In Black America; Barbara Jordan: American Hero, with Mary Beth Rogers

Till the next episode. From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America. Sometime it was very important for the federal government to intervene to protect the rights of individuals and particularly the right to vote, which she always felt was the most fundamental

and important right of an American, and any time that would be infringed upon by custom our law that she found a champion in the federal government to come in and rectify that. So that was a very important lesson for her to learn that there was a role for a powerful and strong federal government that could actually benefit and help people's lives to improve. But she also learned that she couldn't depend on many of her allies that sometimes she was dealing with big talk instead of big results. And a lot of people pledged her support to her which she felt did not materialize. And so by the time she ran that third campaign, Victoria's campaign for the Texas State Senate, she was pretty much in charge of her own rights. Mary Beth Rodgers, author of the book, Barba Jordan, American Hero, published by Banum Books. The Honorable Barba Jordan was the first black U.S. Congresswoman from the deep south.

She defended the causes of the poor and promoted civil rights legislation during her six years as a representative of the 18th District of Texas. Jordan Stellar achieved many influence span decades and moved beyond the fifth ward of Houston, Texas, the nation, and even the world. Through a bold and powerful voice for many, she reflected humility throughout her life, never forgetting her beginnings. She exemplified honor, dignity, and integrity. Barba Jordan died on January 17, 1996, at the age of 59. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, Barba Jordan, with Biographer Mary Beth Rodgers, in Black America. She didn't know quite how to get started, and her daddy passed out and made her go print business cards and passed them out at the Good Hope Church, and so she began to do wills and divorces and have some business. But she began to get more involved in the community and came to the attention of a man whose

name was Mack Brown, who was the, at that time, probably the wealthiest and most influential African-American in Houston and throughout the South, he owned a string of savings and loan associations and was probably the largest SNL owner in the African-American owner in the South. And he began to set up speaking engagements for her. He saw her as a commer. He saw her as someone who could really could break through some of the barriers and began to provide opportunities for her to do that. For over 30 years, Barba Charlene Jordan actively contributed to the American dialogue, writing and speaking about the most critical issues that face Americans. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Jordan was the first black woman elected to the Texas Senate. She graduated with honors from Houston's Wheatley High School. She went on to Texas Southern University and graduated Magnum Cum LaDee with a degree

in government and history. In 1959, she received her law degree from Boston University. In 1966, Jordan became the first black woman elected to the Texas Senate. She was the only black and woman in that session. In 1972, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and assigned to the House to Dissierary Committee. And in 1976, she was the first black to deliver a keynote address at a national party convention. Recently, in Black America, spoke with Mary Beth Rogers, author of Barba Jordan, American Hero. When you take on a biography, you have to say to yourself, do I want to spend the next two or three years of my life studying this individual? And in my preliminary research, I decided I did because I was curious about her. I wanted to know what made her like she was. And I had the image of Barbara walking into the Texas State Senate when she was only 30 years old.

It was 1967. And fully a third of the members of that Senate body hated her onsite because of who she was and what she represented. And another third of those people in the Senate were very awkward around her. They may have never shaken the hand of anyone like Barbara or looked anyone like Barbara in the end. That's quite what to do. And the third that generally welcomed her to the Texas Senate were a little uneasy about how she was going to perform. And I thought, how could someone 30 years old walk into a situation like that, being the only woman, the only African American, younger than most of those people, and face that hostility and indifference, intention? But within a month, charm the leadership of the body, went over the members of the Senate, charm the press and the lobby. And at the end of four months, I'd be voted the most effective and popular freshman member of the Texas Senate.

So as I started to look at her, I thought, how did this happen? Most of us don't have that sense of self-confidence when we're 30 years old and can walk into an exclusive club that would love to keep us out. When did you first meet Ms. Jordan? I think I met her in the 60s as she was becoming involved in Texas politics. But I didn't really know her well until the 90s. And Richard became Governor of Texas. I was Governor Richard's Chief of Staff and Governor Richard asked Barbara to be her counsel on ethics. And so it was during that time period that I got to know her a little better. How long did it take you to assemble all the research information and the writing component to the book? Basically, about two years, I spent about two years with Barbara. Was it difficult and ascertaining the detailed information that it's included in the book? Well, Barbara was a very private person and many of her friends were reticent about talking in great deal about her.

