She Changed the Nation, page 19
Jordan’s primary contest was highly unusual in that she faced a white liberal as opposed to a white conservative. Whitfield and Jordan therefore both reached out to the same group of voters. What divided them were not issues but race. Harris County Democrat organizer Bob Hall remembered the contest well: “She really was the issue, her black face was the issue.” Like Perry, Hall understood the power dynamics of coalition politics: “This is something that had to be taught on both sides. That it had to be a bargain. And had to do with the selection of candidates and agreement on issues. Everybody had to be empowered and they had to have something to say about it. . . . It was a complicated thing . . . no matter how liberal we claimed to be we had all grown up in a totally segregated and racist culture, and we had to change things we did not want to confront. . . . We’re going to be changing things and that means dealing with Black people in a different way.”46 Jordan’s race against Whitfield forced white liberals in the HCD to recognize not only the power of Black voters but the necessity of Black political leadership.
At the end of the campaign, Jordan answered to Whitfield’s attempts to discredit her because of race with a proud, racially conscious theme that perfectly reflected the feelings of her constituents. “Our time has come,” she said at a public rally. For the past twenty years, Black voters had voted for white candidates, and sent whites legislators to hold office. Now Jordan urged Black voters to seize the day: “Can a white man win? I say to you NO. Not this time. Not . . . this . . . time!”47 She was right. The 1966 Democratic primaries in Texas sent three Black representatives to the Texas legislature for the first time since the late nineteenth century, and two of them, Barbara Jordan and Curtis Graves, were from Houston. The expanded number of at-large House seats allowed Graves in by a whisker, and Jordan won her senate seat in a landslide.
Fears of a tossup were unfounded—Jordan crushed Whitfield. She received 98 percent of the Black vote in her district, the highest percentage of the Black vote received by any candidate, white or Black. The Eleventh Senate District was racially mixed, and Jordan did well with white voters too, but the Black turnout for Jordan was so large that she only needed twelve white votes to win.48 Jordan never believed that the HCD was fully with her in this race.49 She was not alone in this view.50 Even though she received a significant number of white votes and had been endorsed by the HCD, she emerged from this race as a symbol of Black political empowerment.51 After Jordan won, her emotional campaign workers, largely female, sang a civil rights medley, including “We Shall Overcome.”52 “We needed a victory,” Jordan stated. “This is the only way. We’ve been talking a long time, but they always come back and say, ‘We don’t see anything.’ They don’t win. A victory in a body like the statehouse will do more to help the Negro recognize his voting strength than anything I can think of.”53
Her victory over Whitfield for the Senate seat, along with the election of Curtis Graves to the Texas House, made national news. The New York Times ran her photograph, and another photo of her and Curtis Graves appeared in Time magazine under a sign that said VICTORY.54 President Lyndon Johnson called to congratulate the young politicians, and a photo of Jordan and Graves appeared in the nation’s major Black newspapers. This election was not just a local story but one that inspired oppressed people throughout Texas. On Labor Day 1966, Jordan spoke at a rally in Austin supporting farmworkers who had marched 490 miles from the Rio Grande Valley to demand a minimum wage only to be told by Governor Connally to go home.55 Progressives turned the event into a push for justice, better pay, and equal rights. At the gathering in Zilker Park, Jordan said: “You’ve heard enough words today; what you really want to see is us pass a minimum wage bill. Take heart today, for no one is trying to give you anything but what you justly deserve. You are not begging for anything. You are not requesting anything; you are making your demand.”56 As a new senator, Jordan would have a say in minimum wage laws. Her status as a political leader now dovetailed with her reputation as an activist.
Jordan’s spot in the limelight took her to Washington, DC. In February 1967, just as she started her term in the Texas Senate, President Johnson invited her to a meeting to discuss a wide range of proposed civil rights legislation with him and other Black leaders. Jordan joined Dorothy Height, Whitney Young, and Roy Wilkins around a table with the president. When Johnson looked at her and said, “Barbara, what do you think?” she responded by proposing that his new federal jury bill contain a “ban on sex discrimination” because this would help “get the Negro women of the country mobilized.”57 Jordan had been a senator a little over a month, but after this meeting she was mentioned in the Washington Post as an up-and-coming Black leader. When Vice President Hubert Humphrey came to Houston, Jordan became part of his entourage. She was emerging as a nationally known Black Democrat.
