She Changed the Nation, page 16
In addition to her work with the NAACP, Jordan became involved in the citywide movement for school integration, vocational training, and education equity, issues that continued to energize the Black community. In 1963 Dr. Ira B. Bryant, principal of Kashmere High School and former principal of the Colored High School in Houston, complained that “Negro inmates in Texas prisons get better vocational training than Negro students in the Houston public schools.” His assertion angered Houston school board president Joe Kelly Butler, but Bryant was backed up by Hattie Mae White, still the lone Black voice on the school board. Bryant spoke “the whole truth,” she asserted. “Go to Wheatley and see the inferior type of training that nursing students get there and then go to San Jacinto and see those facilities. They are lovely,” said White.27 In the summer of 1963, when the board refused to integrate the all-white San Jacinto Vocational High School, a group of nine Black leaders, along with the Inter-Faith Group committee of Greater Houston, wrote to the school board threatening “overt reactions.” The letter, which Jordan signed, defined “overt reactions” as “peaceful demonstrations on the part of dissatisfied persons if there is no redress.” White pressed the issue, stating, “I feel the board’s attitude toward integration does not comply or show good faith in the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling.”28 That was the understatement of the year. In 1960 a federal judge had ordered the Houston school board to begin a “grade a year” integration program, starting with the first grade. By 1963 the first three grades had been integrated, but the slow pace of the process and the continued discrimination faced by Black people of high school age seeking vocational or professional education remained acute.
Jordan then became involved in a new organization to force the issue of school integration called PUSH (People for the Upgrading of Schools in Houston), led by Rev. William Lawson, whose church was attended by many college students from Texas Southern. When the school board appointed a conservative Black principal to a key administrative position, PUSH spoke out against the move, which it criticized as a stunt to delay integration and shift attention away from the board’s flagrant disregard for Brown.29 Joining one hundred protesters who picketed a school board meeting, Jordan read a statement opposing the appointment: “It is clear that such a position and the selection of the person to fill this position would be designed not to elevate the status of Negroes but to further degrade them.” One of the placards read, “Down with Uncle Toms.”30
Jordan and the NAACP used the issue of inferior education to highlight economic inequality and discrimination in the workplace. According to the 1960 census, the median income of Blacks in Texas was less than half that of whites. In the spring of 1963, “the issue of jobs for Negroes has come to the surface with the fierceness of a pent up cause,” said the Texas Observer.31 Segregation “was [all] around you,” Houstonian Alvia Wardlaw remembered. “You knew what it meant from an early age. You encountered it in the grocery store. There was a colored water fountain and a white water fountain. Every adult in the community made you aware of segregation and discrimination, but at the same time you could forget about it when you were doing things that were part of your community, like going to the games and pep rallies or hearing civil rights activists like Barbara Jordan or the Reverend William Lawson speak.”32 By 1963 Jordan had established a reputation as an outspoken opponent of segregation and racial injustice.
