The Making of Barbara Jordan
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
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Through this epic period in black Houston’s history Barbara Jordan ran for office. She was a member of the NAACP, the most conservative civil rights organization. She took part in no sit-ins, marched in no demonstrations, carried no signs. And although there were fewer than 30 black lawyers in town, she did not volunteer to defend any of the jailed protestors. In spite of the practical effects of the attacks on the system, she never wavered in her burning desire to find a place in it. And as the sixties wore on, she attacked black power and made no bones about her intentions to continue working with the white establishment. For someone of her age and ambition, this behavior might well have earned the epithet Uncle Tom. But it did not, in part because of the sheer power of her rhetoric, but also because as a woman and a lawyer she was not expected to be a fighter. Just as her childhood friends had accepted her uniqueness ten years before, so the leading civil rights leaders of black Houston—some of her former TSU classmates—accepted her uniqueness in the sixties. She was “just Barbara,” and she had her own role to play.
It was not a “black” role. Barbara Jordan can count votes; to achieve power she would have to expand, not jeopardize, her white support. The “black” issue she has most consistently fought for is voting rights. When she filed in the State Senate race she brought along the black dentist whose law suit in 1944 had won blacks the right to vote in the Democratic primary. She made a rare display of calling in her political chips to prevent the Texas Senate from considering a bill to restrict the franchise by compounding the difficulties of voter registration. She took the same risk in Congress when she went against both the Texas establishment and the congressional black establishment—the two normal sources of her strength—in her successful effort to expand certain provisions of the Voting Rights Act to cover Texas. The blacks were against expansion on the grounds it would jeopardize the Act being renewed for the South; in this case, contrary to the accepted stereotype, they were timid and she was bold. She considers the Voting Rights expansion her most significant legislative accomplishment. The franchise is her sort of issue; its exercise is decorous, restrained, impersonal—but effective. It is the cornerstone of the system she believes in. She wasn’t raised to rebel or to make a scene; she didn’t learn that at home, and she didn’t learn it at Wheatley. And, as far as she knew, most blacks were as uncomfortable with those methods as she was. But the militants paved the way for her. They made her seem moderate, respectable, and safe. As Everett Collier of the Houston Chronicle says, “Barbara worked to prevent any violence or radicalism that would cause trouble.” And there could be no more pure political tightrope artistry than the ability to make a Collier think she is keeping the blacks in line, while making a Reverend Lawson think she is manipulating the establishment.
“The civil rights movement,” says Lawson, the leader of the school boycott, “brought to prominence a different sort of person than Barbara. The civil rights leaders were angry, passionate, impulsive people who drew attention to an ancient wrong in a dramatic way. In the language of the Olympics, they were the dash men; for the long haul you need distance runners. Barbara is a distance runner. It’s simply not her style to get out with a sign, or to be disruptive. It is no accident that the impulsive and eloquent voices of the civil rights movement did not make the transition to positions of power and responsibility. Those sorts of positions belong to people like Barbara, people with a purpose but also with the ability to hold their own in political infighting with the establishment’s best.”
And so, when the clash between Graves and Jordan came in 1972, it would be Jordan who would win. After the census of 1970, Houston was redistricted; a new congressional district, the 18th, was drawn for Jordan. She had, however, left Graves the impression he would get her senate district when she moved up. Instead, it was cannibalized into other districts, making it virtually impossible for a black to win. Graves held her responsible for losing it. It was the last straw in what he took to be a long string of compromises and deals with the establishment. He decided to oppose her for Congress. Jordan had worked hard on labor issues, and had the unions sewed up. She also had the financial backing of the Houston establishment. Graves was the underdog; labor unions threw him out of endorsement meetings, he had no money, his old friends didn’t seem to mind that the richest blacks and whites were backing Jordan—her money men were old black conservative Mack Hannah and white Houston booster Gail Whitcomb. Those were the sort of people Graves and his allies had always fought, but his allies seemed to be slipping away. The hippies and the New Left radicals he had courted were little help.
