Barbara Jordan was the first Black woman elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction and the first Southern Black woman elected to the United States House of Representatives. The lawyer, educator, and politician is noted for her influential opening speech at the House Judiciary Committee hearings of Richard Nixon’s 1974 impeachment process. She was also the first Black person, and the first woman, to ever deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. She retired after three terms in Congress to become a professor and policy advocate.
Barbara Jordan was born on February 21, 1936, in Houston, Texas, the youngest of three children. Already adept at public speaking as a high school student, she attended Texas Southern University, a historically Black institution. While there, she was a national champion debater, defeating opponents from Yale and Brown, and tying against Harvard University, which she considered one of her proudest college moments. She majored in political science and history and graduated magna cum laude in 1956, then went on to Boston University School of Law, where she was one of two women to graduate in 1959.
Jordan taught political science at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for a year before returning to Texas, gaining admittance to the bar, and starting a private law practice. She campaigned for the Democrats during the 1960 presidential election, and this experience launched her political career. She lost her races for the Texas House of Representatives in 1962 and 1964, and in 1966 she decided to run for the Texas Senate instead.
This time Jordan won, becoming the first Black state senator in the United States since 1883. During her tenure, she worked to establish a minimum wage law, anti-discrimination statements in business contracts, and a Fair Employment Practices Commission. She was elected President of the Texas Senate on March 28, 1972, making her the first Black woman in America to oversee a legislative body. After a landslide win in 1972, with 81% of the vote, she became the first Black person from the South to be elected to Congress since the 19th century.
Jordan has been honored for her work with inductions into both the Texas and National Women’s Hall of Fame, and has been awarded The Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, The Elizabeth Blackwell Award from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award.