Hers was a life of firsts:
The first African-American woman elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction.
The first woman from Texas, and the first African-American woman since 1898, to be elected to the United States House of Representatives.
The first African-American woman to serve on the House Judiciary Committee.
Yet it was one speech given at a pivotal point in the country’s history that made Barbara Jordan a national name.
On July 25, 1974 Barbara commanded the country’s attention with her 13-minute opening statement at the impeachment hearings of President Richard Nixon on July 25, 1974. Her statement, broadcast live to the nation in prime time, made the case to impeach President Nixon in terms that ordinary citizens understood: in defense of the Constitution.
“Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, “We, the people.” It is a very eloquent beginning. But when the document was completed on the seventeenth of September 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.”
Born in Houston in 1936, Barbara grew up in a poor neighborhood and attended segregated public schools. After high school, she enrolled at Texas Southern University, an historically black college that Texas created to avoid having to integrate the University of Texas. She graduated magna cum laude.
A champion debater in high school, Barbara led her college debate team to victories over Yale and Princeton, and earned a tie with Harvard that raised eyebrows in the college debate world.
“When an all-black team ties Harvard,” she said, “it wins.”
Barbara had her sights set on law school ever since Edith Sampson, a Black lawyer, gave a talk at her high school career day. After graduating from college, she left Houston for Boston University, where she was one of two black women in her law school class.
She earned her law degree in 1959, passed the bar in both Massachusetts and Texas, and returned to Houston to start her own law practice, working out of her parents’ house. At the time there were three black women licensed to practice law in Texas. Barbara was the third.
She took a second job as an administrative assistant to a county judge, and joined John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960. Liking politics more than a little, Barbara ran twice for a seat in the Texas house of representatives and lost, but her third campaign — this time for a state senate seat — sent her to Austin in 1967. As a state senator, Barbara focused on civil and human rights issues, and passed Texas’ first minimum wage law.
She ran for Congress in 1973, winning the seat by more than 80 percent. Fellow Texan (and former president) Lyndon Johnson supported her appointment to the House Judiciary Committee, a top appointment for a junior congresswoman.
In all, Barbara served three terms in Congress. She passed legislation that required banks to lend and work with underserved poor and minority communities; expanded federal voting rights protection to Latinx, Asian and Native Americans; and established a Fair Employment Practices Commission. She sponsored and co-sponsored more than 300 bills and resolutions, including a bill that would have granted housewives Social Security benefits. She supported the Equal Rights Amendment.
In 1976, Democrats named her the keynote speaker at their national convention, a first for a Black woman. The party tapped her a second time in 1996.
Barbara retired from Congress in 1979 to teach ethics at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. She received more than 25 honorary degrees and dozens of awards, and continued to support women’s and civil rights issues.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton awarded Barbara the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. He also named her chair of the US Commission on Immigration Reform, but she had to step down due to poor health.
Barbara was diagnosed with MS in 1973, but kept her condition secret from her Congressional colleagues. Her health continued to decline after she retired from politics (she gave her speech to the 1996 Democratic convention in a wheelchair) though she kept up a busy schedule.
Barbara died on Jan. 17, 1996 from complications of pneumonia from leukemia. She was 59. More than 1,500 people attended her funeral in Houston; President Clinton and Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas, spoke, as did Barbara’s college debate coach. She is buried in Texas State Cemetery, the first African American to be buried with 900 governors, senators, congressmen and other prominent Texans (and more than 2,000 veterans and wives of the Confederacy).
Hers was a life full of accomplishments, yet her belief in the country guided her words.
“What the people want is very simple,” she wrote. “They want an America as good as its promise.”