Jordan, Barbara Charline

(b. 21 February 1936 in Houston, Texas; d. 17 January 1996 in Austin, Texas), first black southern woman in the United States Congress.

Jordan was the third of three daughters of Arlyne Patten Jordan and Benjamin Jordan. Her mother cleaned houses, and her father was a laborer and Baptist preacher. Both were well-known orators in the Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Houston. The year she was born, the church’s minister helped found the Texas branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A Good Hope church member was plaintiff in the 1944 Supreme Court decision that forced Texas Democrats to allow black voters to participate in party primaries. Jordan’s great-grandfather, Edward Patton, served as the only black member of the Texas House of Representatives from 1891 to 1893 and was one of the last black Republicans elected after Reconstruction in that state. Jordan’s cousin, Dr. Thelma Patten, the first black female physician in Houston, presided at her birth. Her grandfather, John Ed Patten, used to read to her as they rode on his mule cart collecting junk for resale, and encouraged her to “travel up from segregation.”

Jordan attended segregated schools in Houston. She was a champion debater for Phillis Wheatley High School and for Texas Southern University, which debated both black and white teams and once tied in competition with Harvard University. She became president of Delta Sigma Theta sorority and graduated magna cum laude in 1956 with a B.A. in political science. Her first experience in integrated classrooms was at Boston University Law School, where only six students in her class were black. One of her first white friends was the daughter of the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. She received her LL.B. in 1959 and passed the bar in both Massachusetts and Texas.

From 1960 to 1966 Jordan conducted a private legal practice from her parents’ home in Houston and served as administrative assistant to a county judge. She worked in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, and made speeches in support of white liberal candidates, but lost her own races for the Texas legislature in 1962 and 1964. After the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 enfranchised more black voters and a United States Supreme Court decision forced redistricting in Houston, Jordan was elected to the Texas state senate from the Eleventh District in 1966. She served in the sixtieth through the sixty-second legislative sessions in Austin, from 1967 through 1973, becoming the first black state senator in Texas since 1883, the first African-American female Texas legislator, and the only woman in the state senate during her two terms.

To the surprise of many, the serious-minded Jordan hosted parties, drank whiskey, played poker, traded votes, and quickly became popular with the other legislators. Nearly half the 150 bills Jordan introduced during her three terms in the legislature were signed into law. These included creation of a Texas Fair Employment Practices Commission; the state’s first minimum-wage law; and increased workers’ compensation coverage for on-the-job injuries. She successfully backed the Equal Legal Rights Amendment to the Texas Constitution as well as Texas’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She also called in political favors to block bills that would harm her constituency in areas such as voting rights. Although she often voted with liberal members of the legislature, she did not let their caucus speak for her.

Her success came from studying the rules, learning the art of compromise, and working closely with the insiders who controlled the power structure, regardless of any disagreements on the issues. President Lyndon Johnson was one of her strong supporters, and her reciprocal support for him included withholding criticism regarding his Vietnam policies at the 1968 Democratic Convention, though she herself had come out against the war. Governor John Connally vetoed Jordan’s appointment to the executive committee of the Texas Democratic party in 1964, yet she would eventually serve as a character witness during his trial for bribery and perjury in 1975. Connally’s protégé, Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, appointed Jordan to fourteen committees in the Texas senate. She chaired the Labor and Management Relations Committee and was vice chair of two others, including the one that drew boundaries for a new Eighteenth U.S. Congressional District in her home county. In 1972 she ran for that seat and won, and before she left the Texas senate, she was elected president pro tempore and governor for a day.

One of President Johnson’s last political acts before his death in 1973 was to advise Jordan to get on the House Judiciary Committee and to secure her appointment. She also served on the House Government Operations Committee. Jordan joined the Black Caucus but did not sit with its members on the floor, choosing instead a seat on the center aisle. She was also one of fourteen women in Congress, the largest number to serve up to that time. She joined other female legislators on several issues, winning an extension of the deadline for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment but losing on federal Medicaid funding for abortions and Social Security benefits for homemakers. One of her first legislative victories in Congress was revising the Omnibus Crime Bill to increase the hiring of women and minorities as police officers. As a Texan she also represented a Mexican-American constituency. Against the will of almost all her old colleagues in Texas, she backed reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was due to expire in 1975, and successfully extended its provisions to cover Texas and other states with five percent or more Hispanic population. She was successful in passing a law to protect consumers from price-fixing, and active in the Judiciary Committee’s efforts to curb abuses by the federal intelligence agencies because she had been the target of the U.S. Army’s domestic intelligence program in the 1960s.

