Barbara Jordan
Barbara Jordan was the first Black woman elected to the Texas Senate, the first Black woman from the South elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and one of the most powerful speakers in American political history. During the Nixon impeachment hearings in 1974, she delivered an opening statement about the Constitution that people still quote as a definition of what American democracy is supposed to mean. She did it while being a Black woman from Texas in 1974, and while living with multiple sclerosis she had not disclosed publicly.
Barbara Jordan grew up in Houston's Fifth Ward. Her father was a Baptist minister who instilled in her the belief that her voice was her instrument and she was responsible for using it well. She graduated from Texas Southern University and then, after losing a college debate competition to Harvard students and deciding she wanted to understand why, went to Boston University School of Law.
She returned to Houston and ran for the Texas Legislature twice, losing both times. She ran a third time in 1966 and won — becoming the first Black woman to serve in the Texas Senate, and the first Black senator in Texas since Reconstruction. Two years later, she was unanimously elected President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and for one day was acting governor of Texas. The first Black person and the first woman to hold that role.
In 1972, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She became the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress.
On July 25, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee was conducting impeachment hearings on President Richard Nixon. Barbara Jordan was a member of the committee. She delivered an opening statement that began: "Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, 'We, the people.' It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that 'We, the people.'"
She went on, in precise, resonant, unadorned prose, to explain what the Constitution meant, what impeachment meant, and what her presence in that room meant. The speech is still studied in law schools and cited in discussions of American constitutional democracy.
In 1976, she delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention — the first Black person and first woman to do so. In 1992, she delivered the keynote again.
She had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the early 1970s and did not disclose it publicly. By the late 1970s, her health required her to use a wheelchair. She retired from Congress in 1978 and joined the University of Texas faculty, where she taught public policy for the rest of her life.
She died in Austin on January 17, 1996, at fifty-nine years old. The Barbara Jordan Terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport is named for her.
What the people want is very simple — they want an America as good as its promise.Barbara Jordan, 1976 Democratic National Convention Keynote
She served in Congress while managing multiple sclerosis she had not disclosed — a condition that was progressing and that she managed privately through her most visible years. She retired from Congress at 42, decades before she would have otherwise. She lived with the knowledge that the document she spent her career defending had been written to explicitly exclude her.
Barbara Jordan demonstrated that constitutional language belongs to everyone — especially to the people it was originally written to exclude. Her 1974 impeachment statement is a model of how to hold power accountable using the power's own stated principles. It is not a rhetorical trick. It is a precise legal argument delivered with the voice of someone who had earned the right to make it.
She also demonstrated that governance requires preparation. She won her first debates, her first Senate seat, and her first national platform through disciplined, rigorous preparation. She believed in the capacity of institutions to be held to their own standards. She spent her life testing that belief.