Figure 4. State Sen. Barbara Jordan speaking at Miller Memorial Theater in Houston, Texas, October 15, 1969. Barbara C. Jordan Archives, Texas Southern University, Houston, TX.
In June 1967 the Democratic National Committee invited Jordan back to Washington along with 130 other African American elected officials. The party leaders sought to form a task group dedicated to cementing African American loyalty to the Democratic Party. Criticism of the war in Vietnam proffered by Martin Luther King Jr. and efforts to form third party challenges by Black power advocate Stokely Carmichael threatened to undermine the fragile ties between a divided Democratic Party and Black voters, particularly in the South. Deputy Democratic chair Lewis Martin admitted that it was not safe to assume that Negroes would automatically vote for Democrats in 1968; the party looked to “elected Negro officials” to hold on to the Black support.58
Martin had reason to worry; much had changed in the nation between 1964 and 1967. Although the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act increased Black participation in mainstream politics, more than one hundred riots in major urban centers occurred between 1965 and 1967. Black activists throughout the country questioned the efficacy and sincerity of Lyndon Johnson’s racial policies, and the president was frequently at odds with Black critics. Johnson and the Democrats wanted the help of newly elected Black political leaders to attract Black voters to the party.
Thus, when asked to comment on the concept of Black power, most of the Black politicians who came to Washington, DC, that summer denounced the “disruptive slogan.” Maryland state senator Clarence Mitchell of Baltimore called Black activists “all mouth and no action.” Mose Cooper, recently elected to a small Illinois farming town’s six-member council, condemned both the individuals and their cause: “I’m strongly against people like Stokely,” he said. “They just made things worse.” Carl Russell of Winston-Salem averred that demonstrations had served their purpose: “Now it’s up to the courts and the politicians.” Yvonne Brathwaite, a California state legislator who would go on to serve with Jordan in Congress, compared Black power activists to white supremacists: “There are extremists of all kinds—Negro militants, white ultraconservatives. I think it’s better to have these things out in the open.” A former Phoenix policeman elected to the Arizona legislature rejected Black power as a slogan and as a goal. “The Negro wants opportunity, not power,” he stated. Nearly every Black politician interviewed said something negative about the Black power movement. The one exception was Texas state senator Barbara Jordan, who simply stated that she preferred to work through the political process, and offered no comment or condemnation of the Black power slogan or those who propagated it.59
Jordan continued to explore new ways of talking about racial differences without endorsing racial separation. In March 1967 she appeared in Dallas with Charles Evers, older brother of murdered civil rights activist Medgar Evers. “The Negro wants to participate in the decision-making,” she told the audience.60 But she also gave a thoughtful analysis about the nuances of racial domination. Both she and Evers “urged understanding of the differences between races rather than attempting to apply Anglo Saxon white protestant standards to all citizens.” Jordan elaborated on this theme of racial difference in a speech she gave a few days later in which she attacked the myopia of middle-class whites. “Social workers,” she said “should stop trying to apply middle class, white standards to the Negro welfare class . . . maybe we don’t all want to be a part of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America. . . . Whites should listen a while to the ‘Negro’s views,’ instead of just bringing your own standards into the conversation.”61 The Dallas Morning News interpreted Jordan’s remarks as a retreat from integration: “Pressure for all-out integration appears to be waning. In its place, the more responsible Negro leaders urge whites to understand the problems and differences of their people, weighed against a background of slavery, discrimination, and broken promises.”62 The paper’s perverse misinterpretation of Jordan’s comments shows how Black power’s call to set priorities beyond integration was sometimes met with a sigh of relief by the white power structure. An acceptance of racial differences did not begin to approach all that Jordan and others were asking for, but she nevertheless took up the theme in her speeches. Black power made her conscious that the movement for Black liberation concerned more than legal rights.