The day after a quarter of a million Americans gathered in Washington in August of 1963 to march for “jobs and freedom” and hear Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black leaders make the national case for an end to segregation, Texans staged their own march in the state’s capitol. They pressed their case for greater economic opportunity before Governor John Connally. It was a tense time. On August 29, approximately one thousand marchers took to the streets of Austin in what was probably “the largest civil rights march Texas has yet had.” All were singing freedom songs and carrying signs that read, “Segregation is a new form of slavery,” “We are tired of gradualism,” “no more 50 Cents per hour,” and “Freedom Now.”33 Speakers at the rally in Rosewood Park in East Austin after the march to the state capitol included “Barbara Jordan, Houston lawyer.”34
In addition to her activism on behalf of civil rights and integration, Jordan worked hard on behalf of the Democratic Coalition. In her speeches she set out to persuade Black voters that coalition politics could work, and that a political “realignment” was slowly tilting the Democratic Party in the South in a more liberal direction. She conceded that Black voters were a minority, but if they registered in greater numbers, she argued, they could hold the balance of power within a coalition. “With Negro voter registration on the rise and Industrialism increasing, the long term prospect is that Negroes, union forces, and assorted liberals will take over the dominant role” in the southern Democratic party, she declared in a lengthy speech delivered shortly after her first defeat. Jordan cited the support she and other progressive Democrats gained from white voters as evidence of change within the party. Conservatives were leaving, and progressive victory, although not certain, was within the “realm of the possible.” Urging her audience to redouble their registration efforts, she stated, “You can help this national balance of power become a reality by your successful voter registration effort. You can help free yourself and your country, you can become involved in the electoral process in a meaningful way . . . you can register, you can vote. This you can do for yourself and your country.” The echoes of Kennedy’s first inaugural address ring through in this optimistic address to block workers as she urged them to register and get out the vote for the liberal coalition in Texas.35
The Democratic Coalition also began to confront racism in its ranks directly. Organized labor in Houston began to move away from its support of segregation. Thanks to progressive New Deal legislation and the hard work of the AFL, and then the CIO, many of the workers who did the gritty, dirty jobs laying down pipe, sweating in the steel mills, and working in the chemical plants that lined the Ship Channel had joined unions, which became important institutions in the city’s industrial landscape. White and Black laborers, however, lived in separate worlds and operated in segregated unions. Coalition politics had led white labor leaders in Houston to reach out to Black voters, but growing activism forced them to face the reality that too often unions benefited white workers over Black. In the summer of 1963, Texas labor leaders, inspired by President Kennedy, issued statements recognizing the moral justice of racial equality in their ranks. In a speech to members of the electrician’s union, state AFL-CIO president Hank Brown argued the case for integration: “I know this is unpopular with many of you, but there is going to have to be room for Negroes in the labor movement. The weapons Negroes are using today to seek rights are the same weapons used by organized labor 30 years ago to bring us to the position we hold today. I think the Negro, the one who is qualified, ought to have the same chance that such tactics brought to the labor movement 30 years ago.”36 Organized labor was willing to work with Black members and Black leadership, but it had to be pushed.
Despite such progress, some observers noticed a lack of enthusiasm among Black elites and passivity among the masses. According to Houston Chronicle journalist Saul Friedman, most Black residents in Houston seemed indifferent to the social revolution sweeping the nation. He noted that fewer than twenty people traveled on the bus chartered for the 1963 March on Washington and criticized Black leaders for failing to foment more protests. He argued that the integration of public accommodations had come at little cost to white patrons, adding that these changes mattered little to Black Houstonians too poor to eat out or stay in previously all-white hotels. “Nearly 61 percent of the Negroes of Houston earn less than $4,000 a year,” he noted, “[and] a quarter earned less than $2,000 per annum.” Job discrimination remained rampant, particularly in the skilled trades. “There is not a single Negro engineer, draftsman, union bricklayer, union electrician, plumber, or crane operator. Without exception, Negroes are laborers on construction projects.” School integration, he added, remained at a standstill.37
