American attorney, politician and educator featured on Time magazine cover as one of 12 Women of the Year 1/05/1976. One of only two blacks and six women to enroll in Texas So. University Law School, she graduated 84th in her class of 250. After practicing law in Houston, 1960-67, she found her true calling of politics during the 1960 Kennedy-Johnson campaign. She entered Democratic politics in the Texas Senate, 1967-72, becoming the first black woman to be elected to that body and entered the U.S. House of Representatives, 1973-79. Her life was a series of firsts: in 1972 she was also the first black woman elected to Congress from the South.
Born the third and youngest daughter of a laborer and union steward and her mom, Arlyne, a domestic, she remembers learning from her dad discipline, a sense of purpose and a demand for excellence. From her grandfather, John Patten, she got a sense of humor and the gift of acceptance of who she was. Originally “a poor kid from Harlem,” Jordan was the first woman and first black to keynote a Democratic National Convention. A compelling orator, she electrified the convention with her 11 minute speech, 7/25/1974, explaining why Richard Nixon’s transgressions during and after the Watergate break-in were really crimes against the Constitution. It also spotlighted a remarkable woman who spent her life breaking down racial barriers to get what she wanted to help blacks, women, the poor and sometimes the very rich. Brilliant and articulate, assertive and ambitious, Jordan was noted for speaking in a deep resonant commanding voice with precise diction and eloquence. She became famous as a member of the House Judiciary Committee’s TV hearings on impeaching President Nixon. Her name was considered as a future prospect for U.S. Attorney General, the Supreme Court, even the Vice Presidency.
After deciding not to seek a fourth term in Congress in 1978, Jordan left politics, explaining that she was moving in a different direction. She segued into teaching, finding it extraordinarily satisfying. Many felt that her decision was due to her suffering from a debilitating illness, which she would not name. She became a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. Personally aloof and markedly reclusive, she used a wheelchair and walker to navigate, compensating for her knee and leg problem. . She felt that her former life, in politics, was unbalanced when she was impelled by a driving force to get ahead and she limited her teaching classes to 15, limiting her work to include recreational time. In 1966, she said, “I am me. I trust myself, resist being controlled by anything external.”
Jordan died on 1/17/1996 Austin, TX of pneumonia and leukemia. She had been ill for several years with Multiple Sclerosis. In 1988 she had nearly drowned when she lost consciousness in her backyard swimming pool.
Link to Wikipedia biography