.” Immediately upon arriving in Congress, Jordan worked to establish relationships with the rest of the Texas delegation, which wielded outsized influence in the House. In the House, Jordan sought out powerful committee assignments, where, as a Black woman, she could blaze new trails and magnify her influence. She disregarded suggestions that she accept a seat on the Education and Labor Committee and instead used her connection with former President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas-she had once been his guest at the White House during her time as a state legislator-to intercede on her behalf with Wilbur Daigh Mills of Arkansas, who, as chair of the Ways and Means Committee, also led the Democratic Committee on Committees. With Johnson’s help, Jordan landed a seat on the Judiciary Committee, where she served for her three terms in the House. Her committee assignments included the Judiciary and Government Operations Committees.

Many laws she backed led to economic and voting reforms that benefited historically disadvantaged groups. Women’s issues also were central to Jordan’s agenda. She championed the Equal Rights Amendment and supported abortion rights. However, Jordan refused to be cast as a standard-bearer for any group, cause, or ideology.

The Nixon Impeachment Hearings: A Defining Moment

Although she acquired a reputation as an effective legislator, Jordan did not become a national figure until 1974, when her participation in the hearings held by the House Judiciary Committee on the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon was televised nationwide. Jordan’s reputation as a national leader was heightened by her involvement in the House Judiciary Committee and the hearings that resulted in the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. She was perhaps best known for as one of America’s greatest orators.

Throughout her Judiciary Committee impeachment speech, Jordan framed the committee's hearing as consistent with the Constitution of the United States, and she began by calling attention to the significance of her own relationship to the preamble:

Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: "We, the people." It's 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. Today I am an inquisitor. An hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. 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.

She defended the checks and balances system, which was set in place to inhibit any politician from abusing their power. She stated facts that proved Nixon to be untrustworthy and heavily involved in illegal situations, and quoted the drafters of the Constitution to argue that actions like Nixon's during the scandal corresponded with their understanding of impeachable offenses. As a result of her landmark statements in defense of the Constitution, the American public recognized her legislative leadership.

1976 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address: A Historic Speech

Impressive as Jordan’s legislative skills were, she was best known for her oratory. On July 12, 1976, Jordan delivered a historic keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. This address was the first time a major political party's nominating convention had an African American as the keynote speaker. In 1976, Jordan became the first woman and the first Black keynote speaker at a Democratic National Convention. Appearing after a subdued speech by Ohio Senator John Herschel Glenn Jr., Jordan energized the convention with her soaring oratory. Jordan was chosen as a speaker because she was a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee and made an impact with her remarks during the impeachment process of Nixon.

“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.” Amid celebration of the national bicentennial, and in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Jordan’s message of hope and resilience, like her commanding voice, resonated with Americans.

Her speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention is considered by many historians to be the best keynote speech in modern history. She campaigned widely for Democratic presidential candidate James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, who defeated President Ford in the general election. Her performance fueled speculation that Carter would choose Jordan for his vice presidential running mate or as a cabinet appointee. Jordan was said to be interested in the position of attorney general. Though it was widely speculated that Carter was considering Jordan for Attorney General, he offered her the job as ambassador to the United Nations. However, Carter did not choose Jordan for a cabinet post after his narrow election win and many observers turned their attention to Jordan’s future and a possible presidential run.

Legislative Achievements and Advocacy

In 1975, a decade after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Jordan supported legislation to extend the act’s provisions for an additional 10 years, noting that state and local officials had continued to implement policies aimed at suppressing voters of color. “The barriers continue,” Jordan said. “And so must the Voting Rights Act-the most effective statute minorities have to guarantee that one day those barriers will come down.” She introduced legislation to extend the act’s voter protections to language minorities, particularly Hispanic Americans. Under her bill, states and local jurisdictions in which more than 5 percent of the population spoke a single language other than English would be subject to Voting Rights Act’s special provisions if officials only printed election materials in English. The bill also required areas covered by the Voting Rights Act to seek approval from federal authorities before implementing changes to their voting procedures. Her legislation was incorporated into the Voting Rights Act’s 1975 re-authorization.

Jordan supported 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. She also authored an act that ended federal authorization of price fixing by manufacturers.

Retirement from Politics and Later Life

The speculation ended abruptly in 1978. Jordan stunned the political world by retiring from Congress. Jordan decided not to seek a fourth term and retired from Congress in 1979. In 1979, she retired from her career as a public servant and returned to Texas as a full professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. Impatient with the sluggish routine of legislative work and ill with multiple sclerosis (which she contracted in 1973), Jordan took an academic post at the University of Texas. She then accepted a position at the University of Texas, Austin, where she taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs until her death.

