The Making of Barbara Jordan
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
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The accepted current view of this system, as expressed by the Supreme Court, is that it created a “badge of inferiority” the white society’s claim that separate could be equal was false: separate was inherently unequal. But the vast effort to dismantle this system has obscured certain of its more positive elements. For example, today many Houston blacks believe their schools have lost something crucial. “Give us back our black principals and teachers,” they say. “The new white teachers don’t understand our children, they don’t enforce discipline or values, they don’t make them learn.” When Barbara Jordan was at Wheatley High School they taught pride. “They taught us dignity,” says one of her contemporaries. The segregated black society was ironically a breeding ground of the very fundamental values white Americans were coming to question. Houston blacks were pro-military, pro-education, and, in their own way, pro-American. “I can still get goose bumps when I hear the Star Spangled Banner,” says Jordan, who is fond of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in her speeches. While blacks most likely burned with a common rage at the humiliation of segregation, they also made the best of things within it. And they were proud of their schools, proud of their athletic teams, proud of their churches, proud of themselves.
Barbara Jordan, for one, has never given the slightest indication she feels “a badge of inferiority” because she went to Wheatley and TSU, or because she grew up in a segregated society. In fact, there must be few pleasures sweeter than going to a debate tournament and beating all the teams you aren’t good enough to stay in the same hotel with. And when TSU traveled north and beat the best debate teams America had to offer, that must have dispelled any doubts she might have had about just how good she was. But ability was one thing; ambition was another. Satchel Paige was one of the best pitchers who ever lived, but he only got to play in the major leagues in the twilight of his career. Barbara Jordan was to become the Jackie Robinson of Texas politics, but it would not be easy. When she returned home with her law degree from Boston University in 1959, the first black to win elective office in Houston since Reconstruction had been on the school board for less than a year. The system of segregation was still in effect (after political meetings, if she and her white allies wanted to eat or get a drink in public together, they would have had to go to black Houston). It’s one thing to play in the black leagues when that’s all it seems can be done. But Barbara Jordan had supreme self-confidence, she had a boundless capacity for hard work, and she had her eye on bigger things.
JUST BARBARA
When she returned to Houston, Jordan started her law office on the dining room table of the house on Campbell Street. She also started doing nuts and bolts political work with the Harris County Democrats. This coalition of labor minorities and white liberals was the mainspring of Houston liberal politics. It had its own office, its own leaders and candidates, and its own platforms; in almost every respect it was a separate political party. The struggles with the Johnson wing of the Democratic party were pitched battles. The liberals had great heart, tremendous esprit, high principles—and they almost always lost. With remarkable resilience they would get up to fight again. Since they openly courted blacks, they were the only place for an ambitious black office seeker like Barbara Jordan to start, just as debate was the place to make her mark at TSU. In the 1960 Kennedy presidential campaign she stuffed envelopes and licked stamps, went on to set up systems to identify block and precinct workers, then was asked to speak at a small rally when the scheduled speaker didn’t show up.
If there is anything Jordan has never wasted, it is an opportunity to speak. Soon she was as prominent in the Harris County Democrats as she had been at TSU. She became vice-chairman; she helped screen candidates; she seemed in every respect a committed liberal. When the Connally-backed black political organization set out to keep the endorsement of the Harris County Council of Organizations (HCCO, the key black political group) from going to liberal Don Yarborough in the 1962 Democratic gubernatorial primary, Jordan went to bat for him. Some members of the HCCO still remember her speech that day, although the Connally blacks did succeed in blocking Yarborough’s endorsement. By then she was running on her own. She borrowed money for her filing fee and persuaded Al Wickliff (who had himself run unsuccessfully for the Legislature and who had managed Mrs. Charles White’s successful campaign to be the first black on the school board) to be her campaign manager. The only problem was that blacks made up less than 20 per cent of Houston’s electorate, and all state representatives had to run countywide. White ran for reelection that same year, got 34 per cent of the white vote, and won with a plurality; Jordan got 23 per cent of the white vote and came in third.
