2 College and Law School

The Jordan family had discussed the matter at length. If Barbara was going to be a lawyer, she would have to take her undergraduate degree at a school in Houston. That way she could live at home and avoid the costs of room and board, and the money saved could be put toward law school tuition. Barbara would have preferred a more prestigious school, but she understood the finances involved. There were no scholarships or fellowships available to an ambitious young Black woman in those days, so Barbara went to all-Black Texas Southern University in Houston and lived at home during her four years there.

In 1952, Texas Southern was a new school, although it could trace its beginnings to 1927, when Houston Colored Junior College was founded. In 1934, it became Houston College for Negroes, then Texas State University for Negroes in 1947. It had been called Texas Southern University since 1951, but it was still an all-Black school whose primary purpose, in the minds of Houston whites, was to fill the need for Black higher education without endangering the all-white status of the University of Texas at Houston. T.S.U. was a small school, and that was good for its students, for each could excel, if he or she wanted to, in some area of campus life.

Arriving at T.S.U., Barbara wasted no time in pursuing her goal of being “outstanding”: she ran for president of the freshman class. Positive she was the best candidate, she studied the issues of interest to the students; formed her opinions on them; and in speeches urging fellow freshmen to vote for her, amazed her listeners with her talent for oratory.

Though still a teenager, Barbara had a commanding voice. Years of listening to her father preach had taught her how to use her voice to best advantage and how to change tone and timbre to emphasize a point. Through her reading she also had acquired an excellent vocabulary. She could say in one sentence what it took others, casting about for the right words, several sentences to say. She had already demonstrated her gift for oratory in high school, where she had won the Julius Levy Oratorical Contest. The award would prove to be the first of many.

Andrew Jefferson, now a Houston lawyer, ran against her in the election and won. “She claims I stole that election from her to this day,” he says. It is unlikely that the freshman class officers election at T.S.U. in the fall of 1952 was the scene of any political “dirty tricks.” It is much more likely that Andrew Jefferson was elected president because he was a male. In that pre-women’s liberation era most males and females believed it was proper for presidents of anything to be male. It is also likely that Andrew Jefferson won the election because he was generally better liked. Barbara Jordan was an extremely serious young woman, not given to social chitchat or campaign-style jokes. A freshman class election was, and is, essentially a popularity contest. Fellow freshmen had little doubt that Barbara Jordan was bright and articulate, but she was not as personally popular among them as was her opponent. That is not to say that Barbara had no friends. Though she kept to herself a lot and did not enjoy a wide assortment of friends, she did have a few. Barbara did not try to get into campus politics after her freshman defeat. Instead, she concentrated on areas that demanded great individual skill and less popularity. She joined the Sigma Pi Alpha Forensic and Dialectical Symposium and the debating team. In these activities she excelled. “She was a champion debater at T.S.U.,” Andrew Jefferson recalls. “We won all the prizes then, every year Barbara was on the team, and we even debated Harvard. T.S.U. has never had such a team. We’ve never been that good since, and Barbara tells the debate coach that all the time.”

Barbara was awarded a plaque for being “the most valuable participant” in the Southern Intercollegiate Forensic Conference at Baylor University in 1954, and she was the inspiration of the T.S.U. team as it made tours to test its skill against the nation’s best college debating teams, including the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and Harvard.

“The best we could do against Harvard was a tie,” Barbara recalls. But the Harvard team must have been a bit surprised at even that outcome of a debate between its team and that of an all-Black southern school, and more than a little surprised at the oratorical ability of a T.S.U. junior named Barbara Jordan.

Each year her skill at oratory increased, her command of language expanded. After a while, word got around campus: never get into an argument with Barbara Jordan. Her campus activities indicated leadership of the responsible kind. She joined Delta Sigma Theta sorority⁠—in the early 1950s almost everyone belonged to a sorority or fraternity⁠—and later was named to one of the most important offices, dean of pledges. She was elected member-at-large to the Student Council, for she had no close personal ties to any segment of the student population and was thus capable of representing all of them.

Meanwhile, as a government major with a law career in mind, Barbara Jordan was becoming increasingly aware of how politics and law affected Black people in America and of the possibilities for change in those areas. In 1954, midway through her undergraduate years, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that “separate but equal” educational facilities were not and could not be equal and thus were unconstitutional. In handing down such a decision, the Court struck down an earlier decision made in 1895 that had established segregation in the United States by allowing separate but supposedly equal facilities. That decision, known as Plessy v. Ferguson, had been made in a case involving public transportation in which the question was whether or not it was constitutional to assign separate streetcars for Blacks. It was later applied to nearly every other public facility imaginable, from schools to theaters to drinking fountains. The 1954 Brown decision would have similarly widespread application. If “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional, then so were segregated public transportation, restaurants, theaters, and so on.

As a result of the 1954 Brown decision Barbara Jordan did a lot of thinking. For one thing, she thought about the practice of law and the contribution Black lawyers had made to the case. Thurgood Marshall, a Black lawyer who would later become the first Black Supreme Court justice, had been a key figure in pursuing the case, working with other lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The Brown decision would be followed by many other cases in which equal rights for Blacks would be sought. Black lawyers would be involved in these cases too, and Barbara hoped to be among them. Perhaps she would one day plead a case for equal rights before the courts.

The Brown decision also caused Barbara Jordan to reflect on the Constitution. Its framers had neglected to mention her and her people, but the document they had written nevertheless contained enough flexibility to allow for questions affecting the rights of her people to be decided based on its tenets. As she said in her famous “Constitution speech” in the summer of 1974, “through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.'”

