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Fifty-five years ago today -- on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 1966 -- Fifth Ward’s Barbara Jordan won her first election. Every Texas schoolkid ought to know about the career that followed.
Jordan was highly visible, often the only Black woman in rooms full of white guys -- first in the Texas Senate, then the U.S. House of Representatives. But what people mainly remembered wasn't the way she looked but the way she sounded. Her voice was grave and deep, as authoritative as thunder. “Churchillian,” people called her.
In 1974, during President Richard Nixon’s impeachment hearings, she riveted Americans with one of the most important speeches in U.S. history. The hearings, she argued, were a moral imperative, a necessary defense of the U.S. Constitution.
Never mind that the Constitution hadn’t always defended people like Jordan – that the original had awarded no rights to African-Americans and women. "I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake," Jordan declared. "But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in 'We, the people.' "
"My faith in the Constitution is whole,” she boomed. “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."
Days later, Nixon resigned.
Jordan left the senate in 1979, after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and became a professor at UT-Austin. She rolled into classes in a wheelchair, but her voice remained strong. And she carried a copy of the U.S. Constitution in her purse.
Stuff that bugs me: For years Austin has had two statues of Barbara Jordan, and Houston has had none. Now the old downtown Barbara Jordan Post Office, the biggest thing the city named after her her, has been de-Jordaned.
The enormous facility will re-open next week as POST Houston, a “cultural campus” with “experiential retail,” clubs, restaurants, flexible office space for nomadic workers, and every other amenity that an upscale twentysomething might crave. I have high hopes for the place itself. I just hate losing Barbara Jordan’s name there.
But this helps: Houston recently announced that it’ll erect a piece of art honoring Jordan outside Houston Public Library’s African American Library, which operates out of the old Gregory School. The library is tucked away on Victor Street, and the art will be made mostly of glass, which seems too fragile and transparent a substance to honor someone so steely and private. But at least it’s something.
If you like knowing history like this: Check out James Glassman’s stuff. As @houstorian on Instagram, he unearths excellent quotations and graphics from Houston’s past. He sells excellent T-shirts. And for years he’s ranted about Houston’s desperate need for a Barbara Jordan statue.
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