As she took stock of her defeat, in a subtle but significant way, she crossed the Rubicon, from black politician to politician. Principles weren’t worth much if you had no power. A black might win election to the Houston School Board, but its politics were byzantine and unrelated to most everything else. But it seemed unlikely that a black, strictly with liberal support, could win a countywide race. What Barbara Jordan had to do, in practical political terms, was expand her base. She had to keep her original black and liberal allies, but she had to find more. She decided to leave the friendly womb of liberal, black Houston and venture forth into the heartland of her opposition. In her own words: “It was clear then that if I was to win ... I had to persuade the monied and politically influential interests either to support me or to remain neutral.” In 1964 she increased her white vote by 50 per cent, but that, along with her now customary 97 per cent of the black vote, was still not enough. And, in the wake of her second defeat, Governor John Connally vetoed her nomination to serve on the State Democratic Executive Committee, on the grounds it wasn’t ready for a black.
And so, her efforts to court the establishment had been unsuccessful; her law practice was barely off the ground because of her political efforts; and ahead seemed to lie only an endless series of losing campaigns. Barbara Jordan contemplated her future. Again, in her words: “I considered abandoning the dream of a public career in Texas and moving to some section of the country where a black woman candidate was less likely to be considered a novelty. I didn’t want to do this. I am a Texan; my roots are in Texas. To leave would be a cop-out. So I stayed.” This story, of course, has a fairy tale ending. The next year the Voting Rights Act extended the franchise, and the “one man on vote” Supreme Court decisions led to the equalization in population of legislative districts. And there, in the twinkling of an eye, was not only 25 per cent more registered black voters, but also a brand-new Texas Senate district almost 50 per cent black. Barbara Jordan had been out front first, she had worked hard, and that seat was hers.
She won 66 per cent of the vote in the primary (including 34 percent of the white vote) and brushed aside a token Republican opponent to become the first black to serve in the Texas Senate since 1882. When she was elected, the civil rights movement was splintering into separatists, militants, and moderates. The vestiges of segregation were everywhere. Yet this first black state senator had not a single item in her platform designed specifically to benefit blacks. She came out for traditional bread-and-butter liberal and union issues like the minimum wage, fair labor practices, and better teacher salaries. She also strongly supported limits on oyster dredging, and played political expediency with welfare, calling for its expansion on the one hand and getting cheats off the welfare rolls on the other. It was a solid, traditional political platform. It was also a pale reflection of her extraordinary rhetoric and presence. Because of her charisma, she led people to expect that she would set things right, and they didn’t have oyster dredging in mind.
But black issues did not go without their champion in 1966. A young black businessman named Curtis Graves was elected to the Texas House of Representatives the same year. Graves was a vocal black activist who had been arrested in a Houston sit-in demonstration in 1961. When Graves got to the Legislature, he made clear he was a black man interested in black issues, and woe betide white racists. As the sixties continued to unfold, Graves started talking of “honkies” and the “oppressors”; he began building a coalition with the New Left and with hippies; he called Viet Nam a racist war. The contrast with Jordan could not have been more direct. Graves was passionate and impulsive, she was aloof and calculating; he was angry, she was conciliatory; he made whites feel personally guilty for the sins of segregation, she emphasized common problems; he would have nothing to do with the establishment, she courted it. While he made herculean efforts to become an effective day-to-day politician, Graves’ real ambition was to make the transition from civil rights activist to politician with principles intact: same strategy, different tactics.
Looking back from the perspective of the mid-seventies, it seems obvious that Jordan’s approach made more sense. At the time, however, it was not so clear. The changes most affecting the lives of blacks were being inspired by black activists, not black politicians. These blacks—mainly students and young ministers—were the new leaders of black Houston. They could point to concrete accomplishment; blacks who worked within the system came back with their hands empty. Quiet voices didn’t get action. Loud voices did. In 1960, the year after Jordan returned from Boston, the sit-ins began, and continued until 1962, the year she made her first race for the Legislature; lunch counters were integrated, and some firms began hiring black employees. Three years later, the focus switched to the slow pace of school desegregation. Ten thousand blacks led by Reverend Bill Lawson marched on the school board; there was a school boycott. Black Houston seemed up in arms.
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