Events proved that voting and elections alone could not solve the problem of racial inequality in a city like Houston. In April 1967 a series of protests at Jordan’s alma mater, Texas Southern University, lasted more than two weeks and involved more than a thousand students who protested against dismal food, the dismissal of a popular professor, and women’s curfew hours. The protests attracted the attention of local police and the FBI. Students blocked Wheeler Avenue, sang freedom songs, and threatened to block traffic and access to classrooms. Demonstrators were arrested and bonded.63 Tensions exploded on May 17, 1967, when Houston police alleged that gunshots were heard on the campus. Police surrounded the dorms and sealed off the buildings. Students from the men’s dorm erected a barricade, and then the police attacked. At two o’clock in the morning, more than a hundred officers stormed the dormitories and began shooting directly into the buildings. Officer Louis Kuba was killed by a bullet to his forehead that was later determined to have been shot by the police. The “3,000 rounds of pistol and automatic gunfire” from the police shattered the dorm windows. Students were driven out of the dorms, ordered to lie on the lawn, and taken to jail; 489 students were arrested.64 “The cops acted as though they were fighting a war,” said one female student. No guns were ever found in the student dorms. “We’re no criminals.”65
Five students were charged with rioting, a felony, and later charged with the murder of Officer Kuba. The mainstream papers, the mayor, and even some of the Black leadership at Texas Southern supported the police action against what the Houston Tribune called an “armed rebellion against lawful authority.”66 It took many months, even years, for the truth of the events to come out, thanks largely to the NAACP. Polls taken at the time indicated that the police action had made Black people more sympathetic to the Black power concept.67 The NAACP sent lawyers from its head office to represent the students. On July 30, 1967, Jordan urged the release of the five incarcerated students at a public rally sponsored by the Houston Legal Defense Fund Committee of the NAACP.68
Jordan was not above using the fear of Black violence to mobilize middle-class Blacks out of their apathy. In a speech to the Sigma Delta Theta Sorority in Dallas in August 1967, a few months after the police riot at Texas Southern, Jordan told her audience that “the Black slum dweller hates us as much as he hates whitey” and that America’s “educated Negroes” must take responsibility for preventing a “national holocaust.”69 In this passage Jordan wanted her educated audience to wake up to the reality of Black deprivation and anger among the poor. Individual Black achievement could not substitute for justice. Bridging class differences between Black Americans must be part of the Black movement.
Jordan continued to argue that voting was a necessary act of racial pride and solidarity. In the fall of 1967, she organized a multiday workshop called the “Texas Leadership Conference,” funded by the Southern Regional Council’s Voter Education Project. More than three hundred Black activists attended the event in Wimberley, a rural retreat outside of Austin. Jordan emphasized Black self-reliance and independence. “Negroes for too long—for reasons of survival—have practiced the art of ‘followship,’” she observed, and she urged Black candidates to build up their own organizations, as she had. “If NEGROES are going to lead, the leaders must talk to each other. . . . YOU must get the voters registered; YOU must get your registered voters to the polls.”70 Alliances with whites were essential for Black success, but Black candidates also needed to strengthen racial solidarity. Her confident performance at the conference impressed observers and gave hope to Black activists.71 She declared herself “not nervous and not frightened” about “being a Negro senator or a woman senator,” but instead looked forward to the job. “I know it will cause a lot of attention to focus on me,” she said, “but I don’t want to avoid it.” Jordan said she “wanted to make a favorable impression in the Senate to pave a path for future Negroes and future women in politics.”72