Friedman singled out for criticism Black attorney George Washington Jr., who, he alleged, profited from Governor John Connally’s patronage. But Washington defended his support for Connally. “We have worked our guts out for liberals and they give us nothing even if they win.” He riposted, “What has trade union labor done for us in 20 years?”38 But Friedman lamented the weakness of Black political leadership: “In Houston, the Negro community continues to sup from the back door on rights that are thrown like bones from the table of the white power structure.” Washington’s skepticism about white laborers was shared by other members of Houston’s Black middle class who also opposed nonviolent direct action. Julius Carter, editor of the Forward Times, said that “Martin Luther King’s tactics would not do here. I’m against demonstrations for demonstration’s sake. There’s just too much demonstrating going on. Our job should be to build the Negro economic power, to build the Negro market. Then the whites will respect us.” Booker T. Washington could not have stated it better. When Friedman asked Carter what “Negro action organization he felt closest to,” he replied, “The Riverside National Bank.”39
Although Carter endorsed her in all her races, Jordan disagreed with his view that protests and alliances with liberals and labor were futile and lacking in purpose. In the fall of 1963, she became involved in voting-rights activism. The Democratic Coalition led by activist and journalist Larry Goodwyn in Austin took charge of a statewide campaign to register new voters and repeal the poll tax in a November referendum. Jordan directed the Democratic Coalition’s Houston operation.40 Goodwyn, who headed the statewide effort out of an Austin office, emphasized the importance of the Bayou city. “The biggest job in Texas is being handled by the headquarters in Houston,” he noted. “Some 70,000 Negro voters are eligible to vote and that means that 3,500 Freedom Kits have to be distributed! . . . Barbara Jordan is doing an around-the-clock job of directing her staff on the distribution of kits and the recruiting of block workers. They’ll be working on both jobs right up to the time the polls close Saturday. Over 60 precincts are involved in this big effort . . . the biggest one in Texas.”41 Calling the voter registration packets “freedom kits” cemented the connection between the movement and the upcoming vote. Jordan was paid $300 for leading the Houston effort, an amount second only to Goodwyn’s fee.
The effort to repeal the poll tax failed. Still, thousands more Black Houstonians became registered voters eligible to cast a ballot in 1964. The coalition also gained more support for liberal Democratic candidates. As Goodwyn pointed out in the Texas Observer, “The tremendous rise in the voting power of Negroes and Latin Americans . . . gives an ever broadening base to the liberal labor minorities coalition. Leaders of these minorities will play increasingly powerful parts in the political decision making of the liberal wing of the party.”42 And although Latinos in Houston were not a recognized faction in the HCD, the off-year 1963 election and poll-tax repeal movement propelled the emergence of a new Latino voice in the city.
Lauro Cruz, a native of the Fifth Ward who later became a member of the Texas House of Representatives, decided to run as a precinct judge in his district. Born in 1936, he had attended local schools in Houston, joined the Marine reserves, and then got called up to basic training at Camp Pendleton, where he earned his high school equivalency, a GED. On his return to Houston, he became the first Latino hired to drive a city bus. He subsequently bought a local store (his mother had also owned one) and decided to become involved in politics: “In that community we had had a precinct judge who had been a conservative, she had never been challenged; I just decided on my own to run against her.”43 One year earlier, Latinos, like Black Texans, had split on whether to support Connally or Yarborough for governor.44 Cruz supported Yarborough, but when he decided to run he knew he could not rely on the Harris County Democrats, and he managed his own campaign: “I was running that grocery store [and] I knew a lot of people; I set it up to where I had a lot of Hispanic people at the polls.” When Cruz won, he received an unexpected call from Mrs. Frankie Randolph: “The phone rang; and this old gravelly voice said . . . ‘This is Mrs. Randolph,’ and said, ‘well I think you did good boy.’ Later on, I found out that was the highest accolade she gave to anybody.” Cruz was thrilled. A timber heiress who became involved in liberal causes in the 1950s, Mrs. Randolph, as she was called, was the “den mother” of the Texas liberals. She bankrolled the Texas Observer, had become a national committeewoman of the Democratic Party, and despised Lyndon Johnson, a man she regarded as wholly unprincipled. Randolph’s congratulatory call made Cruz realize that he could bring a Latino voice into the coalition in Houston.45
After he became a precinct judge, Cruz teamed up with Otis King and Barbara Jordan on a project for the non-profit Crescent Foundation to find employment for “hard core unemployed people.” Cruz met King and Jordan in “an old house” on Lyons Avenue, in the Fifth Ward, outside a pool hall. Cruz remembered the wintertime cold. “We had an open fire heater, [and] you could see by the flames that it was not an airtight building. We were on the second floor, and we were sitting around there trying to get this thing together.”46 Jordan’s work with the foundation showed she remained tight with King and Washington despite their support for Connally. Antipoverty work, voter registration, and NAACP activism introduced her to a wide range of activists in Houston, Dallas, and Austin. She began to think about the next election and what the defeat of the November anti-poll tax referendum meant for her campaign. And then in November 1963 a life-changing event occurred in Dallas.