But I had the cooperation of the family and her close friends and so gradually people began to open up to me. I was very fortunate. I was teaching at the time at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. And after Barbara's death, her secretary had been assigned to me. And she had kept Barbara's schedule over the years. She knew who Barbara's close friends were. She knew where most of her speeches and papers were and so that was a enormous benefit to me. I spent time before her death, give us an backstage idea of who Barbara Jordan really was. Well, Barbara Jordan was probably one of the most effective public speakers of this century. And she became an inside political player in Texas when she was in the state senate in the 60s. And then when she went to Congress in 1972, she was an effective insider. She could make things happen.

She could build alliances with very powerful people. And she did so. And so it was a combination of this extraordinary speaking ability that she had, which first came to national attention during the Watergate hearings in 1973. And then again in 1976, when she gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, she was the first of African-American to do that. And she became the voice of ethics for public servants over the course of her career. She left Washington in 1977 and came to the University of Texas to teach. But over the years, she continued to show up on just about every list of most admired Americans, most admired women you'd like to see on the Supreme Court, women who could be president. And the national press every time there would be a scandal of some import nationally would always call Barbara and want to know what she had to say about it.

So I think she was influential and was a voice of reason and ethics in public affairs and thus respected and admired for that. In reading a book, besides all the information that chronicles Miss Jordan's life, there is also an interwoven within that story, the history of the political process and politics and used it until the certain extent, the state of Texas. How did you go about interwoven that story? Well, I thought that was an important story to tell for several reasons. First of all, Barbara never talked about the hardships she encountered in her life. And she made it look so easy. It was as if this young woman could just, you know, step forward and accomplish anything she wanted. I knew that wasn't true. And I thought it was important to tell a little bit of the history of the civil rights movement in Texas and particularly in Houston where Barbara grew up because she grew up in a rigidly segregated community.

She grew up in under conditions that most people would consider poverty conditions. And I thought it was important to tell that story and to look at some of the obstacles she had had to overcome in her youth. And you couldn't tell that without talking about Texas politics in the 40s and 50s and 60s. And even going back and looking to the roots of it in reconstruction after the Civil War and what had happened to African Americans in Houston immediately after the Civil War and how some of the residential patterns of segregation developed, how some of the very restrictive laws on segregation developed in Houston in that period. So I thought it was important to tell that story in order to understand really the significance of what Barbara had achieved. Miss Jordan wasn't really in the true sense a Christian daughter. And she wanted to do things that young girls would like to do on Sunday instead of going to church.

The relationships she had with her grandfather almost Sundays afternoons. Well her grandfather was a junk dealer in Houston who had a prison record. And on Sundays he would take young Barbara in his mule drawn wagon through the river oak section of Houston which was one of the most exclusive residential sections there and pick up the refuse of the rich folks and take it back and shape it into something and sell it in his junk yard. And Barbara loved to go with Grandpa Patton on these rights because he talked to her and he listened to her and he made her feel that she was truly loved and truly important. And he taught her a kind of renegade Christianity which was that you didn't have to be in church to either love God or be loved by God that she had value as a human being. And that there was a way to treat people to help bring out the best in them. And Barbara's affection and attachment to her grandfather lasted her entire life. She had a photograph of him in her wallet which she carried with her at all times.

But when Barbara was 13, her own father felt the call and became a Baptist minister. And Barbara was grew up in a very religious church going family, a good hope missionary Baptist church in Houston which was one of the original African American churches to grow immediately after the end of slavery in Houston. And it was a prestigious church and it was a church that had so many activities. You can grow up in a community of love and acceptance. The Houston NAACP grew out of the congregation of that church. That's right. The pastor for 40 years was Reverend A. Lucas who organized all of the chapters of the NAACP in Texas into a statewide organization. And at one point Houston had the largest NAACP chapter in the south. And it all came out of Reverend Lucas's church.

