The Making of Barbara Jordan
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
(Page 2 of 7)
Even though some black leaders worry about a loss of community identity amid such growth, black Houston has at least as much center to it as white Houston does. The old neighborhoods of Fifth and Third Ward still provide the character. Texas Southern University, the black newspaper, and most business and professional offices are in Third Ward. The black elite lives there, in the former mansions of the Cullens and the Weingartens along MacGregor Bayou; so does the black middle class, mostly in the abandoned Jewish neighborhoods just east of Main Street and north of Hermann Park. Still, there has not been in Houston the sort of second- and third-generation inherited black wealth which has dominated black communities in Atlanta and New Orleans. Black Houston has been a more open place, just as white Houston has. That is true of Fifth Ward as well, which remain the grass-roots heart of the black community. The labor unions are there, as are the largest and most fundamentalist black churches, the largest black funeral parlors, and the wealthiest blacks like Mack Hannah and Don Robey. Wheatley, the Fifth Ward high school, usually wins in football and basketball; Yates, the Third Ward high school, usually excels in academics and debate. Fifth Ward is a poorer and tougher place.
Barbara Jordan is from Fifth Ward. A few years after her birth in 1936, her father, B.M. Jordan, became a Baptist minister. To help support his family he kept his job as a warehouseman. When Barbara was in her teens, the family moved to Campbell Street, just east of Lockwood near the corner of Campbell and Erastus; she and her mother still live there. Most of the houses on the street are shotgun shacks, house after identical house about sixteen feet wide and five feet apart, each constructed with a center door, a small porch, and a window to either side. Since the houses are so small, a good deal of the life on Campbell Street occurs in front yards. Everybody knows everything about their neighbors; it is a small-town feeling that much of white America, with its air conditioning and fixed-glass windows, has unwittingly let slip away. Immediately behind the houses across the street is the vast expanse of the main Houston freight yard, where thousands of trailer trucks and hundreds of railroad cars are constantly in motion, supplying Houston’s booming commerce. But Campbell Street, with its corner bar, Lou’s Beauty Nook, and the Tornado Motel, might as well be light years away from that cosmopolitan prosperity.
The distinctive qualities of Barbara Jordan—her speaking ability, her ambition, her charisma, and, of course, her size—all developed early. Reverand Jordan’s churches were solidly missionary and fundamentalist, the churches that for 300 years had promised black Americans salvation from a world of tears and travail. On Sundays, Barbara and her two older sisters would get up behind their father after his sermon and sing gospel music, the old-fashioned kind where they clapped and swayed and affirmed the joyous promise of their religion. The father prided himself on speaking correctly, in full, rounded, unaccented tones. To him correct speech was a mark of good breeding and class, and he insisted his daughters speak correctly. The common assumption that Jordan developed her speaking style at Boston University Law School could not be more wrong. “She had it in the cradle,” says Tom Freeman, her debate coach at Texas Southern University (TSU). “She did get a little JFK cadence in her voice from Boston,” says her old friend Andrew Jefferson, a former state district judge and a talented politician. “Those of us who knew her well noticed a little extra when she came back from Boston—a sort of embellishment, a little frosting on the cake.” So far as Jordan herself is concerned, “I don’t have an accent. I just talk like me. I have talked this way as long as I can remember.”
Jordan’s attitude is disingenuous, at the least, since her voice is much of her image. It underscores her aloofness and dignity, it lifts her beyond region, it masks any fuzzy thinking or lowly ambition, and it scares hell out of people. On hearing it for the first time, one awed young woman said, “I turned on my television set and thought I was listening to God.” It sounds, as Congressman Andrew Young of Georgia says, “like the heavens have opened up.” The religious parallels are apt, because the voice is an evangelical voice, a voice designed to bring to the fold the presence of the Lord. For that voice, for much of her ambition, and for her exacting standards of excellence, she can thank her father.
