![]() Barbara Jordan: Years in Congressįive months later Jordan ran for Congress as the Democratic nominee for Houston’s 18th District. In her final year in the state senate, Jordan’s colleagues elected her president pro tem, allowing her to serve as governor for a day-June 10, 1972-in accordance with state tradition. In Austin, she won the respect of her colleagues and worked to pass a state minimum wage law that covered farmworkers. She twice ran unsuccessfully for the Texas House before winning the 1966 contest for a newly created Texas State Senate district. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, heading a Harris County voter drive that yielded an 80-percent turnout. She passed the Massachusetts and Texas bars and returned to Houston to open a law office in the Fifth Ward. Three years later, Jordan earned her law degree as one of only two African American women in her class. Jordan graduated magna cum laude from Texas Southern University in 1956 and was accepted at Boston University’s law school. The team famously tied Harvard’s debaters when they came to Houston. There Jordan joined the debate team and helped lead it to national renown. Jordan was a member of the inaugural class at Texas Southern University, a Black college hastily created by the Texas legislature to avoid having to integrate the University of Texas. Jordan attended the segregated Phillis Wheatley High School, where a career day speech by Edith Sampson, a Black lawyer, inspired her to become an attorney. Her mother Arlyne was a maid, housewife and church teacher.ĭid you know? Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan's great-grandfather, Edward Patton, was one of several Black representatives who served in the Texas legislature during Reconstruction. Her father, Benjamin Jordan, was a Baptist minister and warehouse clerk. Barbara Charline Jordan was born on February 21, 1936, in her parents’ home in Houston. ![]()
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