“My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, and it is
total,” Congresswoman Barbara Jordan told a national television audience on
July 25, 1974. She was not about to
stand by and watch “the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.” At that time, Jordan was participating in the
House Judiciary Committee hearings on President Richard Nixon’s serious abuse
of presidential powers. Jordan’s vote
again Nixon helped lead to the President’s resignation in August.
A brilliant scholar and a thrilling orator, Jordan became the
first African-American elected to Congress since the 1870s. Her eloquent denunciation of Nixon at the
committee hearings in 1974 stirred the nation.
Two years later, she became the first black woman to deliver the keynote
address at a Democratic National Convention.
Her presence there, she noted, proved that “the American Dream need not
forever be deferred.” After retiring
from Congress in 1979, Jordan taught at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1992, though confined to a wheelchair due
to multiple sclerosis, she again addressed a Democratic convention. Less than four years later, however, she died
at the age of 59. President Lyndon B.
Johnson once said Jordan “proved that black is beautiful before we knew what
[the saying] meant.”
Jordan’s love of and respect for the U.S. Constitution was so
great that she always carried a copy of the document in her purse.
