Barbara Jordan: “The Constitutional Basis for Impeachment”

About the Author

Barbara Jordan was born in Houston, Texas, in 1936 and grew up during a time of racial segregation throughout the South. As an African American, she became increasingly aware of the limitations imposed by segregation when she traveled outside the South as a member of the Texas Southern University debate team in the early 1950s. In 1959 she earned a law degree at racially integrated Boston University and then returned to Houston, where she began her law practice and soon became involved in politics.

In 1966, after two unsuccessful campaigns as a Democrat for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, Jordan successfully ran for a seat in the Texas Senate. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had eliminated state-imposed prerequisites for voting, including the Texas poll tax, which had impaired the voting rights of many African Americans. In 1972, by Supreme Court–mandated reapportionment, Houston gained a new congressional district. Jordan ran for that seat and won an overwhelming victory to represent the new Eighteenth Congressional District of Texas in the U.S. Congress.

Jordan was the first African American woman elected to the Texas Senate and the first African American elected to that body since Reconstruction. When she joined the U.S. House of Representatives, she became the first African American to represent Texas in Congress and one of the first two African Americans elected to Congress since Reconstruction. Jordan quickly became a political insider. Pragmatic, she learned the rules, analyzed the power structures, cultivated connections, and became skilled at negotiating compromises and trading votes to gain support for legislation that was important to her constituents. Her willingness to compromise and work with conservatives drew criticism, however, from Houston's liberals as well as from the Congressional Black Caucus.

Jordan came to the nation's attention in 1974 when, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she made an introductory statement in the nationally televised committee hearings on the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. The year 1974 was the first time presidential impeachment had been seriously considered since 1868, when Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House. Jordan's remarks were well received, and in 1976 her fellow Texan Robert Strauss asked her to be one of two keynote speakers at the Democratic National Convention. This was the first time that either a woman or an African American had been a keynote speaker at any major party's national convention. After the 1976 keynote address, there were calls for Jordan's nomination as Jimmy Carter's running mate.

In 1977, for reasons of ill health, Jordan announced she would not seek another term. Before her third term in Congress ended, Jordan accepted a position teaching at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where for almost twenty years she taught graduate courses in policy and ethics. She continued to speak about ethics, accountability, and citizen participation before business and civic organizations and at graduation ceremonies. She also accepted positions on corporate boards of directors, often as the first African American on the board. After Ann Richards was elected governor of Texas, Jordan served as her ethics adviser. In 1992, when Richards was the chair of the Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton, the party's presumptive nominee, asked Jordan to deliver a keynote address at the convention. Jordan died in Austin in 1996.