Vernon Jordan

Vernon Eulion Jordan Jr. was born on the fifteenth of August 1935 at Atlanta, Georgia, the second of three sons of Vernon Eulion Jordan Sr. — a Black postal worker of the Atlanta Post Office — and Mary Belle Griggs Jordan, a caterer of the principal white-Atlanta society households. He was raised in the segregated University Homes housing-project of West Atlanta — the principal Black-Atlanta federal-housing-project of the post-Reconstruction period.

He was placed at the David T. Howard High School at Atlanta — the principal Black secondary school of Atlanta of the period — and at DePauw University at Greencastle, Indiana, completing the bachelor’s at DePauw in 1957 magna cum laude. He was the only Black student of his DePauw class.

He took the LL.B. at the Howard University Law School in 1960 — third in the class of 1960.

He was admitted in 1960 to the Georgia state bar and entered the Atlanta law firm of Donald L. Hollowell at Atlanta — the principal Black-Atlanta civil-rights legal practice of the period and the principal Atlanta NAACP-LDF-affiliated litigation office. He was the principal junior associate of Hollowell from 1960 to 1964.

He was the principal attorney for Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes — the first Black students admitted to the University of Georgia under federal-court order on the sixth of January 1961. He escorted Hunter and Holmes to the University of Georgia campus through the segregationist Athens mob on the eleventh of January 1961 — the principal Black-attorney post-Sweatt physical desegregation of a major southern state university of the period.

He was named in 1962 the Georgia field secretary of the NAACP and from 1965 to 1970 the director of the Voter Education Project at Atlanta — the principal Black voter-registration programme of the closing years of the Civil Rights movement, the successor to Wiley Branton (placed in this archive)’s 1962–1965 directorship of the same programme.

He was named on the third of January 1971 the executive director of the United Negro College Fund at New York and on the first of June 1972 the president of the National Urban League — the principal Black-American urban-services organisation of the post-war period.

He served the National Urban League presidency from 1972 to 1981 — directing the principal Black-American social-services agency through the period of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations’ urban-policy retrenchments.

He was shot and severely wounded at Fort Wayne, Indiana on the twenty-ninth of May 1980 by the white-supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin — Franklin was attempting to kill Jordan because Jordan had been escorting a white woman to an Indianapolis NAACP fundraiser. Jordan was hospitalised at Methodist Hospital, Indianapolis for ninety-eight days and recovered.

He resigned the National Urban League presidency in 1981 and joined the Washington law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld as senior partner. He held the senior-partner position at Akin Gump for twenty years until 2000.

He was the principal informal advisor to President Bill Clinton across the eight years of the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001 — the so-called First Friend of the Clinton White House. He chaired the Clinton-Gore transition team of 1992–1993.

He joined the Wall Street investment-banking firm Lazard Frères and Company at Manhattan in 2000 as senior managing director — the principal Black-American senior Wall Street investment banker of the post-Reginald-F.-Lewis (placed in this archive) period.

He died at Washington, D.C. on the first of March 2021 of natural causes, at eighty-five.

He is honored here as the principal Black senior advisor of the Clinton administration.