Barbara Jordan

Jordan was born February 21, 1936, in Houston's Fifth Ward, the youngest daughter of a Baptist preacher and a maid who also taught Sunday school. Her maternal great-grandfather, Edward Patton, had been one of the last Black members of the Texas House of Representatives before Jim Crow disenfranchisement closed that door for two generations. She graduated Phillis Wheatley High School with honors, became a national debate champion at Texas Southern University, and took a law degree at Boston University in 1959. Back in Houston at twenty-four, she was one of only two Black women licensed to practice law in Texas, running a private practice out of her parents' dining room while volunteering to register Black voters for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket.

Jordan lost two races for the Texas House before winning a Texas Senate seat in 1966, becoming the first Black woman ever to serve there and, in June 1972, the first Black woman to serve as acting governor of any American state, for a single ceremonial day. Elected to the U.S. House that fall with Lyndon Johnson's backing, she won a seat on the Judiciary Committee and used it on July 25, 1974, delivering a televised statement on the case for impeaching Richard Nixon that closed with the line, "My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total." Two years later she became the first Black person and first woman to deliver a keynote address at a major party's national convention. She retired from Congress in 1978, only six years after arriving, citing her health.

Jordan was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1973, her first year in Congress, and kept it from the papers for years while the disease slowly took her legs; by the 1990s she used a wheelchair, and in 1988 she nearly drowned in her own pool during physical therapy before her partner, Nancy Earl, pulled her out. The two women shared a home in Austin for two decades, a fact Jordan's advisers pressed her to keep private; the National Archives now describes her as the first LGBTQ woman to serve in Congress, a label she never used herself. Her last public role complicates the civil-rights portrait further: appointed by Bill Clinton to chair a commission on immigration reform, she recommended cutting legal immigration by a third, arguing the country's obligations to its own democratic process outweighed an open door.

Jordan died January 17, 1996, of complications from pneumonia and leukemia after twenty-three years of multiple sclerosis. She became the first African American buried in the Texas State Cemetery, and Austin's airport named its main terminal for her, with a statue in the concourse. Bill Clinton later said, in a documentary interview, that he had planned to nominate her to the Supreme Court and that her declining health was the only reason he never got the chance. The Postal Service put her on a stamp in 2011, and the coalition formed in her name with fellow organizer Bayard Rustin has kept using both their names in the fight for marriage equality that neither lived to see finished.

Barbara Jordan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Texas's first minimum wage law law
  Sponsored during her Texas Senate years 1969
• Watergate impeachment statement speech
  Televised House Judiciary Committee address on the case for impeaching Richard Nixon 1974
• Voting Rights Act renewal law
  Championed expanding protections to language minorities 1975
• 1976 Democratic National Convention keynote address speech
  First keynote at a major party convention given by a Black person or a woman 1976
• U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform report other
  Chaired the commission; its recommendations shaped the 1990s immigration debate 1994

• February 21, 1936 aged 0 Born in Houston's Fifth Ward
• 1956 aged ~20 Graduates Texas Southern University, a national debate champion
• 1959 aged ~23 Earns a law degree at Boston University
• 1966 aged ~30 Elected to the Texas Senate, the first Black woman to serve there
• June 10, 1972 aged 36 Serves one day as acting governor of Texas
• November 1972 aged 36 Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
• July 25, 1974 aged 38 Delivers her statement on the impeachment of Richard Nixon
• July 12, 1976 aged 40 Delivers the Democratic National Convention keynote address
• January 17, 1996 aged 59 Dies in Austin, Texas

• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. mentored by
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. spoke on the impeachment of
• Bill Clinton b. 1946
  42nd president whose centrist politics, economic agenda, and impeachment shaped the post-Cold War era. appointed by
• Bayard Rustin 1912–1987
  Civil rights strategist who organized the 1963 March on Washington and championed LGBTQ and labor rights. paired posthumously in the Jordan/Rustin Coalition