She Changed the Nation, page 27
For support throughout the day, she had relied on her numerous friends, and now she turned to Nancy Earl. “I had planned another little party,” Jordan recalled, a semi-formal gathering that included Nelson. “I grabbed Nancy and said, ‘Look, I’m going to the hospital, but you take everybody on out to the restaurant and I’ll try to join you.’” She sat with her mother for a time, but nothing more could be done. She called Earl again: “I’ll be in touch. Do everything you know I’d want done. Just have fun.” Jordan eventually went back to the hotel, changed, and talked with Earl again: “I told her to meet me at the hotel with anybody who still wanted to hang on and that we would go out to her house and do a final wrap up with the guitar. And that’s what we did.”7 Playing music and being in Earl’s home gave her peace and demonstrated a simple truth: Public acclaim could never provide sufficient solace from life’s emotional ups and downs, which could and would come. Jordan stayed awake most of that evening, buoyed by the support of Earl and other close friends.
In the morning she went to her mother and persuaded her to return to the hotel. Shortly after the two left the hospital, Ben died. Now it was her mother’s turn to cry. “Is he really gone?” Arlyne asked, as the family gathered outside his hospital room. Rosemary, the eldest, urged her to compose herself, but Jordan told her mother, “No, you cry. You’ve lost your man.” Jordan loved the blues, and the music of the evening echoed the dramatic events of the last twenty-four hours. “This is her man who’s gone,” Jordan said to Rosemary.8 News of Benjamin Jordan’s death made the New York Times—“Father Sees Daughter Sworn In, Dies Next Day”—and the headline gave Arlyne solace: “He died at a time when everybody knew it. In New York, they know that he died!”9 She knew how much he craved recognition and attention. Benjamin Jordan believed he had played a key role in his daughter’s success, and it appeared almost predestined that her day as governor was the fitting moment for him to take his final leave. “If my father had had the option of choosing a time to die,” Jordan said to Earl, “he would have chosen that day.”10
Benjamin Jordan’s lifelong pursuit of recognition affected his daughter deeply. After she retired from office, Jordan reflected that “in my other life, I was in the spiral to get ahead. . . . I didn’t ask myself ‘what are you ambitious to do?’ I wanted to be all that I could be. I was propelled by a driving force and was leading what I now consider to be an unbalanced life.”11 Undoubtedly Jordan possessed the “type A” personality common among winning candidates. Columnist Meg Greenfield archly called Washington politicians adult versions of the “good children” common in high school. They were the prodigies, protégés, and “head kids” who possessed a driving force to be first, to win, and to succeed. Bill Clinton’s biographers noted that as the “returning hero,” his string of achievements and victories at school and scouts brought acclaim to a family that otherwise lacked distinction.12 When Jordan brought home medals and awards, it set her apart from the high-school crowd and compensated for her father’s middling status. Her family was intensely invested in her success. On the night of her victory over Curtis Graves, they started planning Jordan’s race for the US Senate. When Jordan’s friend Stan McLelland demurred, suggesting that Texas was not ready to elect a Black woman to a statewide office, he felt their wrath.13 Accustomed to her winning, Jordan’s family could not imagine her losing. They did not fully understand the pressures and obstacles she faced, and perhaps they did not want to know.
Undoubtedly much of Jordan’s initial striving came from a desire to please her father. Initially Ben had been the ambitious one in the family. When he first came to Houston, he was a young man in a hurry. He wanted recognition as a preacher and a family he could be proud of. In Jordan’s early years, Ben—a distant presence—was busy with work and his church as he tried to “make it.” Yet the youngest Jordan daughter—feisty and quick with her words—gained her father’s attention by puncturing his ego. Much to his dismay, Jordan piped up with embarrassing anecdotes in the presence of other adults, telling strangers that her grandfather had purchased the nice new coat she was wearing. Without consulting her parents, Jordan quit piano lessons, disconcerting Ben with her highhandedness. “She has always been, even as a little girl, very sure of herself,” said one of her elementary school friends.14 In general, Jordan seemed too independent for her father’s liking. “We did not see eye to eye on anything,” she recalled.15 But seeing her recite and sing at Greater Pleasant Hill appeared to change his attitude. During her early adolescence, her father became a more forceful presence in Jordan’s life, and she began to care more about what he thought.
