Barbara Jordan

Barbara Charline Jordan was born on the twenty-first of February 1936 at Houston, Texas, the youngest of three daughters of the Reverend Benjamin Meredith Jordan — a Baptist minister and warehouseman — and Arlyne Patten Jordan, an exceptional public-speaker in the Black Baptist tradition whose Sunday recitations of the Old Testament her daughter would across her life identify as the principal source of her cultivated rhetorical voice. She was educated at the segregated Phillis Wheatley High School of Houston, where she completed the secondary curriculum in 1952 at the top of her class. She took the bachelor's magna cum laude in 1956 at the historically Black Texas Southern University and entered Boston University Law School the same fall — only one of two Black women in her cohort. She completed the LL.B. at Boston University in 1959.

She returned to Houston, was admitted to the Massachusetts and Texas bars in 1959, and worked through the 1960s as a Houston attorney and as a Democratic Party precinct organiser. She ran for the Texas House of Representatives in 1962 and 1964 and lost both contests. In November 1966 she was elected to the Texas State Senate — the first Black state senator from Texas since Reconstruction and the first Black woman ever elected to the Texas State Senate.

She was elected in November 1972 to the United States House of Representatives — the first African American elected to Congress from Texas since Reconstruction. She served three terms across the following six years and was assigned in January 1973 to the House Judiciary Committee.

Her decisive moment came on the twenty-fifth of July 1974 during the Watergate impeachment hearings. Her fifteen-minute opening statement on the impeachment articles — broadcast live on all three American television networks — argued from her Houston Phillis Wheatley training in the constitutional history of the impeachment clause that she had been excluded from the Founding constitution but that her faith in it was nevertheless total. The statement is preserved in the Avalon Project at Yale Law School as one of the principal speeches of twentieth-century American constitutional rhetoric.

She delivered the keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention at New York — the first African American and the first woman of any race to deliver the keynote address at a major American political-party convention. She left Congress in January 1979 on grounds of declining health and accepted the Lyndon Baines Johnson chair in national policy at the University of Texas at Austin, holding the chair for the rest of her life.

She died of multiple sclerosis at Austin on the seventeenth of January 1996, at fifty-nine.

She is honored here as the constitutional voice of Watergate.