Jordan, Vernon E. Jr. 1935–

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Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. 1935–

Civil rights leader, lawyer

For more than two decades, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., was one of the most visible and influential spokespersons for the plight of black Americans. Jordan served a ten-year tenure as the executive director of the National Urban League, an organization dedicated to improving social conditions for blacks living in cities. His selection for that prestigious position while still in his mid-thirties was no fluke: Jordan had earned a reputation for dignified oratory, a level head, and a strong agenda as a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Regional Council. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) once described Jordan to a Time correspondent as possessing “one of the ablest and most articulate voices in the civil and human rights movement.”

Vernon Eulion Jordan, Jr.—the second of Vernon and Mary Belle Jordan’s three sons—was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1935 and lived in one of the first public housing projects built specifically for blacks. That project, wrote People reporter Jed Home, “was as segregated as schools, streetcars and luncheon counters.” Indeed, Jordan and his brothers grew up with middle-class comforts—his father was a postal worker and his mother ran a catering business—but they still felt the ramifications of the “separate but equal” statutes in the Deep South. “You knew there was colored water and there was white water, and you knew you sat upstairs in the theater,” Jordan acknowledged in People. “It was a way of life, and you understood that. It never meant you accepted it.”

Young Vernon Jordan earned excellent grades in his all-black public schools, in addition to playing basketball. After graduating from high school, he attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Though the only black in his class and one of five in the school, Jordan engaged in many campus activities, playing basketball, appearing in plays—one of which he wrote himself about racism in the South—and serving as vice-president of the school’s Democratic club. He majored in political science, minored in history and speech, and earned several first prizes for oratory, including one at the Indiana Interstate Oratorical Contest.

Jordan graduated from DePauw University in 1957 and moved to Washington, D.C., where he studied law at Howard University. While there he married Shirley M. Yarbrough. Asked by an Ebony correspondent how he

At a Glance…

Born Vernon Eulion Jordan, Jr., August 15, 1935, in Atlanta, GA; son of Vernon (a postal supervisor) and Mary Belle (a caterer; maiden name, Griggs) Jordan; married Shirley M. Yarbrough, 1959 (deceased); children: Vickee. Education: DePauw University, B.A., 1957; received law degree from Howard University, 1960.

Law clerk for attorney Donald Hollowell, 1960-64; Georgia field secretary for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1962-64; private practice lawyer and director of Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council, 1964-70; United Negro College Fund (UNCF), New York City, executive director, 1970-71; National Urban League, New York City, executive director, 1971-81; Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld (law firm), Dallas, TX, and Washington, DC, partner, 1981—. Member of ten corporate boards.

Selected awards: Fellowships to Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Metropolitan Applied Research Center; received Old Gold Goblet from DePauw University, 1969; received honorary degrees from Brandeis University, Bloomfield College, Morris Brown College, and Wilberforce University.

Addresses: Office —Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, 1333 New Hampshire Ave., NW, Ste. 400, Washington, DC 20036.

paid for his higher education, Jordan replied: “I worked to help pay my way to college. I was a bus driver with the CTA [Chicago Transit Authority] for two summers, 1957 and 1958, making $2.45 an hour and sometimes working 16 hours a day.” Upon graduating from Howard in 1960, Jordan received offers of employment from several corporate law firms in the nation’s capital, but he decided instead to move back to Atlanta in order to join the civil rights movement.

While his wife began a career in social work, Jordan served as a clerk in the office of legendary civil rights attorney Donald Hollowell. “It excited me to be back in the South, at the cutting edge of that kind of activity,” Jordan recalled in People. Within a year he was in the thick of things. A black student, Charlayne Hunter, successfully sued the University of Georgia to gain admittance. On the first day of class, an angry crowd gathered to deny her entrance to the campus. The six-foot-four-inch Jordan used his body as a shield to escort Hunter to her first class. It was the first time his picture made the newspapers.

In 1962 Jordan was named Georgia field secretary for the NAACP. In that high-profile job he made speeches, organized new NAACP branches, coordinated demonstrations, and called for economic boycotts of industries that would not employ blacks. So successful were the boycotts that a number of stores in Atlanta began to hire blacks that same year.

Jordan realized that the key to black power in the South lay in the vote. In 1964 he moved to Arkansas and opened a private law firm. At the same time he became director of the Voter Education Project run by the Southern Regional Council. This new position took him all over the South, where he coordinated voter registration drives and counselled the black electorate. A Time correspondent noted: “By 1968 the South had nearly 2 million new black voters, the number of black elected officials in the region had jumped almost eightfold, to 564, and Vernon Jordan was a nationally known civil rights leader.” Simultaneously, Jordan became known among the black civil rights leadership as a level-headed mediator who was able to arbitrate when disagreements arose within the ranks.

Joined the Upper Echelon

The charismatic young leader had just announced plans to run for Congress in Atlanta in 1970 when he was asked to become executive director of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF)—an organization that, through fund-raising, helped to finance a consortium of black colleges nationwide. In Jordan, the UNCF found a capable administrator. In his twelve months on the job, the organization raised $8 million, which it dispersed to 36 member colleges. Jordan was firmly committed to the idea of a black intellectual elite—a portion of the population that he believed would set an example and even push to change the plight of those who had less education. “You’ve got to have an intellectual working Black elite and you can’t get that standing on the corner,” he asserted in Ebony. “But you go even beyond that and realize that the way people survive in this society is through work—a decent job with a decent wage if that is available.”