And Barbara's family had been very involved in that church. And Thurgood Marshall on his trips throughout Texas would speak and be at the church. So Barbara kind of envied that notion of kind of challenging the legal system but working within the system as a way to make change because that was what went on at good hope missionary Baptist church. There was a particular unique bond between her and her sisters and her brother doing that time because basically they want to allow to go out and play with the other children. Now their father was very strict, made them memorize and recite Bible verses, insisted on church attendance, not only on Sunday morning but Sunday afternoon and Sunday evening and various services during the week. He would not let them go to movies, he would not let them go to dances. Barbara's sisters acquiesced a little more than she did. She rebelled and she would sneak around and do things but she really never openly confronted

her father until she was much older. But that whole atmosphere in the church and in the family even though she rebelled against a lot of it made her feel that she was important, accepted, cared for, looked after. And I think that was enormously important helping her develop that self confidence that allowed her to break so many barriers. A lot of people don't know until after they've read the book or had some other information that the Jordan family stayed with their uncle and there were a lot of, it was seven, nine or ten people staying in this frame house and fifth ward if I'm not correct. Well, Barbara, when Barbara was born, her mother and father lived with her grandfather and her grandfather's second wife and the daughter of the second wife and they became very, very close and her paternal grandfather was married to a woman whose father had once been the

pastor of the Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church. So the whole family, the whole family life and community life centered around the activities of that church. Was it her grandfather that was a member of the Texas legislature? It was her great grandfather. This was Grandpa Patton's father who left Texas when Grandpa Patton was a very small child and he only vaguely remembered his father. He knew that he had gone to Washington and become a lawyer and in the course of research for this book, I found an Ed Patton who had been one of the last African-American members of the Texas legislature before all of the segregation laws and retrenchment after reconstruction came in. He had served a one session of the legislature. He had fought the imposition of the poll tax.

He had fought for state appropriations for what is now Prairie View A&M College and had gotten and those days something like $100,000 appropriated for Prairie View which was quite significant. He represented San Jacena County, it was from a little town in these Texas called Evergreen. When he decided to run for reelection at this point, the clan and various white terrorist groups, and that's what they were, were trying to scare the black population into not voting, not participating and the sheriff in San Jacena County actually took a shot at Ed Patton and he feared for his life and left Texas and went to Washington and that was the last the Patton family had ever seen or heard of him. We began to see glimpses of what Barbara Jordan would become when she was at Phyllis Wheatley High School. Right. Give us a little background. Well she became a debater and an extraordinary public speaker and she was president of the National Honor Society, now she was never, Barbara was always a rather large girl, not particularly

attractive and not the ideal of the attractive young cheerleader or the most popular girl at school. So she decided she was going to have to use her mind in her town and she did and but she became a champion public speaker and debater and went on then to Texas Southern University where she really developed under her debate coach Tom Freeman and she began to use her skills. She won declamation contest, she won one of the high points of her college career was when she and her debate partner, Otis King, who now teaches at Texas Southern Law School, tied the Harvard debate team in a debate and as Barbara said that was like winning. I was also intrigued with the little side by a little story with Barbara and Otis traveling to Baylor and they got separated from the caravan and the debate teacher said well you two together should have been able to figure out what you all needed to be.

That's right. Tom Freeman was taking his debate team to debate in a forensic tournament at Baylor University and it was the first African American team to really break the color bar in Texas in terms of those competitions and they started out in two cars from Houston Freeman driving one and Otis King driving the other and as they got closer to the Waco, Otis and Barbara realized that Freeman had not told them where they were supposed to go, where they were supposed to stay and they drove around and finally figured out they went into one of the big hotels knowing that they probably were not going to be able to stay there and found out where to go and then they were very frustrated and Freeman, as you say, told them well I figured you could figure out a figured out and Barbara said and Otis King said that that's the kind of belief that Freeman expressed in them again once again added to their self confidence. Not only to make it in that segregated world but to venture out in that larger white

dominated world where they were in effect pioneers and he helped them have the confidence to know that they could do that and succeed and as Barbara said the first time she defeated a white girl in a declamation contest she realized that she had nothing to fear anymore. Once in her senior year at Texas Southern Barbara finally realized that she wanted to do something else more with the life and she decided she wanted to be an attorney and she eventually went to Boston University of Boston's law school but there she figured out or realized that all of her life she's been competing in this little segregated African-American world and once leaving that world and going to Boston and realizing that the world in which she thought she was living in is much smaller than those of her classmates. And I think that's true.

Barbara, I think in her high school years as she became aware of the system of segregation pretty much accepted it. She didn't think there was anything that could be done but as she and the TSU debate team traveled around the country she saw a different world and she realized in the Supreme Court it handed down the Brown versus Board of Education decision which called for the integration of public schools in the country and she realized that she had a role to begin to break down those barriers and if she could remain comfortable and successful in the Texas Southern and the fifth ward of Houston but she felt like at that point she had an obligation on a personal level to begin to break down some of those barriers and that involved leaving Texas and actually trying to live in the larger world and see what it was like. And going to Boston University put somewhere in a hardship on the family finances because she couldn't call on for Christmas or Thanksgiving doing her first couple of years.

