Jordan ran for Congress five months later as the Democratic nominee for Houston’s 18th Congressional District. Jordan’s colleagues elected her president in her final year in the state senate, allowing her to serve as governor for a day (June 10, 1972) in accordance with state custom. She ran unsuccessfully twice for the Texas House, before winning the 1966 election for a newly constituted Texas State Senate district.īy working to enact a state minimum wage legislation that included farmworkers, she earned the respect of her colleagues in Austin. She got into Massachusetts and Texas bars but later returned to Houston to start law practice in the Fifth Ward. Jordan graduated from law school and was one of just two African American women in her class. Jordan graduated magna cum laude from Texas Southern University in 1956 and was enrolled into the law school at Boston University. Jordan accepted the debate team and assisted it in achieving national prominence. Jordan was a member of the inaugural class of Texas Southern University, a Black college formed by the Texas government to escape the University of Texas’ integration. Her father (Benjamin Jordan) was a Baptist minister and warehouse clerk and her mother (Arlyne), was a domestic, housewife and church instructor.ĭid you know? Edward Patton, the great-grandfather of Texas congressman Barbara Jordan, was one of the several Black members who sat in the Texas assembly during Reconstruction.Ī career day speech by Black lawyer Edith Sampson motivated her to pursue a legal career when Jordan was attending Phillis Wheatley High School. In her parents’ house in Houston, Barbara Charline Jordan was born on February 21, 1936.
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