During Jordan’s first legislative session, she had fully emerged as the face of Black leadership in Texas. She continued to address the public at church gatherings, sorority events, dinners for block workers, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies at new buildings. She appeared on local television in Houston.73 She also gave speeches outside of Texas. At the invitation of Martin Luther King Jr., Jordan traveled to Atlanta to speak at a gathering of Black state representatives sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, a state legislator from Los Angeles, remembered Jordan started off her speech by singing a gospel song: “They loved it, and I think Dr. King really enjoyed having her there.”74 When King was assassinated, Jordan was sitting with Governor Connally at the Hemisfair celebration in San Antonio. At that tragic moment, she heard Connally state that Martin Luther King Jr. had “contributed much to the chaos, and the strife, and the confusion, and the uncertainty in this country, but whatever his actions, he deserved not the fate of assassination.” Grieving and outraged at the governor’s callousness, Jordan left San Antonio to rush back to Houston to be with her constituents and arrange a memorial service for King. Her enmity for Connally only grew deeper, and she, along with the NAACP, demanded he apologize for such a “dastardly statement.”75
After King’s death, Jordan confronted white audiences on the deleterious effects of racism on Black lives. At a newspaper and media convention in Austin at the end of May 1968, she contributed to a panel titled “The Role of News Media in Race Relations.” Her audience consisted of “owners and executives from the majority of the major white newspapers, and radio and television stations.” The crowd heard Jordan lay out Black frustration with the slow pace of political change in the nation. According to the Forward Times, she “held the packed house spellbound” as she spoke for over an hour.”76 She talked about the failed promise of the American Revolution and the Constitution: “The real question which now arises is, did anybody believe these promises of America? Were the spokesmen of this country serious? I submit that the Negro believed—and that white America could not risk belief.” She quoted Black psychologist Kenneth Clark about the effects of racism on mental health, and she asked the audience: “Have you ever questioned the extent of your own contribution to the perpetuation of this kind of system? Do you in your contacts with minority people serve their further dehumanization and self-doubt and sense of unworthiness? Can you define the promise of America—and if you define it, can you help make it real?” Explaining the appeal of Black power, she stated that the excluded “become tired of empty promises, meaningless phraseology, exploitation, and intimidation. They became tired of a thousand blatant and subtle indignities heaped upon their heads and stored in their gut, a thousand different times, on a thousand different days.” Jordan offered a blunt assessment: “Prejudice and discrimination based on race has produced a society which has a cancer built into it. Palliatives and bandaids cannot cure the ills.” She ended by asking: “Who Speaks for the Negro? NO ONE. He: the Black Man, stands silhouetted against a thriving abundant America. . . . He wants IN. He wants America to hear him—understand his condition and support his humanity. He knows that if this country does this, it will save him; you will save this country and you will save yourselves.”77 Jordan’s readiness to confront a white audience with their own complicity in perpetuating inequality on every level, from the institutional to the personal, astonished the Forward Times, which noted that “an almost instant mood of acceptance” fell over the white audience. “She wrapped up her masterpiece of oratory by demonstrating how the person listening to the sounds from the Negro community was the one to be concerned about and not the one making the sounds.”78
Sometime after this speech, Jordan, like many others, dropped the word “Negro” entirely and began using the word “Black” to describe herself and her constituents.79 The shift in language also seems to signal a broadening perspective. Jordan read the books and statements published by Black power leaders, and she readily gave her opinions in a 1970 oral history interview on the condition that it be released after her death.
She described what it was like for her to navigate the dynamics of “the white man’s world” she encountered first in law school and then in the Texas Senate: “I tried to learn his rules, you know. ‘The Man,’ as many of our young people call him writes the books and knows the rules and makes the decisions. And so I decided in order to cope with the world as it is and not as we would like for it to be. . . . It was necessary to find the door for getting inside just a little bit to find out what ‘the man’ is doing and how he acts and how he thinks and how he reaches decisions.”80 Ever since the days of slavery, Blacks had to scrutinize the ways and psyches of whites to survive. Her tactic was to “try to get a little corner at the decision-making table where you can hang on and maybe get a word in here and there or a sentence or a dot, you know.” But instead of ending on an upbeat note celebrating the gradual acceptance of Black voices at the table, she abruptly concluded: “I suppose I was in the process of learning to lose, as I still am.”81