Jordan is best known for her role in the confrontation between Congress and President Richard M. Nixon that led to the latter’s resignation. Jordan’s first speech in Congress, on 18 April 1973, analyzed the separation of powers and concluded that Nixon had trampled on the Constitution by refusing to spend money Congress appropriated, by bombing Indochina without consent of Congress, and by forbidding members of his administration to appear before congressional committees.

That summer, Nixon’s illegal campaign activities, including covering up break-ins and spying at the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate building, came to light. The president defied the special prosecutor, the courts, and later Congress by refusing to turn over subpoenaed evidence. On 31 July 1973 the first impeachment resolution against Nixon for high crimes and misdemeanors was introduced in the House Judiciary Committee, and on 20 October, Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, replacing him with a Houstonian whom Jordan knew and respected, Leon Jaworski. Jaworski gave information to the Judiciary Committee that enabled them to conduct a parallel investigation and learn that transcripts sent to the committee by the president had been distorted.

In July 1974 House Judiciary deliberations on impeachment were televised to the nation. Jordan spoke just before 9 P.M. on 25 July. She had studied the evidence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers to arrive at her decision. “I have finally been included in ‘We, the People.’… My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total,” she said. “I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.” Jordan explained to the public the meaning of impeachment and the ways that Nixon had set himself above the law and the Constitution.

The success of her speech set the stage for a series of votes in committee favoring impeachment on grounds including lying to investigators, subverting justice, paying hush money, and misusing the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Jordan also voted with a minority of committee members to impeach Nixon for tax evasion and the illegal bombing of Cambodia.

On 8 August, before the full House could vote on impeachment, Nixon resigned. His successor, President Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon while Jordan was on a congressional delegation trip to China. As President, Ford vetoed many bills that Jordan considered important to her constituency, including public works jobs and day-care provisions for children.

In 1976 Jordan electrified the public with her televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, but she quashed a popular cry to nominate her for vice president and supported Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter in his slim general election victory over Ford. Although Jordan expressed an interest in being appointed Carter’s attorney general, such an offer was never made, and she declined to consider other posts such as United Nations ambassador.

Jordan learned in 1973 that she had multiple sclerosis, a progressive autoimmune disease. In her last session of Congress, she focused on removing racial discrimination from all federal programs and preserving the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had done much to further civil rights. By the end of the session, Jordan was using a cane. Retiring from Congress in 1978, she returned to Austin to live with her longtime companion, Nancy Earl, and to teach at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. A year later, she had to use a wheelchair.

Over the next seventeen years, she gave many speeches; served on various corporate, nonprofit, and government boards; was ethics adviser to Texas governor Ann Richards from 1991 to 1995; and chaired President Bill Clinton’s Commission on Immigration Reform from 1994 to 1996. She died of leukemia shortly before her sixtieth birthday. She was the first black person to be buried in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.

Jordan was an inspiring orator, a consummate politician, and a champion of the political rights of the disenfranchised. Shortly before her death, she summed up her own motivation: “We cannot stand to have, in a democracy, any significant portion of the people who do not have a voice in what happens to them.… [W]e as a people, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, must keep scratching the surface until we get where we’ve got to be, and that’s all inclusiveness for all people.”

The collection of Barbara Jordan’s papers is at Texas Southern University in Houston. Jordan’s autobiography, written with Shelby Hearon, is Barbara Jordan: A Self Portrait (1979). The major biography of her is Mary Beth Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero (1998). There is a major biographical essay on Jordan in Nancy Baker Jones and Ruthe Winegarten, Capitol Women: Texas Female Legislators, 1923–1999 (2000). One of Jordan’s last recorded interviews is included in a video, Getting Where We’ve Got To Be! Women in the Texas Legislature, 1923–1999 (2000). The complete transcript of the interview is at the Archives for Research on Women and Gender, University of Texas at San Antonio. An obituary is in the Houston Chronicle (17 Jan. 1996).

Ruthe Winegarten