Barbara Jordan's voice still echoes for Democrats

HOUSTON -- You can almost hear her famous voice booming off the printed page.Barbara Jordan still speaks, boldly, forcefully, from a letter buried in a box on a shelf behind two sets of glass doors inside a library on the poor side of town.The archives at Texas Southern University tell the story.Reaction flooded the late congresswoman's offices after her brilliant and stirring keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.In America's awkward pause after the Vietnam War, Watergate and the toughest times of the civil rights struggle, Jordan captivated the nation when she called for -- almost demanded -- national unity."We are a people in a quandary about the present," she boomed over the audience at Madison Square Garden. "We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community. We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present, unemployment, inflation, but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America. We are attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal . . . "Jordan spoke of the bedrock beliefs of the Democratic Party and its place in great change movements of the past. But she admitted its mistakes, too. She pointedly turned down a chance to bash the opposition party. And she even concluded by quoting a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.Hundreds of telegrams poured into her office and the Democratic National Committee. She got thousands of phone calls and tall stacks of letters now buried in those obscure archives at her undergraduate alma mater.One postcard offering praise was from a 16-year-old Kingston, Pa., kid named Marc Holtzman -- who would one day run for governor of Colorado as a Republican."It was kind of like a political awakening for me," Holtzman, now 48, remembered of the speech. "Barbara Jordan was just somebody who was unbelievably dynamic, inspiring, somebody who was so symbolic of what I wanted to become."Many other letter writers, like a man in Farmington, Conn., told Jordan they were moved to a simple conclusion: "Jim Carter does not need to look any further for a vice president. She is superior to any of the candidates he is considering."But that was not to be. Jimmy Carter, who began his run for the presidency while still a first-term governor of Georgia, picked a more traditional choice, Walter Mondale. Jordan, a second-term black congresswoman, wouldn't even allow her name to be submitted for formal consideration.She was matter-of-fact in her typed reply to the Connecticut man. The letter speaks:"While I respect Governor Carter's sensitivity to the needs of blacks and women, I do not feel that the country is ready to accept a woman in the second highest office in the land," Jordan wrote. "However, when that time does come, I plan to be ready."Jordan never got to see that day.She traded politics for academia in the 1980s and, just a month short of her 60th birthday, died on Jan. 17, 1996.On that day, Hillary Rodham Clinton was in Ann Arbor, Mich. She toured a pediatric hospital, greeted kids who were finger-painting and met with members of a local fan club who passed out cookies baked from Clinton's personal recipe. Such was the life of a first lady on a book tour.On the day Jordan died, Barack Obama was a young lawyer and college lecturer on the south side of Chicago. He was still in the early stages of that year's campaign for a seat in the Illinois Senate -- the springboard to the rest of his political career.Even in 1996, the thought of the Democratic Party nominating a woman or a black man for president seemed nearly as distant as it had 20 years earlier.And, at least according to Jordan, it was unthinkable in 1976, four years after Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's groundbreaking but mostly symbolic presidential campaign."I appreciate very much your vote of confidence in me and your belief that I am qualified to be the vice-presidential nominee of the Democratic Party," Jordan wrote to a woman in Redondo Beach, Calif. "I chose not to have my name placed in nomination for the position because I believe that if and when my name or the name of any other black American is placed in nomination, it should be done with a serious intent. Such was not the case for my name being placed in nomination in New York City."In those candid letters to well-wishers she had never met, Jordan spoke of one barrier she knew she couldn't break.The rest of her life, she was known for a fierce, well-pronounced determination that acknowledged few limits.* * * Jordan was born in 1936, and grew up under segregation in what biographer Mary Beth Rogers described as "the black world, her world, the Fifth Ward of Houston."Her parents met through their Baptist church, and father Ben Jordan, a preacher, was a dominant figure who tried to raise his three daughters under a strict rule of discipline.On Sunday mornings, they'd wake up early to study Scripture together in the living room of their modest home before heading off to church, said Rose Mary McGowan, the future congresswoman's sister.The girls were not allowed to go to movies. They never had keys to the house. If they went out and came home, their parents would have to let them in, McGowan said.But even at a young age, the baby of the family was strong-willed, to put it diplomatically."She did listen, but she wanted you to take her advice particularly," McGowan says at a home filled with tributes to her late sister. "She would listen to some of the things that I said, but she really liked to have the last word."The father wanted all three of his girls to become teachers. But Jordan wanted to be a lawyer, just like her hero, Edith Sampson, the first black woman elected as a judge in the United States, the first African-American to be appointed as delegate to the United Nations.Few people spoke up to Ben Jordan. But Barbara Jordan did."She was strong in her convictions, and she even softened his heart in a sense, too," McGowan says.In high school, those convictions found a direction. She joined a debate team, took on the