Forgotten American Blogging: Barbara Jordan

I'm restarting the long lost Forgotten American Blogging series. It used to be just on Tuesdays, but I can't really commit to doing it every week at this point. So it will be more occasional I guess.

Although she died only 12 years ago, Barbara Jordan is pretty well forgotten about today by anyone who was not familiar with her during her life. The only possible reason any of my students would know about her is that the main terminal in the Austin airport is named after her and there is a big statue there of her. But there's no explanation as to who the heck she is.

And as at least some people know, she was an extremely brave and important person in U.S. history.

Born in Houston in 1936 to a Baptist minister and a domestic worker, Benjamin and Arlyne Jordan, Barbara Jordan would rise to become the first African-American woman ever elected to Congress from the South. She attended Texas Southern University, where she became a national champion debater. Her oratory skills became her calling card years later when she was a national political figure. She graduated from TSU in 1956 with a dual degree in political science and history. She then went to Boston University for her law degree, graduating in 1959. Jordan spent a year at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before returning to Texas to take the bar, which she passed in 1960, becoming only the third African-American woman to be licensed as a lawyer in the state.

Jordan always had political ambitions. She ran for the Texas Senate in both 1962 and 1964, losing both times. But she won in 1966, becoming the first African-American to serve in the Texas Senate since 1883. She quickly moved up in the body, becoming chair of the Labor and Management Relations Committee and, in 1972, president pro tempore.

In 1972, she ran for the U.S. Congress and was elected from her Houston district. She was helped by her political mentor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who helped ensure her a seat on the House Judiciary Committee. As a member of that committee, she became a leader in the fight to impeach Richard Nixon. She gave a speech during a televised session of the committee meeting that propelled her into national spotlight. She famously said,

"Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, 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.

Today I am an inquisitor. I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution."

She worked hard during her short time in Congress for working people and people of color around the nation. She lobbied to expand the 1965 Voting Rights Act to cover Mexican-Americans. She helped push the Workman's Compensation Act, which significantly increased benefits to workers injured on the job. She also sponsored the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which required banks to make lending services available to poor and minority communities.

Jordan's political ambitions remained high. She gave the keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, a feat she would repeat in 1992. Jimmy Carter was interested in naming her either attorney general or U.N. ambassador but she remained in Congress. She was interested in challenging Republican Senator John Tower in 1978. However, although she was barely 40 years old, her health was in a state of collapse due to multiple sclerosis, which she started fighting in 1973. Instead, she retired from Congress because her health could not stand the workload any longer.

She went home to Texas where she became a professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. But her impact of public affairs was not confined to the classroom. She came back to Washington in 1987 to testify against the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. She ripped Bork apart in her testimony:

I am opposed to the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court of the United States. My opposition is not a knee-jerk reaction of followership to the people or organizations whose views I respect. My opposition is a result of thinking about this matter with some care, of reading the White House position paper in support of Robert Bork, of reading the Judiciary Committee's point-by-point response to that position paper, discussing the matter with friends and people I respect, reading some of Judge Bork's writings. But more than any of that, my opposition to this nomination is really a result of living fifty-one years as a black American born in the South and determined to be heard by the majority community.

Remember that Bork played a huge role in Watergate and that Jordan became famous because of her speech regarding Nixon's impeachment. Bork was the key figure in the Saturday Night Massacre on October 20, 1973, firing special prosecutor Archibald Cox when both Attorney General Elliott Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned before they would do so. In the Bork confirmation hearings, Jordan said

All I can say is that on the day and at the time that Robert Bork fired Archibald Cox, there were rules and regulations in place, viable, alive, with the force and effect of law. They were violated, and, to me, that means the solicitor general acted illegally...For you to confirm Robert Bork to the Supreme Court I think sends the wrong message. I believe that such a confirmation would indicate that it is all right with you for a person to sit on the Supreme Court who has utter disdain for the Office of Special Prosecutor....A new justice should help us stay the course, not abort the course.

Texas Supreme Court justice Rose Spector later said, "I knew it was all over for Bork when I saw Barbara Jordan wheel into the committee room to testify against him." Instead of Bork, we have Anthony Kennedy, who is a conservative guy but one who is massively less terrible than Bork would have been. Thanks to Jordan's testimony, as well as others, innumerable bad Court decisions have not happened. Can you imagine a Court right now made up of Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Bork? Say goodbye to Roe to begin with.

Bill Clinton was a great admirer of hers. He considered her for a Supreme Court nomination, though her health would not allow it. He did grant her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.

Jordan's health remained terrible however. She died in 1996, at the age of only 59, and with the last 18 years of her life forced out political life because of that health. One must wonder what would have happened if she had lived a long life. Would she have been the first black female president? Could she have knocked out both barriers at once? Even today, she would only be 72, the same age as John McCain.

But Jordan would not only be the first black female president. She also would have been the first lesbian president. Jordan had a lifelong partner, Nancy Earl. Jordan kept her sexuality out of the press. For a politician in the 1970s, the taint of homosexuality would likely have killed their political ambitions, possibly not in her congressional district, but certainly nationally. Have we come very far from that? I don't know. It's at least possible that Janet Napolitano, the governor of Arizona, may be a lesbian. She should be a leading candidate for the vice-presidential nomination. And people are already worried about how her sexuality would play in front of a national audience.

I will close this post by quoting the closing remarks Jordan gave at her keynote speech for the 1976 Democratic National Convention

Now, we must look to the future. Let us heed the voice of the people and recognize their common sense. If we do not, we not only blaspheme our political heritage, we ignore its common ties that bind all Americans. The great danger America faces is 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 this happens, who will then speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good? This is the question to be answered in 1976.

Are we to be one people bound together by a common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation?

We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done. There is no law that can require us to form a national community. This we must do as individuals. There is no president of the United States that can veto that decision.

As a first step we must restore our belief in ourselves. We are a generous people, so why can't we be generous with each other. We need to take to heart the words spoken by Thomas Jefferson: "Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life are but dreary things."

I have confidence that we can form a national community. I have confidence that the Democratic Party can lead the way. I have that confidence.

It is hypocritical for us to exhort the people to fulfill their duty to the Republic if we are derelict in ours. More is required. We must hold ourselves strictly accountable. We must provide the people with a vision. If we promise, we must deliver. If we propose, we must produce. If we ask for sacrifice, we must be the first to give. We must be.

What we have to do is strike a balance between the idea that the government can do everything and the belief that the government should do nothing. Strike a balance.

Let there be no illusions about the difficulty of forming this kind of national community. It's tough, difficult, not easy. A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny. If each of us remembers.

I have confidence that we can form a national community. I have confidence that the Democratic Party can lead the way. I have that confidence.

Now, I began my speech by commenting to you about the uniqueness of a Barbara Jordan speaking to you on this night. I am going to conclude my speech by quoting a Republican president and ask you to relate the words of Abraham Lincoln, relate them to the concept of a national community in which every last one of us participates: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master."

This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference is no democracy."

Sounds to me like the Bush Administration seriously needs to read this speech.

Much of this information is taken from Mary Beth Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero, published by Bantam Books in 1998.