Graves then did the only thing he could: he attacked. He called Jordan a “tool” and raged about “an open attempt to buy the 18th district” as she sat tight-lipped on the same platform. This was his case, which has been the standard case against Jordan: “The congressman from this new district must be someone who owes his allegiance to the people who are in the district and not to the corrupt politicians who have brought our state to shame and ridicule. If you are looking for someone who goes along to get along, one who plays politics with your lives, one who is long on speaking but short on delivering services, then don’t vote for Curtis Graves.” As his position became more desperate, some of his supporters began spreading rumors about Jordan’s sex life. It was a tough campaign, an unprecedented battle between two prominent black politicians. Jordan never attacked Graves, and simply repeated that the issue was “who can get things done, who is more effective.” She received 80 per cent of the vote. Graves got 13 per cent, and left Texas for good.
Why did she win? There are several answers, but the most important is she was simply a better politician. She had carried water for key supporters like labor unions, she had gathered new supporters among the Houston establishment, and she had protected her base in the black community by appealing to its abiding conservative instincts. Although Graves played an important role in the protest movements of the sixties, he didn’t know, as another black politician said, “when it was time to put his dashiki in the closet, stop raising hell, and start getting things done.” The politician with a low civil rights profile beat the militant. In the words of Reverend Lawson, who is also a friend of Graves: “She had a vision back in the sixties. Most of us couldn’t see it. She saw beyond conflict to the enduring institutions, and she saw that most people, even black people, wanted to believe in them, if only they could be made to work. Within those institutions she saw that people like Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson got more done. So she wed her philosophy and purpose to their practical skills. But she kept her purpose. The rest of the civil rights movement is far behind her in making that transition.”
THE HEIR OF LBJ
The transition from the civil rights movement to Johnson-Rayburn politician was actually not that difficult a transition for Barbara Jordan to make. She had never really been in the civil rights movement. She had always, from her days at TSU, been in politics. Johnson-Rayburn politics were the politics of the big-time campus operator writ large, and the first opportunity Jordan had to practice them since her student days was when she arrived in the Texas Senate in 1967. As a freshman, she had to earn the support—in student terms—of the seniors. “The Texas Senate was touted as the state’s most exclusive club,” she wrote in Atlantic Monthly. “To be effective I had to get inside the club, not just inside the chamber. I singled out the most influential and powerful members and determined to gain their respect.” Barbara Jordan was the perfect freshman to integrate the school: she was bright, she did her homework, she had great talent; she also loved the institution, gave deference to its elders, and made them feel that it—and they—were the most important things in her life.
Since no black face had been seen in the Senate chamber since 1882, and since that body had its share of unreconstructed Southerners, there was still a certain period of adjustment. Back then it was traditional for Claude Wild, Sr., the Humble Oil lobbyist, to give a little dinner dance for the Senate before the session began. Wild thought he had a bit of a problem, so he called Don Kennard, a liberal senator from Fort Worth who was rumored to know a few blacks personally. Kennard tells the story: “Don,” Wild said, “I’ve got a little dilemma with Senator Jordan.” “What’s that?” Kennard asked. “Well, it’s about [late Dallas Senator George] Parkhouse and Mrs. Parkhouse, not to mention some others. What if Senator Jordan brings along a big black man from Houston? How will everybody react? What if her date tries to dance with Mrs. Parkhouse? What then?”
“They were breaking new ground, and no one knew what would happen,” Kennard recalls. “So my wife and I invited Barbara to go to the dinner with us. Within three minutes after she arrived she had charmed everyone and was the center of the stage. Just by being so gracious and charming she literally compelled even the biggest racists to be gracious and charming too. It started that night, really. She obviously respected them and didn’t make them feel evil or guilty. And they had never been confronted with an intelligent, imposing, witty black person before; so they warmed to her. I know it sounds silly looking at it all from ten years later. But those were different times. She was the first, and she ended up beating all of us at our own game.”
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