In 1971 Whitney Young, Jr., the executive director of the National Urban League, drowned while visiting Nigeria. Jordan was the unanimous choice of the Urban League board to succeed Young in a position that was arguably the most important one in the nation for the cause of black empowerment. By the early 1970s the civil rights battle had moved from the South to the ghettos of the country’s cities. The Urban League sought help from the government and from corporate sponsorship to fund job training programs, early childhood education, and other causes dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty. Jordan was the first lawyer to head the organization traditionally run by social workers, and he brought his considerable fundraising skills with him when he took office.

Jordan saw the Urban League as a bridge between white executives and the urban poor. He sought sponsorship from corporations and wound up sitting on several corporate boards. Under his leadership, the league opened 17 new affiliates, for a total of 117. During his decade as the Urban League’s leader, Jordan oversaw an annual budget of over $100 million, much of it supplied by the federal government. With his salary from the league and his stipends from corporate boards, he earned six figures a year.

A taste for fine cigars and Brooks Brothers suits, however, earned Jordan the disdain of some members of the civil rights struggle. Playwright Amiri Baraka expressed his scorn in People by calling the Urban League “a vehicle for allowing the interests and thinking of white racist monopoly capital to penetrate the black movement.” Not surprisingly, Jordan held different views of his work as a public servant. “If I do a good job here,” he argued in Ebony, “the Black people are not the only beneficiary; so is the country. The country has a vested interest in Black people doing well. It is really true that the chain is as strong as its weakest link…. Those of us in leadership of the Black community have an enormous burden of clarifying and defining the issues.”

The Target of an Assassin

As a member of the black leadership, Jordan traveled across the country to promote social concern about urban poverty. One such trip in 1980 found him in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for a speech before the local chapter of the Urban League. After a long evening of dining with and speaking to the Fort Wayne chapter, Jordan spent an hour drinking coffee in the home of league member Martha Coleman. When Coleman returned Jordan to his hotel, he was shot from a distance by a sniper armed with a powerful .30-06 hunting rifle—the kind used to kill bear and deer. One gunshot ripped a fist-sized hole in Jordan’s back, narrowly missing his spinal column. He was rushed to a Fort Wayne hospital, where he spent almost five hours in surgery.

Jordan survived the shooting but spent three months in the hospital and underwent five surgical procedures. Visitors to his hospital room included then-President Jimmy Carter and various black political leaders, including Jesse Jackson. Jordan put the harrowing brush with death in perspective in Ebony : “It is significant to note that, since over the years many Blacks died on a highway because no hospital would take them because they were Black, here in 1980 I would get shot in a little town like Fort Wayne and be rushed to a hospital where the internist in the operating room was Black, the anesthesiologist was Black and the surgeon was Black. Now what that suggests is that there has been some progress.” Jordan vowed to continue as director of the Urban League as soon as he recovered. Despite a thorough investigation by the FBI, no one was ever brought to trial in the assassination attempt.

A New Direction

When Jordan announced in 1981 that he was retiring from the Urban League’s leadership, he was adamant that the shooting had nothing to do with his decision. He said he simply felt that a ten-year term in the office was the limit for any one person. Jordan left the Urban League on the eve of severe budget cuts to social service programs by the administration of President Ronald Reagan. As the 1980s progressed, the league lost almost 80 percent of its federal funding. New Republic contributor Herbert Denton outlined the battle Jordan had fought during the last years of his directorship: “The years have been grueling and frustrating for him and for the other bright-eyed, ambitious young men in… the old photographs [from the civil rights movement of the 1960s]. This later generation of civil rights leaders invoked the familiar rhetoric and tried to keep the old goals alive. But the economy declined, the climate sharply turned conservative, and many whites, including large numbers of former liberals and allies, began to suggest elliptically that race was no longer an obstacle and that perhaps the rest was up to blacks themselves.” Denton concluded: “Just below the surface, the attitude has become: pull your socks up. Quit whining. Don’t have so many babies.”

For his part, Jordan declared that he was leaving the Urban League, not the principles behind it. “I’m not leaving the movement,” he said in Time. “I’m leaving the leadership. I won’t run away from civil rights cases as a lawyer, but I won’t be at the cutting edge.” Jordan joined the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. He has worked for the Dallas, Texas-based firm for more than a decade as a full partner. In 1991 Robert Strauss, the firm’s highest-profile attorney, was named ambassador to Russia. A Wall Street Journal reporter claimed that Strauss’s departure will mean “a larger role for… Jordan, who, like Mr. Strauss, is a congenial and sought-after speaker at political and corporate gatherings.”

Whatever direction Jordan’s career takes, his contributions to the cause of civil rights are beyond doubt. As Denton put it in the New Republic, the tall, suave, well-educated Jordan “became the movement’s ambassador to the establishment, a man of the boardrooms and the rarefied world of power and money.”