Barbara Jordan, a Houston lawyer trained at Texas Southern University and Boston University, broke the color line in the Texas Senate in 1966 and in 1972 became the first Black woman elected to Congress from a Southern state. On the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate crisis, her televised statement of 25 July 1974 on the constitutional meaning of impeachment made her one of the most admired public speakers in the country. After leaving Congress she spent nearly two decades teaching ethics and public policy at the University of Texas.
At a Glance
- Born
- 21 February 1936, Houston, Texas
- Died
- 17 January 1996, Austin, Texas
- Birth name
- Barbara Charline Jordan
- Known for
- First African American in the Texas Senate since 1883 (elected 1966); statement to the House Judiciary Committee on impeachment (25 July 1974); keynote address, 1976 Democratic National Convention
- HBCU ties
- Texas Southern University (Graduated magna cum laude, 1956); Tuskegee University (Taught for a year before opening her Houston law practice in 1960)
- Fields
- Politics · Law · Education
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
Barbara Charline Jordan was born in Houston, Texas, on 21 February 1936, the youngest of three daughters of Benjamin Jordan, a warehouse clerk and Baptist minister, and Arlyne Patten Jordan. She grew up in a Black neighborhood of segregated Houston and attended its segregated public schools, where she was drawn to oratory and debate, and by her own account decided in high school to become a lawyer.
Jordan enrolled at Texas Southern University, the city’s public Black university, where she starred on the debate team, which competed against white colleges across the country, and graduated magna cum laude in 1956. She went on to Boston University School of Law, one of only a handful of Black women in her class; by her own account she had to work far harder than classmates from elite white colleges to overcome the gaps left by segregated schooling. She received her law degree in 1959. That year she passed the bar examinations of both Massachusetts and Texas.
Life and Work
After teaching for a year at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Jordan returned to Houston in 1960 and opened a law practice, working at first from her parents’ home. She volunteered in the 1960 Kennedy–Johnson campaign, organizing get-out-the-vote efforts in Black precincts of Harris County, and ran twice for the Texas House of Representatives in the early 1960s, losing both times in countywide races.
Court-ordered redistricting under the principle of “one person, one vote” created a new Houston state senate district, and in 1966 Jordan won it, becoming the first African American to serve in the Texas Senate since 1883 and the first Black woman ever elected to it. In a body of thirty white men she built a reputation for mastery of procedure and coalition-building; she pushed through the state’s first minimum-wage law and worked for voter registration. In 1972 her colleagues unanimously elected her president pro tempore, and on 10 June 1972, with the governor and lieutenant governor out of state, she served by Texas custom as “governor for a day,” the first Black woman to act as governor of a state.
In November 1972 voters in Houston’s Eighteenth Congressional District elected her to the U.S. House. She and Andrew Young of Georgia, elected the same day, were the first African Americans sent to Congress from the former Confederacy in the twentieth century, and she was the first Black woman from the South to serve there. She won a seat on the Judiciary Committee and later also served on Government Operations, and on 25 July 1974, as the committee opened debate on articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon, she delivered a televised statement grounding the case in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. She noted that the original Constitution had not included people like her, but that amendment, interpretation, and court decision had brought her into “We, the people,” and she declared that she would not sit idly by while it was subverted. Between 27 and 30 July the committee approved three articles of impeachment, charging obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress, and Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974, before the full House could vote.
In 1975 Jordan sponsored the extension of the Voting Rights Act to protect language minorities, bringing Mexican Americans in Texas and other non-English-speaking citizens under its coverage. On 12 July 1976 she became the first African American woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. Speaking at Madison Square Garden in New York, at the convention that nominated Jimmy Carter, she presented her own presence on the platform as evidence that the American dream need not be deferred, and called on the party to articulate a common national purpose rather than a collection of competing interest groups. She retired from Congress after three terms in January 1979.
“My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total.”
Legacy
Jordan joined the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin in 1979, teaching ethics and public policy, and served as ethics adviser to Governor Ann Richards in the early 1990s. In 1992, already weakened by illness, she again delivered a keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, sixteen years after her first. She lived for years with multiple sclerosis and later leukemia, and used a wheelchair in public. In 1994 President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. She died in Austin on 17 January 1996 of pneumonia, a complication of leukemia, and was buried in the Texas State Cemetery.
Her Judiciary Committee statement is widely anthologized as a defining exposition of impeachment as a constitutional remedy, and it has been revisited in every subsequent presidential impeachment. A statue of her stands at Austin–Bergstrom International Airport, where the passenger terminal bears her name. She wrote an autobiography with Shelby Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait (1979).
The Constitution’s promises are held in trust by each generation, including by people it once excluded, and defending them takes both knowledge and courage. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 21 February 1936 Born in Houston, Texas.
- 1956 Graduates magna cum laude from Texas Southern University.
- 1959 Receives her law degree from Boston University.
- November 1966 Elected to the Texas Senate, its first Black member since 1883.
- 10 June 1972 Serves as acting “governor for a day” of Texas.
- November 1972 Elected to the U.S. House from Texas’s Eighteenth District.
- 25 July 1974 Delivers her statement on impeachment to the House Judiciary Committee.
- 12 July 1976 Delivers the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
- 1994 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- 17 January 1996 Dies in Austin, Texas.
Sources and Further Reading
- Barbara Jordan and Shelby Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).
- Mary Beth Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero (New York: Bantam Books, 1998).
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “JORDAN, Barbara Charline.” Link
- Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas, “Jordan, Barbara Charline.” Link
- The Portal to Texas History, “Barbara Jordan – Governor of Texas for a day – June 10, 1972.” Link
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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.