02/23/2026
Happy Birthday, Barbara Jordan🎈 A true patriot with an impact. And an MS survivor, like me...
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A man paid for 25 billboards across Houston reading "Thank you, Barbara Jordan, for explaining the Constitution to us." Thousands of letters poured in. People swarmed her car.
All in response to a televised 15-minute speech by a first-term congresswoman. Barbara Jordan's stirring rebuke of then-President Richard Nixon's abuse of power before the House Judiciary Committee had electrified the nation.
Twenty-two years later, Bill Moyers stood at her memorial service and tried to sum up what her words had meant to a nation shaken by corruption, where faith in government had crumbled. "Just when we despaired of finding a hero, she showed up, to give the sign of democracy," he said. "This is no small thing. This, my friends, this is grace."
Before that pivotal speech in 1974 -- which generated a groundswell of public support for ousting Nixon -- most Americans had never heard of Barbara Jordan. Fifteen minutes later, they would never forget her. Texas columnist Molly Ivins once said Jordan would be the obvious choice in a casting call for the voice of God -- and on that evening, millions understood why.
Jordan, a first-term congresswoman from Texas, opened by reminding the nation that when the Constitution was completed in 1787, "I was not included in that 'We, the people.' I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake."
Then, with devastating precision, she laid out the constitutional case for impeachment. "My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total," she declared. "I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution."
In that speech, Jordan gave the nation a constitutional education, quoting Hamilton and Madison to explain why the founders had granted Congress the power of impeachment. "It is designed to 'bridle' the Executive if he engages in excesses," she said. "It is designed as a method of national inquest into the conduct of public men. The framers confined in the Congress the power, if need be, to remove the President in order to strike a delicate balance between a President swollen with power and grown tyrannical and preservation of the independence of the Executive."
Within days, the Judiciary Committee voted to recommend impeachment. Within weeks, Nixon was gone. But the speech that made Barbara Jordan a household name was not a beginning -- it was the culmination of a journey that started on the segregated buses of Houston's Fifth Ward.
Barbara Charline Jordan was born on this day in 1936, the youngest of three daughters of a Baptist minister and a domestic worker. Her father, Benjamin Jordan, demanded excellence. "I would come home with five A's and a B," Jordan recalled, "and my father would say, 'Why do you have a B?'" He wanted his daughters to become music teachers -- a respectable ambition for young Black women in segregated Houston. Two of them did. Barbara had other plans.
"I always wanted to be something unusual," she said. "I would never be content with being run of the mill." When she was in the tenth grade at Phillis Wheatley High School, a Black lawyer from Chicago named Edith Sampson spoke at Career Day. Sampson was crisp, competent, confident. Jordan decided on the spot: that was what she was going to be. Her father told the encouraging teacher to stay out of his family's affairs. The law, he said, was no profession for a woman.
Jordan enrolled at Texas Southern University -- a Black college hastily created by the Texas legislature to avoid integrating the University of Texas. Every day, she rode segregated buses to campus, passing empty seats to reach the placard marked "colored" at the back. At TSU, she joined the debate team under coach Thomas Freeman and discovered she could beat anyone in any room. The team defeated opponents from Yale and Brown and tied Harvard. "When an all-Black team ties Harvard," she later said, "it wins."
She attended Boston University School of Law -- one of only two Black women in a class of 600. She graduated in 1959 and returned to Houston, where she became only the third Black woman licensed to practice law in the entire state of Texas. She couldn't afford an office, so she practiced from her parents' dining room table. It took three years before she could open her own.
In 1960, she volunteered for the Kennedy-Johnson presidential campaign and was given the job of running a voter turnout drive in Houston's Black precincts. She worked until midnight, sometimes later, organizing block by block. The effort delivered an 80 percent turnout. She was hooked. "My interest, which had been latent, was sparked," she said. She ran for the Texas House of Representatives in 1962. She lost. She ran again in 1964. She lost again.