In high school she initially struggled to live up to his expectations. From her father’s perspective, Jordan had been blessed with every advantage. Praise came rarely if at all, and the pressure to abide by his demands seemed constant. Jordan struggled with her temper. Deference to authority—a signature trait of the “good” child—did not come to her easily. During her first year at Phillis Wheatley, the twelve-year-old misbehaved. Jordan often corrected and outsmarted her teachers, and their annoyance with her quick intellect prompted her Aunt Mamie to make a threat: if the disruptive behavior continued, Ben would have to know. “That settled it,” Jordan recalled. “And after a while, I got it under control.”16 She redirected her energy and attention toward pleasing her teachers and her father rather than making them upset. “Her mother was very quiet,” remembered one of Jordan’s childhood friends. “It was always her father who mattered.”17 Eventually Jordan became the good child who succeeded at school and won awards, if not acclaim.18 But her success did not lead to an easy or warm relationship with Ben. In fact, Jordan was wary around her father. “He was a strict disciplinarian,” she remembered. “I always had to keep the lid on.”19
Only when his daughter performed in public did the stern Benjamin Jordan allow his emotions to flow and for his pride to appear. Jordan recalled how he sobbed uncontrollably during her “Girl of the Year” speech in high school, and she came to expect that during a good speech or performance her father would lose his stern mask and cry. As she matured, a desire to stir an audience with her words became integral to Jordan’s psyche and her positive sense of self. When asked why she enjoyed politics, she once said, “It’s people and the response you can get from them. You can get people excited. That makes you feel good.” Jordan, conditioned to elicit a response from an audience, and gratified by her father’s emotional reaction to her oratory, observed how the pattern affected her time and time again. “Then when you get elected and try to deliver on all the promises you made, it’s a little frightening.”20 Propelled to speak, gain a response, and then struggle to deliver on a promise, Jordan created ever-rising and new expectations, matched by new emotional highs for herself.
Like her father Jordan also had a public and a private face. And although she resented her father’s dominance, throughout her life she continued to keep the lid on her emotions and rarely confronted him. After Jordan won “Girl of the Year” at Wheatley and the speaking contest in Chicago, Ben had expected and wanted his youngest to aim even higher and excel. But once she started attending Texas Southern, she continued her old pattern of having fun on the sly with her friends. In high school, Jordan and her sister Bennie drank, smoked, and attended forbidden dances at Hester House, a local youth center where Jordan sang her specialty song, “Money, Honey.” Now, at TSU, she and Bennie openly drank beer at the Groovey Grill, joined what Ben called a “hell fire sorority,” and took odd jobs as a babysitter and cleaner to pay for it. Her father felt shocked and disappointed that Jordan, with all of her gifts, apparently lacked ambition.21 Jordan probably dreamed of escaping back to Chicago, but instead she went east, on a “mind opening journey,” with Tom Freeman and the TSU debate team. She gained confidence, and when Tom Freeman arranged for a big ceremonial homecoming for the team that included receiving an award bestowed by the college president, Jordan remembered how much she enjoyed winning. College debate, travel, and recognition all reignited her old ambitions.22
After she finished law school, Jordan thought about staying in Boston, but despite her differences with her father, she returned home. Jordan’s attitude toward her father softened. She needed and appreciated his help setting up her law practice and her early campaigns, but the old tensions remained. Her genuine gratitude toward her father was always tempered by frustration. She acknowledged her father’s contributions to her career but then felt irritated when he continued to press her for recognition. He always wanted more attention. Navigating the demands of a dominant parent, another common experience among successful politicians, required great patience.23
