JORDAN, BARBARA (21 February 1936–17 January 1996), American lawyer, educator, and the first Black woman to be elected to a congressional seat in the South. A Democrat, she served in the US House of Representatives for the 18th district of Texas between 1973 and 1979 and is well known for her interpretation of the issues surrounding the Watergate scandal and investigation.
Born in Houston, Texas, Jordan graduated from Phyllis Wheatley High School in 1952 and earned her bachelor’s degree in 1956 from Texas Southern University. In 1959, she graduated from Boston University with a degree in law and was admitted to both the Massachusetts and Texas bars. She returned to Houston in 1960 and opened her law practice, simultaneously working for a county judge and campaigning for presidential nominee John F. Kennedy.
Jordan ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives in both 1962 and 1964, but she continued to campaign and was elected to the Texas senate in 1966. She was the first African American state senator in Texas since 1883, and the first Black woman elected to the Texas state legislature. Despite the cool welcome from her colleagues, all of whom were White men, Jordan established Texas’ first minimum wage law, anti-discrimination clauses in business contracts, and the Texas Fair Employment Practices Commission.
In 1972 Jordan became the first Black woman to preside over a legislative body when she was elected president pro tempore of the Texas senate. As president pro tempore, Jordan served as the acting governor of Texas when the governor and lieutenant governor were out of state, technically making her the first Black chief executive in the nation. The same year she won the general election for the downtown Houston congressional seat against Republican candidate Paul Merritt. She and Andrew Young of Georgia were the first Black members of Congress in the twentieth century. She held her seat for the next two terms, deciding not to run in 1978 due to poor health.
In her first term Jordan quickly landed a seat on the Judiciary Committee, which she maintained for the entirety of her time in congress. In 1975 she also took a seat on the Committee for Government Operations. While in office, Jordan sought to expand the protections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and adeptly navigated the internal politics of Washington. She was known for strategic compromises that were informed by her commitment to her constituents. In her own words, “I am neither a black politician nor a woman politician. Just a politician, a professional politician.”
Congressional investigation into the Watergate scandal resulted in articles of impeachment being considered against Nixon in the summer of 1974. Jordan, who supported all five articles of impeachment, delivered opening remarks to the Judiciary Committee that received national attention. “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.” Her final words were that if the Judiciary Committee did not find the evidence for Nixon’s impeachment compelling enough, “then perhaps the eighteenth-century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth-century paper shredder.”
Throughout her career, Jordan’s legislative priorities centered on the working class and the expansion of Civil Rights protections. She aimed to realize and sustain a society in which all people are treated equally and believed it could be accomplished through finding new ways to implement the existing system of government.
Though she stepped down from her congressional position in 1978, Jordan continued her career as the Lyndon Johnson Chair in National Policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. She taught at the University of Texas until the early 1990s while also remaining active in the political sphere, delivering keynote addresses at the Democratic National Conventions of 1988 and 1992. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed her to lead the Commission on Immigration Reform.
Barbara Jordan received nearly two dozen honorary degrees throughout her career and was named to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1990. She died on January 17, 1996, in Austin, Texas.