boys and at one competition impressed a judge who would later become a mentor."She could speak well. And she could speak convincingly," says Dr. Thomas Freeman, 88, Jordan's professor and debate coach at Texas Southern. "She had a strong voice, a voice that carried."Jordan graduated and enrolled at the Houston school, where she ignored the lack of females on Freeman's debate team and won a spot as the first.Even today, Freeman is the ultimate showman, and, like other students, Jordan emulated his dramatic, strikingly proper speaking style.With it, she and her classmates from Texas' first supposedly "separate-but-equal," all-black university more than held their own against teams from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia. Sometimes, Jim Crow laws meant they had to stay in blacks-only motels on the outskirts of town."Everywhere we went, we were against men," Freeman says, in an office where every shelf, desk and table is covered with gold trophies, pictures and knickknacks.And how did the Ivy League men react? They said, "I can't believe it," Freeman recalls. "We let a woman beat us?"Jordan was a star at Texas Southern. One of her only regrets: She lost an election for student council president.After TSU graduation, she enrolled in law school at Boston University and took her speaking talents to a whole new level, Freeman says. She earned her law degree in 1959, returned to Houston and became only the third black woman licensed to practice law in Texas.* * * Soon, as the civil rights struggle was at its peak, she tried to win seats in the state legislature. In 1966, she became the first black woman elected to the Texas Senate.In 1972, Jordan won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and she took a seat on the Judiciary Committee. She had no way of knowing what a national platform that would become.Over the next two years, as most congressional freshmen are still learning their ways around the Byzantine corridors of power, Jordan was on the committee investigating President Nixon's alleged abuses of power in the Watergate affair.Most Americans had never heard of Jordan. But on July 25, 1974, she gave one of the more memorable and blistering statements during the debate over articles of impeachment.Sitting next to another young rookie, now-veteran Rep. Charlie Rangel, Jordan began: "Mr. Chairman, I join my colleague, Mr. Rangel, in thanking you for giving the junior members of this committee the glorious opportunity of sharing the pain of this inquiry . . . "Before talking of the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution, she paused to consider its "We the People" preamble, and how that term did not include her when it was written in 1787.That was Jordan's style, Freeman explains. She didn't just project her voice powerfully, but she projected herself, her story, into the authority of the words."Today, I am an inquisitor. And hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel," she said. "My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution."* * * The speech elevated Jordan as a voice of accountability, ethics and the rule of law. And so, after Nixon's resignation, when Democrats were trying to topple President Ford in 1976, she was a logical choice to make one of two keynote addresses at the Democratic National Convention.Sen. John Glenn of Ohio went first. And then, when it was Jordan's turn, few knew why she had to be helped up six short steps to the podium. According to Rogers' biography, American Hero, right in the middle of the Watergate investigation, Jordan had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.The speech began slowly. Jordan greeted delegates and spoke about a 144-year tradition of Democrats coming together to write a party platform and pick a presidential nominee."But there is something different about tonight," she continued. "There is something special about tonight. What is different? What is special? I, Barbara Jordan, am a keynote speaker."That "I, Barbara Jordan" punch line, which Freeman can mimic in a falsetto voice even today, did not appear in the first draft, nor the second draft of the speech. It was scribbled in pencil between lines on the third draft.The line wasn't fancy. It wasn't lyrical. But it was halting, and it signaled the party's message that year. Nobody said "change" like Barbara Jordan.At its heart, the speech was about national healing, national unity and "the common ties that bind all Americans.""Many fear the future. Many are distrustful of their leaders, and believe that their voices are never heard. Many seek only to satisfy their private . . . wants, to satisfy their private interests," Jordan said. "But this is the great danger America faces: that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups; each seeking to satisfy private wants. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good? This is the question which must be answered in 1976: Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor; or will we become a divided nation?"That one brief passage foreshadowed Clinton's 2008 promise that there would be no "invisible Americans" if she were in the White House. Right there was a preview of Obama's unifying theme: "There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There's the United States of America."As Jordan got her day in the spotlight in 1976, "Perhaps the times were right for a black woman to step forth and represent the entire nation, because that's what she did," her former teacher, Freeman, says.But what about 2008? What would Barbara Jordan think today? Is the country now ready to take a bigger leap and elect its first black president?To Freeman that's a sad question."We made progress up to the '70s, but so much more progress needs to be made to get America ready," he says, his voice rising and then falling to a whisper. "Because the very question that is being raised . . . There would be no reason for the question if we were ready. Nobody would ask, 'Are we ready?' We would just move along."(Contact M.E. Sprengelmeyer of the Rocky Mountain News at sprengelmeyerm@shns.com)