Jordan had long simmered over her father’s hypocrisy. She saw how he preached moral probity to others while doing as he pleased. Throughout her life she had witnessed, and resented, how he intimidated her mother, badgering her into passivity; she hated his overbearing arrogance. Jordan had some suspicions about her father’s behavior, and after her election to the Texas Senate, she decided to find out the truth. One night while she was visiting her parents in Houston, she followed her father and watched from her car as he drove “straight to the home of a woman she knew.” Jordan waited outside and fumed but remained silent. She lacked the courage to confront him about his affair. They never had a falling out, but she also found it impossible to forgive him. According to one biographer, Jordan condemned her father in front of her friends, and “stayed furious with him for years.” The stability of her homelife, and the traditional, religious values of both her mother and father, provided a foundation for her achievements, yet under the surface the family dynamic could be volatile.24
Jordan’s enormous powers of self-control may not, to many, appear healthy, yet she harnessed that tremendous emotional discipline to her political advantage, chipping away at the people in power, just as she wore down her father and gained his acceptance. “That’s the way I like to work,” she said.25 She sometimes claimed that “disruptive or divisive kind of behavior is of no help,” but Jordan had been involved in plenty of protests. She understood the importance of nonviolent direct action and organized dissent for upsetting the racial status quo and introducing change. Jordan believed that “all blacks are militant in their guts; but militancy is expressed in various ways.”26 She suppressed her aggression, imposing logic on her emotions so that she could remain calm and negotiate the matter through. In an interview with Paul Duke, Jordan referred to herself in the third person, and described how she used her intellect to harness, or “suppress,” her anger in the middle of a political conflict: “You see underneath, and you want to break out as in some kind of a display of aggressiveness. The truth of the matter is that in the back of your mind you know that in the long run that display of aggressiveness is going to retard the cause that you’re trying to fulfill or to bring about. So you suppress, you suppress, that’s what I meant by militant in their guts. You suppress that and then act on another plane.”27 Suppressed anger became the yeast for Jordan’s political rise.
“You suppress, you suppress,” was a strategy that came out of her home, and out of segregation; it was an approach that Jordan’s family, constituents, and many other Black notables of the 1970s could easily recognize and endorse. One of her contemporaries, tennis great Arthur Ashe, a native of Richmond, Virginia, told interviewer Lynn Redgrave on the BBC that “I am not emotionally very open, but I don’t think it’s a crime.” He explained how and why he had been trained to suppress his emotions: “Control is very important to me. You grow up Black in the American South in the late forties and fifties, you have no control. White segregationist laws tell you where to go to school, which bus you can ride on, which taxis to take, what you can say. And then in the sixties, what we call the American Black social revolution, and then you had Black ideologues trying to tell me what to do.” Ashe resented all of it. “When do I get to decide what I want to do?” He called the famously aggressive tennis champion John McEnroe “frail.” At the same time, Ashe admitted he envied McEnroe’s “emotional freedom to be a bad boy.” That kind of behavior was something, Ashe declared, that he could never have done and ultimately did not wish to do: “My race would not have allowed me to be like that. And I wouldn’t want to be like that.”28 Even as an adult in the 1990s, Ashe felt accountable to what his home community in Richmond would have wanted to see in him: dignity, composure, perhaps cunning, and, of course, victory.
“Ambition is at the heart of politics,” noted political scientist Joseph Schlesinger. His research confirmed the simple observation that representative democracy depends on “a supply of individuals with strong office drives.”29 For generations ambitious Black Houstonians who wanted to gain office faced racism and impossible legal hurdles. Although the times were changing, a few favorable court decisions, by themselves, could not put a Black person in office. Someone had to take the risk and run. Jordan stepped into that breach. Running for office meant facing dangers posed by white racism, of course, as well as accepting the risk of a humiliating loss. Political strategist Billie Carr understood that successful candidates needed to have confidence and unusual drive. Otherwise, how would they have the emotional fortitude to run again after a defeat, or to ask for money when they had not yet won? “I wouldn’t want to have a candidate who didn’t feel confident,” she said, not to mention highly invested in winning a race.30 Black Houstonians valued anyone with strong drives who succeeded. Ending racism in American politics started with Black voting and supportive court decisions, but victory and inclusion involved developing Black candidates, people who felt driven not only to run but to win.
