The Making of Barbara Jordan
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
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Being practical also means trading off today’s issues for power tomorrow. It means, for example, going with the establishment on energy to get their support on other issues. A better example, however, was Jordan’s support for the plank in the 1968 Democratic platform praising President Johnson’s Viet Nam policy. As early as 1966 Jordan had been opposed to the Viet Nam War, but in Chicago she rigorously defended it. Why? Here’s what she told the Wall Street Journal: “That plank probably resulted in further killing and dying, but I felt it was important for Texans to be supportive of their man.” These values—that supporting “their man” is more important than killing and dying—are odious. They are an extreme example of how the Rayburn-Johnson practical politics can function as more blinders, blocking out conscience by political expediency. These values of “Texans supporting their man” may well also have contributed to her decision to testify for John Connally.
Now no one seriously wants politicians to be “impractical,” and no doubt subjecting the careers of other ambitious politicians to similar scrutiny would yield at least as many, and probably more, lapses, missteps, errors in judgment. Such performance is disturbing in Jordan’s case, however, because in spite of her protestation that she is only a politician, she is universally thought to stand for something more. In her behalf, her supporters say, as Reverend Lawson did, that she has tied Rayburn-Johnson techniques to a higher purpose. Further testimony comes from black State Representative Mickey Leland, whose Houston district includes Jordan’s home: “Barbara uses the system for blacks; it doesn’t use her.” But Andrew Jefferson says it best: “Barbara will listen to the establishment about their problems, and she’ll take the time to understand divestiture and the natural gas shortage. She won’t oppose them just because they are the establishment. But when it comes down to some long-standing demand, some long-standing principle, she can be counted on to help the establishment understand it just as she tried to understand their energy problems. She gets her leverage that way, and she’s not afraid to use it.”
The central dilemma about Barbara Jordan is that while almost everyone believes she has this central core beyond politics, this ultimate devotion to long-standing principles, no one really knows what it is. No one can point to many long-standing principles that she has made the establishment recognize. Given her constituency, she should be expected to vote liberal, and she does: she rolls up 80, 90, 100 per cent scores on all the tallies kept by black, liberal, feminist, and environmentalist groups. She votes virtually down the line with the Black Caucus on black issues, although she will occasionally oppose them on energy. In Texas she did work for the minimum wage, workmen’s compensation, fair labor practice, antidiscrimination. In Washington she passed the Voting Rights Act expansion and extension. But these voting records and these legislative accomplishments are simply straight liberal politics; they are not the core. The remark is, “Well, they’re part of it, but they’re not it.”
What “it” is, is of course the mystery. The same aura that surrounded her as a young girl surrounds her as a mature politician. That elusive quality of being beyond definition, of being “just Barbara,” defies the analysis of skeptical adult observers just as it defied the analysis of teenagers. More than anything else, this accepted inevitability of her greatness is her biggest asset. “Barbara has that rare mental capacity to have a master plan for her life, a sense of high destiny,” says Reverend Lawson. “Gandhi had that. Martin Luther King had that. John Kennedy I believe had that. When you have it, other people can sense it. It’s both a knowledge of how much only you can do and how little time you have to live to do it in. I suspect it’s what makes her work so hard, drive herself so much. It’s a destiny not so much for herself, but for a people; not black people, but a whole coalition of suffering, yearning people. I can’t define it, and she might not be able to, but I am sure she understands what it is.”
One of the most important reasons she inspires such hope is because she is a Southerner, and understands as well as anyone the significance of the New South. While she may rigorously avoid being typecast as a black, female, or liberal politician, she takes pains to insist she is a Texan and a Southern one. “I am a Texan,” she wrote. “My roots are there. . . ‘Texan’ frequently evokes images of conservatism, oil, gas, racism, callousness. In my judgment, the myths should be debunked, or at the least, should include the prevalent strains of reasonableness, compassion, and decency.” Her friends say she is really only comfortable with Southerners, including blacks like Georgia’s Andrew Young but also some of the most reactionary members of Congress. Jordan says she has a “very good relationship with old, establishment white conservatives. Maybe I have a natural affinity for Southerners because I am a Southerner.” Part of the reason, of course, is her application of the same charm, deference, and humor she used on the same sorts of men in the Texas Senate.