President Kennedy’s death devastated Jordan. Houston hairdresser Wilma Brown recalled that Jordan had been with her when the news came on television. Jordan stared at the screen and wept. “Kennedy will always be my president,” she told Brown. “If only I could have been that person instead of him; if I could only have Oswald shoot me, my life would have been well worth it.” Brown told her that she was “crazy,” but Jordan’s reaction showed her feeling for Kennedy and his stated ideals.47
By 1964 Jordan had been involved in voter registration drives and the anti–poll tax movement for four years. She had marched with the NAACP and become an advocate for immediate compliance with school integration. She was better known than ever, had more contacts than ever. In this period she never stopped speaking; wherever she was asked to go, she went. As Rev. Bill Lawson remembered, “She would make herself available to every kind of little group. Barbara would come to your church, union hall, school.”48 She traveled outside Houston, where her public speeches took on a more critical tone. In spring 1964 she delivered a banquet keynote address in Chicago honoring Charles F. Armstrong, a long-serving African American Illinois state legislator who had championed school integration. The eight hundred guests attending the elegant dinner in the Sherman House included attorneys, school board members, Cook County superintendents, civil rights activists such as Daisy Bates, and Jordan’s friend and fellow attorney Ernestine Washington. According to the Chicago Defender, Jordan’s speech “brought down the house, with the line: ‘Negroes today reject Uncle Toms and Uncle Thomases—Uncle Toms with PhD degrees.’”49 Thrilled to return to a city she had loved as a teen, Jordan had moved miles politically since the 1950s. Individual Black achievement was not a substitute for racial justice. Black Americans needed to demand full equality.
In 1964 Jordan ran for the state legislature again. Initially she had wanted to oppose a nonincumbent, but a more experienced candidate convinced her that she should challenge Willis Whatley once again. As soon as she left that meeting, she knew she had made a huge mistake, that she had allowed herself to be talked into something that went against her better judgment. But she vowed to make the best of it. Black turnout was better than ever, and she gained 20,000 more votes than her previous run in 1962, but still she lost to her better-funded conservative opponent. She criticized the HCD for their incompetence and lack of support. When she sought computer data on the voters in her district, the HCD sent the information to El Paso. “By the time we got the data the campaign was over,” complained Wilhelmina E. Perry, a sociology professor at Texas Southern and a Jordan campaign advisor.50 Perry was another older woman professional Jordan had looked to for guidance. A dedicated member of the HCCO, Perry had worked closely with Jordan on the poll-tax referendum, and she remembered the candidate’s frustrations at the inefficiency and the arrogance of the HCD during the “chaos” of Jordan’s 1964 campaign. Jordan felt hurt and frustrated by the indifference shown by her white political colleagues. Once again, it seemed, she had worked hard for the coalition, and she felt let down by white voters in her city as well as by the coalition.
After her loss, she recalled, “I didn’t go to campaign headquarters. Instead, I just got in my car and drove around most of election night. The question was: ‘is a seat in the state legislature worth continuing to try for?’ I asked myself—‘why are you doing this?’”51 In her depression, she even neglected to thank her campaign workers: “After I got home and had gone to bed, my campaign manager and campaign coordinator came to my house asking, where have you been? The people are all waiting for you at headquarters. I said: I’ve been driving around. And when Chris called to say, ‘well we’ve got the analysis for you,’ I snapped at him: ‘I’ve got the analysis for you: I didn’t win.’ And went back to bed.”52 Shockingly, Jordan walked out on her campaign staff and left her workers hanging.