In 1966, after court-ordered redistricting finally created a district that reflected where Black Texans actually lived, Jordan ran for the Texas Senate -- and won. No Black person had held a seat in that chamber since Walter Moses Burton, a formerly enslaved man, left office in 1882. It had been 84 years. "For the first time in Texas," Jordan said, "we are going to have legislators who represent people, not cattle."
Jordan faced a chamber of thirty White men. She was the only Black person. She experienced racism and sexism from her colleagues. The Senate Members Lounge still bore a sign reading "Men Only" -- a sign that would be removed during her tenure. Houston's Black community wondered how much difference one woman could make in that room.
Jordan's answer was strategic, not confrontational. She befriended the most powerful conservative in the Senate, Dorsey Hardeman, and cultivated a close relationship with Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes. She mastered the rules, studied the process, and outworked everyone. "I am willing to work through any structure," she said. "I am not so hard that I cannot bend as long as my basic principles are intact." Her colleagues unanimously voted her outstanding freshman member. She sponsored or cosponsored some 70 bills; nearly half became law, including Texas' first minimum wage.
In 1972, her colleagues elected her president pro tempore of the Texas Senate -- the first Black woman in America to preside over a legislative body. When one senator rose to second the nomination, he spread his arms and said: "What can I say? Black is beautiful." That same year, as acting governor for a day when the governor and lieutenant governor were out of state, she became the first Black chief executive in the nation's history.
With Lyndon Johnson's support, Jordan won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972, becoming the first Black woman from a Southern state to serve in Congress. Johnson helped secure her a seat on the House Judiciary Committee -- a seemingly routine appointment that would, two years later, place her before the largest television audience of her career.
After the Watergate speech made her a national figure, Jordan delivered another historic address: the keynote at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, the first ever given by a Black woman. "We are a people in search of a national community," she told the delegates. "We are attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal."
In 1973, Jordan had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The disease would gradually confine her to a wheelchair, though she kept the diagnosis private for years. In 1978, she declined to seek re-election, citing an "internal compass" pointing her away from the demands of Congress. She accepted a professorship at the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and became one of the most beloved teachers on campus.
She returned to the national stage in 1992, delivering the keynote at the Democratic National Convention a second time -- this time from a wheelchair. Her voice had not diminished. In 1994, President Clinton presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Barbara Jordan died on January 17, 1996, at the age of 59, from pneumonia related to leukemia. She was buried in the Texas State Cemetery -- the first Black woman to receive the honor. Her grave rests near that of Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas." Governor Ann Richards delivered the eulogy: "She was a constant, and she was as true as the North Star."
The New York Times wrote: "She left Congress after only three terms, a mere six years. No landmark legislation bears her name. Yet few lawmakers in this century have left a more profound and positive impression on the nation than Barbara Jordan."
For 84 years, Jim Crow, poll taxes, and white primaries had ensured that no Black person would sit in the Texas Senate. It took the Voting Rights Act, court-ordered redistricting, and a woman from the Fifth Ward with the preparation, the strategy, and the voice to demand her place at the table -- to finally break through.
Barbara Jordan spent her life fighting for what she believed the people wanted -- something very simple: "an America as good as its promise."
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To watch Barbara Jordan's famous Nixon impeachment speech, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrqVBclJVco
A new documentary by PBS Independent Lens is being released this week -- learn more at https://www.kpbs.org/news/2026/02/20/independent-lens-the-inquisitor
For an inspiring picture book biography about Barbara Jordan, we highly recommend "What Do You Do With A Voice Like That?" for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/with-a-voice-like-that
For adult readers who would like to delve deeper into her story, we recommend "Barbara Jordan: American Hero" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780553380668 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4r8YOKt (Amazon)
There is also a collection of her major speeches, "Barbara Jordan: Speaking the Truth with Eloquent Thunder," at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781477325049 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4qQ7x3U (Amazon)
For books for children about more trailblazing female political leaders who made an impact -- both historically and in modern times -- visit our blog post, “Remember the Ladies: 25 Children's Books on Women in Politics” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11162
To inspire young readers with the true stories of women who stood up for women's rights and the rights of others throughout history, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
