Remembering Barbara Jordan

One of our finest legislators and her outstanding Speech in Defense of the Constitution

Barbara Jordan

Whenever I think about competent, brilliant legislators, Barbara Jordan is at the top of the list.

*Born in Houston,Texas 1936  Died in Austin, Texas 1996

*Lawyer, teacher, civil rights leader, lawmaker,

*First LGBTQ+ woman in Congress

*Education Graduated cum laude from historically Black Texas Southern University in 1956 and attended Boston University School of Law graduating in 1959.

*Taught at the Tuskegee Institute for a year and returned to Houston to open a law practice

*Began her career in politics in 1960 volunteering by carrying the message of the Kennedy-Johnson campaign to African American churches.

*In 1966 was elected as the first African American senator in the Texas Senate since the end of Reconstruction in 1883. The Texas Senate in 1966 consisted of 31 white men and Barbara Jordan. She experienced both racism and sexism but her work ethic earned her respect from her colleagues.

*Re-elected to the Texas Senate in 1968. While there she was the first African American woman to serve as president pro tempore, served one day as acting Governor becoming the first African American woman to be the governor of a state

*Elected in 1972 to the U. S. House of Representatives becoming the first woman elected in her own right to represent Texas in the House. 

*Barbara Jordan was named to the House Judiciary Committee and was part of the impeachment proceedings concerning Richard Nixon.

*At the hearing Barbara Jordan delivered a defense of the Constitution that was so powerful that some consider it one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century.

It’s here that I want to let Representative Jordan make that speech again to us in 2024. It is as relevant or more than it was on July 25, 1974.

There is much more to the life of this remarkable woman and I can only scratch the surface. I’ll let the words of the National Archives clasped it out.

Jordan had a successful career in Congress—she had a knack for deal-making and used the good will she cultivated to extend the minimum wage to cover nonunionized farmworkers and domestic workers. Jordan retired from politics in 1979 and spent her remaining years as an adjunct professor at the University of Texas. She was the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 1992, a role she had first filled in 1976.

Nancy Earl, an educational psychologist, was Jordan’s companion from the 1970s to Jordan’s death in 1996. The two women met on a camping trip in the late 1960s. Earl occasionally acted as Jordan’s speechwriter and helped care for Jordan after she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. While Jordan and Earl never addressed the nature of their relationship publicly, they had a strong, close partnership for many decades. In addition to being a brilliant politician, Jordan was both a groundbreaking African American and lesbian woman in Congress.