It was very hard and her father sacrificed to send her money and her two sisters who were by this time teaching school would send her $10, $15 a month to help her get by so she didn't have any money and she didn't have anything extra and it was a family sacrifice and Boston was hard on her because she was competing in a different arena she was competing in law school with graduates of Brown and Smith and Columbia and they had had a much better education than she had at a TSU and for the first time in her life she realized how deprived of she had been growing up and having only the experience of segregated schools. Barbara worked very, very hard. She did not make great grades in Boston but she and she was worried her first year that she had flocked out. She was really anxious about it. She came through with 70s.

She passed her second year. She did a little better because in her second year she farmed a study group with the few other African American students who were in that in her law school class. One of them being minor jacks and who went on to become the mayor of Atlanta and she finished probably I guess with about an 80 average in law school. Took the bar in Massachusetts because she couldn't decide whether she wanted to stay there or come back to Texas but she came on back to Texas and took the bar and passed it and became only the second African American woman in the state of Texas to pass the Texas bar. Now coming back to Houston was not all the fanfare that she thought it would be having passed the bar and becoming a lawyer because basically the first couple of years she, her law firm was on a parents' down in the table. That's right and she didn't know quite how to get started and her daddy passed out. It made her go print business cards and passed them out at the Good Hope Church and so she began to do wills and divorces and have some business.

She began to get more involved in the community and came to the attention of a man whose name was Mac Brown who was the, at that time probably the wealthiest and most influential African American in Houston and throughout the South he was the, he owned a string of savings and loan associations and was probably the largest SNL owner in the African American owner in the South and he began to set up speaking engagements for her. He saw her as a comeer. He saw her as someone who could really could break through some of the barriers and began to provide opportunities for her to do that and after she decided to run for the legislature, Texas legislature in 1962 she got all involved in the Kennedy Johnson campaign in 16, had caught a political bug and decided to run for office and of course she would just defeat

it. So handily in 1962, this is before redistricting, this is before all of the officials were elected by a countywide election, the county was largely white and it was in effect rigged, no African American or minority could win countywide in Houston. Lessons learned from that, those two defeats she had. While she learned, first of all, that the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions which in effect provided for redistricting and reapportionment based on population and a Senate seat was carved out in Houston, as she began to look at the numbers she realized that in this new Senate seat which covered central Houston the third and fifth wards that she had carried almost every precinct in that district and so she ran for office and won. Her lesson that she learned was that sometimes it was very important for the federal government

to intervene to protect the rights of individuals and particularly the right to vote which she always felt was the most fundamental and important right of an American and any time that would be infringed upon by custom or law that she found a champion in the federal government to come in and rectify that. So that was a very important lesson for her to learn that there was a role for a powerful and strong federal government that could actually benefit and help people's lives to improve. But she also learned that she couldn't depend on many of her allies that sometimes she was dealing with big talk instead of big results and a lot of people pledged her support to her which she felt did not materialize and so by the time she ran that third campaign, victorious campaign for the Texas State Senate she was pretty much in charge of her own

race and had determined that she was not going to let anybody else make the decisions that would shape her political future. When did Miss Jordan begin to take seriously the physical restraints that were coming upon her at that time? Well during her first term in Congress in 1973 she began to have some numbness in her feet and she began to stumble a bit and had a few falls. She was so involved in getting acclimated to Congress and working her way and figuring out how to operate. She didn't really do anything about it but in December of 1973 she went to Bethesda Naval Hospital for a check-up and after numerous tests were run looking for various neurological disorders it was diagnosed that she had multiple sclerosis. Mary Beth Rogers authored the book Barba Jordan American Hero Published by Baton Books. If you have questions, comments or suggestions ask your future in Black America programs,

write us. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for a technical producer, David Alvarez, I'm John Johansson Jr. Thank you for joining us today and please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America Cassette's Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in Black America Cassette's Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hanson Jr.

Join us this week on in Black America. Now the time she made the keynote address at the Democratic Convention in 1976, she was walking with the cane. Most people were not aware of it unless they were very close to her. Barbara Jordan, American hero with author Mary Beth Rogers this week on in Black America.