Barbara Jordan was a Houston lawyer, Texas state senator, and three-term U.S. representative whose Watergate impeachment statement and 1976 Democratic convention keynote made her one of the most influential political voices of the twentieth century. Born in Houston’s Fifth Ward in 1936, she became the first Black state senator in Texas since Reconstruction, the first African American elected to Congress from Texas, and the first Black woman from a Southern state to serve in the U.S. House.1The University of Texas at Austin. The Barbara Jordan Legacy
From Houston to Boston University Law
Jordan graduated with honors from Texas Southern University in 1956 and earned her law degree from Boston University School of Law in 1959. She was admitted to the Massachusetts and Texas bars the same year and returned to Houston to practice.1The University of Texas at Austin. The Barbara Jordan Legacy Her caseload covered real estate, business matters, and family law, and adoptions became her favorite type of case.2University of Florida. Big Hopes – Barbara Jordan Alongside her practice, she worked local Democratic campaigns, learning voter drives, redistricting, and organizing at the ground level.
Firsts in the Texas Senate
A 1965 federal court order forced Texas to redraw its senate districts under the one-person, one-vote standard. Harris County gained three new districts, one covering downtown Houston and the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Wards. Jordan ran there in 1966, defeated state Representative Charlie Whitfield in the Democratic primary, and won the general election.3TexasBar.com. Barbara Jordan Profile She was the first Black state senator in Texas since 1883 and the first Black woman ever elected to the Texas Legislature.1The University of Texas at Austin. The Barbara Jordan Legacy
She chaired the Labor and Management Relations Committee, becoming the first African American senator to lead a major committee in the chamber, and was the first freshman senator named to the Texas Legislative Council.3TexasBar.com. Barbara Jordan Profile She pushed through the state’s first minimum wage law, added antidiscrimination clauses to state business contracts, and created the Texas Fair Employment Practices Commission.4U.S. House of Representatives. JORDAN, Barbara Charline
Her colleagues elected her president pro tempore of the Senate, placing her second in the gubernatorial line of succession behind the lieutenant governor.5Texas Politics Project. Texas Politics – Order of Gubernatorial and Presidential Succession On June 10, 1972, with both Governor Preston Smith and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes out of state, she served as acting governor for a day. The role was ceremonial, but it made her the first Black chief executive of any state.1The University of Texas at Austin. The Barbara Jordan Legacy
Congress and the Voting Rights Act
Jordan won Houston’s 18th Congressional District in 1972 with 81 percent of the vote and took a seat on the House Judiciary Committee.6The Portal to Texas History. The Barbara C. Jordan Archives Her most durable legislative work came in the 1975 amendments to the Voting Rights Act. She helped add Section 203, which requires covered states and political subdivisions to provide voter registration materials, ballots, and other election information in the language of applicable minority groups as well as in English.7U.S. Department of Justice. Language Minority Citizens Congress found that language minorities had been shut out of the political process through discriminatory practices, and Section 203 targeted the groups that had suffered the worst exclusion: Spanish-speaking, Asian, Native American, and Alaskan Native communities.
The Nixon Impeachment Statement
On July 25, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon were broadcast on national television, and Jordan’s opening statement became one of the most cited political speeches in American history. She began with the Constitution’s preamble:
“Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: ‘We, the people.’ It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that ‘We, the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.'”8Miller Center. My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole; It Is Complete; It Is Total
She then 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.” Her legal analysis drew on James Madison to argue that a president connected in any suspicious manner with wrongdoing who sheltered others from accountability met the constitutional standard for removal.8Miller Center. My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole; It Is Complete; It Is Total
The committee approved three articles of impeachment, charging Nixon with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress, and alleging he had violated his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office.9The American Presidency Project. Articles of Impeachment Adopted by the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Nixon resigned before the full House voted.
The 1976 Democratic Convention Keynote
On July 12, 1976, Jordan delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in New York City, becoming the first Black woman to keynote a major party convention. She opened by acknowledging that the moment would have been almost impossible a decade earlier.10The American Yawp Reader. Barbara Jordan, 1976 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address The speech warned that the country risked becoming “a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual; each seeking to satisfy private wants.” She argued instead for a national community built on shared responsibility, telling the delegates that no executive order or law could force Americans to form such a community. “This we must do as individuals,” she said.
Teaching and the Immigration Commission
Jordan did not seek reelection in 1978 and left Congress in January 1979. She joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, teaching political values and ethics, intergovernmental relations, and policy research on local election systems.11Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Remembering Professor Barbara Jordan – An LBJ School Oral History She also served as ethics advisor to Texas Governor Ann Richards.
In the 1990s, she chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, later renamed the Jordan Commission, which analyzed the economic and social impacts of federal immigration policy and delivered recommendations to Congress.12The White House Archives. Presidential Message Honoring Barbara Jordan She pushed for streamlining legal immigration while tightening enforcement, and insisted reforms treat people with procedural fairness. In 1994, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Illness, Death, and Legacy
Jordan lived for years with multiple sclerosis, which eventually confined her to a wheelchair. She kept the diagnosis private for most of her career, and it did not stop her from teaching, advising Governor Richards, or chairing the immigration commission. She died in Austin on January 17, 1996, at 59, from complications of leukemia.
The Voting Rights Act provisions she championed still require bilingual election materials in covered jurisdictions. Her impeachment statement is still taught in law schools and quoted in congressional proceedings. The passenger terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport bears her name, as does a statue on the University of Texas campus.