Although she kept a lower public profile, Jordan continued recording impressive achievements and winning honors in her remaining years. Despite her absence from Washington, D.C., she remained influential in political affairs. She was popular among students, worked as an adviser to Texas governor Ann Richards in 1991, and chaired President Bill Clinton’s Commission on Immigration Reform in 1994. She served on the board of trustees of the Kaiser Family Foundation from 1985-1993. As a member of the board, she played a pivotal role in the decision to completely make over the Foundation under new leadership in 1990, and in the early decisions that shaped the Foundation’s role today as a leader in health policy and communications.

Although poor health affected her legendary speaking ability, she returned to the public eye to oppose the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987, deliver her second Democratic National Convention keynote address in 1992, and denounce anti-immigrant legislation in 1995. Jordan received the 1994 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, from Clinton. In 1994, President Bill Clinton presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a civilian. She then accepted a position at the University of Texas, Austin, where she taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs until her death.

Jordan served on President Bill Clinton’s Commission on Immigration Reform. The commission recommended that total immigration be cut by one-third, to approximately 550,000 per year. Its proposals also favored immigration based on skills of potential immigrants and family reunification of U.S. citizens, and ending unskilled immigration except for refugees and nuclear families.

Personal Life and Death

Barbara Jordan was fiercely guarded about her private life but lived with her companion Nancy Earl for over twenty years. Jordan and Nancy Earl shared a home in Austin, Texas and maintained a close bond for 20 years. Despite speculation, neither Jordan or Earl addressed the nature of their relationship. Jordan's political career was often shadowed by homophobic attacks, with advisors cautioning against the visibility of her personal relationships. With their advice, Jordan's openness about her sexual orientation was limited to private settings. Jordan held a negative view on marriage and viewed it as a life of subservience.

In 1973, Jordan began to suffer from multiple sclerosis. Rep. Barbara Jordan was first diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in the early 1970’s. On July 31, 1988, Jordan nearly drowned in her backyard swimming pool while doing physical therapy.

On January 17, 1996, she died of complications from pneumonia. Jordan passed away on January 17, 1996, and is buried in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. Jordan died at the Austin Diagnostic Medical Center in Austin, Texas, on January 17, 1996, at the age of 59. Her cause of death was complications from pneumonia and leukemia. Jordan was interred in Texas State Cemetery. She was the first African American to receive this honor. Jordan laid in state at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin for a public goodbye. During her tenure in the Texas State Senate, Jordan had advocated for African Americans to be buried in the state cemetery. Jordan's grave rests near that of the "Father of Texas", Stephen F. Austin.

Legacy and Honors

During her career, she was the recipient of 31 honorary doctorates and numerous national awards. Rep. Barbara Jordan is best remembered for her defense of the Constitution during the impeachment hearings of President Richard Nixon in 1974.

The Barbara Jordan Conference Center in Washington, D.C., is our tribute to the indelible mark that she left on the Foundation’s people and mission. Her papers are housed at the Barbara Jordan Archives at her alma mater, Texas Southern University.

The main terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport is named after Jordan. A boulevard in central Austin is named after Jordan. Several schools bear her name, including elementary schools in Dallas, Texas, Odessa, Texas, Austin, Texas, Barbara Jordan Early College Prep School, Richmond, Texas, Barbara C. Jordan Intermediate School, a middle school in Cibolo, Texas, Barbara Jordan Career Center in Houston, and The Barbara Jordan Institute for Policy Research at her undergraduate alma mater Texas Southern University. On April 24, 2009, a statue of Barbara Jordan was unveiled at the University of Texas at Austin, where Jordan taught at the time of her death. The Barbara Jordan statue campaign was paid for by a student fee increase approved by the University of Texas Board of Regents. The effort was originally spearheaded by the 2002-2003 Tappee class of the Texas Orange Jackets, the "oldest women's organization at the University" (of Texas at Austin). Created by Bruce Wolfe, the statue stands on the campus's West Mall near the Student Union in 2009. The Barbara Jordan Public-Private Leadership Award is presented by Texas Southern University's School of Public Affairs and School of Law. An elementary school in University City School District is named after her, Barbara C. Jordan Elementary School.

In 2000, the Jordan/Rustin Coalition (JRC) was created, honoring Jordan and Bayard Rustin, a leader in the civil rights movement and close confidante of Martin Luther King Jr. The organization mobilized gay and lesbian African Americans to aid in the passage of marriage equality in the state of California. In 2011, the Barbara Jordan Forever Stamp was issued.

Barbara Jordan’s contemporaries included Shirley Chisholm, Harold Washington, John L. Lewis, Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson. Former Illinois senator Carol E. Moseley Braun and President Barack Obama are two major inheritors of Jordan’s legacy. In thirty years of public service, she earned a reputation for ethics, integrity, and excellence that few could match. The influence and impact of her relatively brief term in national office were profound.

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