Reverend Jordan wanted his three daughters to become music teachers; two did. In a segregated society, being a music teacher was one of the best ambitions a young black woman could have, and Reverend Jordan insisted on the best. “I would come home with five A’s and a B,” Barbara Jordan told Molly Ivins of the Texas Observer, “and my father would say, ‘Why do you have a B?’” She wanted to please her father, to meet and even exceed his standards; but she wanted to be more than a music teacher. “I always wanted to be something unusual,” she says, “I would never be content with being run of the mill, I was thinking about being a pharmacist, but then I asked myself, ‘Whoever heard of an outstanding pharmacist?’” When she was in the tenth grade at Phillis Wheatley High School, a Chicago lawyer named Edith Sampson addressed the Career Day assembly. Sampson was crisp, competent, confident. Then and there, Barbara Jorda decided that was what she was going to be. At first, her father told a teacher who encouraged this ambition to “stay out of his family’s affairs”; that the law was no profession for a woman. But he came to encourage her “to do whatever I thought I could.” (Reverend Jordan died in 1972, the day after he attended his daughter’s Governor for a Day ceremonies in Austin.)
If anyone who knew her as a girl remembers Barbara Jordan having any doubts about herself, they aren’t letting on. “She has always been, even as a little girl, very sure of herself,” says Mary Justice York, who has known her since the third grade. “We knew from the very beginning she would do something different from the rest of us. She has always been large. ... In those days, the kids who were the leaders were usually slim and pretty, with nice, long hair and pretty brown skin ... but Barbara—it wasn’t that she tried to be the leader or strove for it—we just recognized her.” A.C. Herald, who was her homeroom teacher at Wheatley, remembers that “she had, even then, such an amazing sense of self.” She had a weight problem, she wasn’t attractive—“My mother says not to make me pretty,” she told her portrait painter—but she was smart, and above all, she had boundless ambition and belief in herself. Apparently the sight of an overweight young black girl (she entered TSU at 16) going about the normal business of growing up in the Fifth Ward with this doomsday voice, this fierce sense of dignity, this tenacious idea of herself and her future, didn’t seem strange. When people who knew her then are asked if she didn’t seem a little, well, phony, with that voice and everything, their response is consistently some variation of: “No, not really. She was just Barbara. That’s just how she was. We always knew she was gonna be somebody.”
At TSU she was everywhere; she wanted to get to the top of everything. She ran for freshman class president, and lost to Andrew Jefferson; she ran for student body president, and lost by six votes. Finally, she was elected editor of the yearbook. But she really shined in debate, where she was the only woman. Her freshman year, Tom Freeman, the debate coach, told her she wasn’t able to speak extemporaneously, and so kept her from doing refutations. “She went on to become one of the best debaters at refutation I have ever had,” Freeman recalls. “I think when I told her she wasn’t good at it that it really challenged her.” While she was at TSU the debate team was spectacular. They toured the country, beating everyone, including Harvard. They integrated the Baylor Forensic Tournament and won the first three years they competed. From TSU, Jordan went on to Boston University Law School, where she was the only woman in her class.
At this point a certain perspective might be helpful. Until she went north with the TSU debate team, Barbara Jordan had lived completely in the segregated society of black Houston. Even when the debate team integrated the regional meet in Waco, they couldn’t stay at the hotel with the other teams. Instead they were put up at all-black Paul Quinn College. The city Barbara Jordan left to attend Boston University in 1956 had segregated taxis, restaurants and lunch counters, restrooms, hospital wards, swimming pools, churches, labor unions, and schools; the handful of black policemen could not arrest whites or eat in the segregated city cafeteria; blacks could not vote in the Democratic primary—the only election in one-party Texas that mattered—until 1944. In 1956, black Houston was a separate city of 200,000 people. Its leading citizens were small businessmen and the leaders of the segregated institutions—the ministers, the educators, the union officials. These men also served as ambassadors to the white society—they lobbied to get a road paved or a library built. In such a society, if you were young, gifted, and ambitious, you had to become aware, in a way no white could really understand, of the limits on your ambitions. You could rise only so far. You had to stay in the black society since the great opportunities of the larger white world were closed. That was what “knowing your place” meant.
My Library