A lot of hard work would go into bringing about the processes of amendment, interpretation, and court decision. The country did not simply do an about-face as a result of the Brown ruling. The next years would see great upheaval as Blacks, and some whites, challenged the long-held customs and beliefs of Black inferiority and second-class citizenship. The upheaval began in Montgomery, Alabama, late in 1955. A Black woman named Rosa Parks was arrested on a Montgomery bus for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. In response, Montgomery Blacks, led by a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., boycotted the buses, refusing to ride on them again until they were treated equally with whites. A little over a year later, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was illegal, and the Black people of Montgomery boarded the buses once more.

Blacks across the country had followed closely the progress of the Montgomery bus boycott. Students at T.S.U. and the people of Houston’s Black community were no exception. The thought crossed their minds that similar nonviolent action could be taken in their own community, but they did not ponder the notion seriously. Change can be a frightening thing, and they were well aware of the costs of the Montgomery Blacks’ actions. Dr. King’s home had been bombed, and he and ninety-two other leaders of the boycott had been arrested and indicted. Most Blacks continued to feel that accommodation to white society’s policies of segregation and discrimination was still the safest and sanest course. As for Barbara herself, her chief priority was her education, and she studied long hours to make the high grades that would gain her admittance to a good law school. “I wanted to go east to school,” she says, “and Harvard Law was considered the best law school in 1956.” Harvard Law School was her first choice.

Harvard did not accept her. Her rejection was not necessarily because she was a woman⁠—Harvard Law had graduated its first female students in 1950. It was not necessarily because she was Black⁠—Harvard Law had graduated Blacks before. But she was a woman and Black and from an all-Black southern college, and those were not the best credentials for acceptance. “They [acted as if they] had never heard of Texas Southern University,” she says, “and at that time it was not absolutely the fashionable thing to have Black people in your student body.” Boston University Law School did accept her. It was a good school and an eastern school, and she was relatively satisfied. As she had hoped, she would have a chance to experience another part of the country.

Barbara graduated from T.S.U. in June 1956 with a B.A. in government, magna cum laude. She was editor of the yearbook, which contained several photographs of her as a member of various organizations. She has changed little in appearance since that time. Tall, serious, competent-looking, she dominates her group photographs. In her senior picture she has a half smile, but her eyes are unsmiling, self-assured, and the angle of her head communicates her intention to be “something outstanding.”

Barbara’s education had become something of a family project. Not only her father but her two sisters as well were helping to finance her tuition and room and board at B.U., for there were still no scholarships or fellowships available to her. Neighbors and friends marveled at the Jordan family’s determination, realizing how hard it was for them during those years. Barbara was also aware of the financial sacrifices her family was making, and she resolved to make them worthwhile. To excel at B.U. Law School in competition with students from the best schools in the East, she had to work harder than the others. But she was used to working hard for what she wanted.

“Things always seemed so easy for Barbara,” a fellow student remembers, “at least in class or debating or at exam time.” But he adds, “Those who knew her best in college knew that she was studying while we slept. There was many a night in law school when her roommate would get up in the morning and find Barbara still studying.”

There was little time for social life, and club activities at law school are minimal. Except for occasional breaks for singing or playing the guitar with a few friends, Barbara did little else but eat, sleep a little, and study a lot. Three grueling years later, in 1959, she graduated from B.U. Law School with an L.L.B. degree.

After graduation, Barbara taught school for a summer while she studied for the Massachusetts bar exam. She took and passed the exam in order to be licensed to practice law in that state, but Barbara really had no intention of remaining in the East. To be sure, the comparative lack of discrimination and segregation in the East appealed to her. Boston, being a college town, provided a welcoming atmosphere to Black students. There were many students, and they were intent on learning, questioning. A sense of camaraderie pervaded the town, the students more concerned with their similarities than their differences. But Barbara realized remaining in Boston would be almost too easy. She missed her family, and while she did not like the patterns of segregation that obtained in Houston, she understood them. She could live with them while at the same time working to alter them. “If there was nothing for me to do but practice law and make money I would have stayed in Boston,” she says, “but I have to be relevant.”

Barbara wanted to help people like those with whom she had grown up, and there were a lot of unfair and antiquated laws in Texas that needed changing. The groundswell for changing laws that were unfair to Blacks was slowly creating the conditions under which those changes could be accomplished.

During Barbara’s years at law school, the civil rights movement had begun to gather momentum. Shortly after the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on the Montgomery, Alabama buses, more than a hundred southerners, most of them Black ministers, met in Atlanta, Georgia to discuss the fight for equal rights. Out of this meeting came the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.), whose stated goal was “full citizenship rights and total integration of the Negro into American life.” For the next few years, S.C.L.C. supported bus boycotts in many southern towns and cities and joined with the older organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.), in campaigning to register millions of Black voters. While she had followed the southern movement with interest, Barbara had been too busy studying to consider active involvement, and by the time she graduated from law school the N.A.A.C.P.’s legal battles for desegregation in Houston were over.

The voter registration drives, however, were not over, and they interested her. There were millions of Black people old enough to vote. If they could be persuaded to register, they could gain considerable recognition from political candidates as an important voting bloc. They could make a difference in local, state, even national politics, and with their political leverage, they could help bring about changes within the system. At the end of the summer of 1959, Barbara returned home to Houston with a Boston accent that enhanced the commanding quality of her oratory and with a determination to put her skills and energies to work at making those changes.