At the same time, a thirst for success alone was not sufficient. The Black community would not turn out in high numbers for a candidate who did not represent their interests or who failed to have a record of service. These high standards practically guaranteed that Black women would emerge as some of the first Black politicians in the civil rights era South. In Houston, Hattie Mae White had already demonstrated a Black woman’s ability to garner votes. When Barbara Jordan emerged as a known activist within the Democratic Party who asked for popular support, she had to earn it. Jordan was not part of Houston’s Black financial elite, and she did not have the backing of conservative white politicians—in fact, she opposed them. But she entered the political fray gradually. Like many of her peers, she entered office determined to continue her work on racial justice and equality. Jordan’s ambition, combined with her professional education, organizing experience, and outspoken opposition to segregation, made her appealing to Black Houston. In her race against Graves, Jordan made the case based on her efficacy, but if she had not been perceived as a forceful, as well as effective, Black leader, she would not have stood a chance.
Jordan’s ambition to succeed in politics should not be misconstrued as an unhealthy desire to dominate others. Such a negative view of ambition has been used to discredit women who seek positions of power or simply to advance in the world. According to psychiatrist Anna Fels, many women prefer not to use the word “ambitious” to describe themselves because it connotes “egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own ends.” As Fels argues, however, ambition is a healthy emotion that involves two components: mastery of a skill and an expectation of recognition. To succeed it is not enough to be good at something. Recognition is important because without it humans feel “isolated and ultimately, demoralized.”31 Her father and her family pushed Jordan to go higher, but it was Houston’s Black community that ultimately validated her ambition. They chose her to be their political leader and representative. They turned her political success into a cultural phenomenon. She understood that members of her community had urged her to aim high because gaining political office gave her the opportunity to represent Black interests in government. For her part Jordan believed she could use her office “to move” the nation and make it more just through achievable legislation, and Black Houston supported those goals.
Jordan’s political ambitions were not so different from that of the other Black women elected to the Ninety-third Congress. The early career of Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, for example, shows some interesting parallels with Jordan’s. A California native who had served several terms in the California state legislature before being elected to Congress in 1973, Burke had a reputation for being pragmatic and cool tempered. Like Jordan she came from a poor, but stable, working-class family. Both women were academically precocious and debate stars in college; both were lawyers and musically inclined. Both had ties to organized labor and unions. And both had taken the initiative to run for the state house in the 1960s against white male candidates.32 Given their backgrounds, both women could have easily been celebrated as representatives of larger Black interests or idealists seeking to expand the promise of American democracy.
Yet too often Jordan and Burke were depicted in the mainstream press as individual women divorced from the larger political forces and issues that had sent them to Washington. The press scrutinized their individual foibles, examining their respective marriage status, physical appearance, clothing, hair, and class positions. The Washington Post, for example, dubbed Burke and Jordan “total opposites in mode and manner.” In October 1972 it published a lengthy feature piece on each woman, accompanied with side-by-side photos. The articles employed a surfeit of racist, colorist, and sexist stereotypes to contrast them. Yvonne Burke was depicted as “charming,” “strikingly beautiful (reminiscent of Dorothy Dandridge),” “creamy skinned,” “meticulously coiffed,” and “chicly dressed.” “Yvonne Brathwaite likes accessories of diamonds and opals.” “Don’t look for a headline conscious women’s libber.” “She quietly overcame male chauvinistic prejudice,” and “her impact as a freshman congresswoman is likely to be on the subtle side, stemming from hard work, diligence and quiet acts of personal determination.” The paper hailed Burke’s married status and breathed relief at her apparent eschewing of feminism, noting she went by “Mrs. Burke (she did not use ‘MS’).” Burke had become well known within the national Democratic Party for chairing the last day of the Democratic convention in a fourteen-hour marathon session.33 A photo of her chairing the convention in a red halter top (she took off her jacket to ward off the stifling Miami heat) appeared in newspapers nationwide. Clearly, there was a sexual overtone to that photo; by the time she came to Washington, the press muted that angle. Please do not worry, was the message in the Washington Post. Burke was a conventional woman—not a “woman’s libber” or radical.