Barbara Jordan’s rapport with white Southerners is also testament to the basic political change in the South since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Representative Andrew Young of Georgia, the influential Atlanta black who has thrown in his chips with Jimmy Carter, describes the process: “It used to be Southern politics was just ‘nigger’ politics, who would ‘outnigger’ the other—then you registered 10 to 15 per cent in the community and folds would start saying ‘nigra’ and then you get 35 to 40 per cent registered and it’s amazing how quickly they learned to say ‘neegrow’ and now that we’ve got 50, 60, 70 per cent of the black votes registered in the South, everybody’s proud to be associated with their black brothers and sisters.” That is the language Jordan understands. Although blacks are only 20 per cent of the voting-age population of the South, that still makes them the largest cohesive voting bloc, except on those increasingly rare occasions when whites vote together. It is not rare for candidates to get more than 90 per cent of the black vote; in political arithmetic, that means with only 40 per cent of the white vote the election is won. In urban areas where blacks are more than 20 per cent, the arithmetic is even better. The result is a Fred Hofheinz or a Jimmy Carter, a Barbara Jordan or an Andrew Young.
But beyond politics, back in the nooks and crannies of a society’s most basic psyche, the South has made an even more fundamental change. Blacks now openly talk about preferring the South to the North, of feeling a greater trust and understanding for their fellow white Southerners than for even the most bleeding-heart Northern liberal. Black support for Jimmy Carter is of course one manifestation of that trust, but it goes deeper. Black voices make this point best. This is Eddie Bernice Johnson, a black state legislator from Dallas: “In the North, racism has had a façade, a pretense that it didn’t exist. People wanted to think that nothing was wrong, that everything was okay and the problem was somewhere else. They didn’t want to admit they had it too, and if you don’t admit the problem, you can’t deal with it. In the South whites are trying to deal with it; the ones that have dealt with it have been through something, and you can generally trust them down the line.” And Reverend Lawson: “The South has always depended on the power that brings the harvest and the seasons, something bigger than one’s self and one’s strivings. That condition reminds us of our common humanity beneath the shadow of larger forces; it breeds a basic compassion and a basic religiosity, an esteem for others even when you don’t particularly like them. In addition, white families in the South have always depended on blacks. Black mammies raised their children and taught them manners, black men tilled their cotton and built their houses. Martin Luther King called it a web of mutuality, a binding of the two races together. That isn’t true in the North; the black is a newcomer there, and by and large he isn’t wanted. Even George Wallace is somehow more aware of the humanity of blacks than is the average white in Grosse Pointe.”
The symbolic dimension of Barbara Jordan’s achievement is to link the troubled past with a hopeful future, to bridge from a segregated society to an unsegregated one. She has been called Aunt Jemima by both her friends and her enemies, and, although she doesn’t like it, the metaphor is apt. In appearance she conjures up the common memories of a culture—she is every black maid, black cook, black mammy. She comes to us direct from Gone with the Wind or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an enduring stereotype of the black women who lived closest with whites, who sustained the web of mutuality. The awesomeness of her presence is rooted in her explicit destruction of that image, as if every black mammy and Aunt Jemima had risen up with their rolling pins to take over the world.
The final mystery about Barbara Jordan is, what next? One of 435 United States Representatives can only do so much, no matter how great her political skills or symbolic import. Carter had her on his list of vice-presidential possibilities (and rejected her, Carter sources say, not because she was black but because, like Carter, she was from the South), and she is mentioned as a possible attorney general or Supreme Court justice should Carter win. For her part, she considers the Supreme Court a place to retire to. The U.S. Senate? Perhaps. Four years ago she dismissed the idea with incredulity: “Barbara Jordan run for senator? A black woman run for the U.S. Senate in Texas?” Today she knows those old barriers are falling and is now open to the possibility, perhaps against John Tower in 1978. But ultimately, as one friend says, “all she really wants to do is be president.” And brothers, that will be the day.
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