7 Rising Political Fortunes
Texas Senator Barbara Jordan started off her first four-year term with a bang. Since all bills introduced in the Senate had to be discussed in committee and reported out first, committee assignments were of major importance. During her previous two-year term, she had been appointed to all seven committees on which she had sought membership. In her second term, she was appointed by Lieutenant Governor Barnes to ten committees. She was made a regular member of eight of them: Education; Finance; Jurisprudence; Legislative, Congressional and Judicial Districts; Military and Veterans’ Affairs; Public Health; State Affairs; and Youth Affairs. She was also made vice-chairman of the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections. Most important, she was appointed chairman of the powerful Senate Labor Committee.
“Today marks an absolute new era for liberals in the Texas Senate,” said Barbara. “I think the lieutenant governor very carefully tried to balance the committees as far as political philosophies were concerned. My appointments are excellent. I received all the appointments for which I had indicated a preference. I did not request a chairmanship, but I was delighted to receive it.” Early in the session Barbara was accorded another honor, although it was a somewhat dubious one. The youngest senator serving in the legislative session was honored with a special resolution wishing her a happy thirty-third birthday. The resolution decreed that the “men only” sign in the members’ lounge, which adjoined the men’s room in the Senate, be removed for that one day.
Barbara proved a strict committee chairman. In fact, there was some grumbling among the members of the Labor and Management Committee that she ran it in an almost military style. Meetings started on time and a late-arriving member risked a withering stare and frequently a scornful remark from the chair. Bills were presented, witnesses were heard, discussions were held, and notes were taken in a no-nonsense atmosphere that discouraged down-home jokes or back-slapping techniques. When the meetings were adjourned, they were over—few lingered around to engage in small talk. Yet operated in this way, the committee was highly productive. Under her chairmanship, the committee reported out both a minimum wage bill and a bill to increase workmen’s compensation benefits to workers injured on the job. And through her clever political maneuvering, Barbara played a major role in seeing that those bills were passed.
There was plenty of opposition, especially to the minimum wage bill. Texas had never had a minimum wage law before, and a few die-hard conservative senators staged a filibuster to prevent a vote on the proposed bill before the legislative session ended. Yet the bill, which would set the state minimum wage at $1.25 an hour as of February 1, 1970, and at $1.40 a year later, was finally passed after a last-minute compromise exempting business firms employing fewer than five persons and farmers hiring fewer than four workers in any one quarter of the year. The workmen’s compensation bill was also a compromise bill agreed upon by the Texas AFL-CIO, the Texas Manufacturers Association, and the Texas Trial Lawyers Association. In fact, the three lobbying groups had written the bill without consulting the legislature, which made some legislators angry. The bill also granted benefits that were lower than the national average for workmen’s compensation, which angered other legislators.
Both bills were too strong in the opinion of some and too weak in the opinion of others. For the first time, Barbara was aware that behind her back liberal legislators were accusing her of “selling out.” She tried not to let those accusations bother her. The workmen’s compensation bill might not be perfect, but labor, management, and trial lawyers had battled each other to a standstill over the issue for the last twelve years. The minimum wage bill might not be as generous or as all-encompassing as it could be, but it was the first such law ever to be passed in Texas. Imperfect though they were, they were better than no laws at all. She refused to be unduly affected by adverse criticism from her colleagues. She looked instead to the working people she had promised to represent. They cheered her. And she took heart from the following statements made in the Houston Chronicle on June 1:
“The 61st Legislature enacted the state’s first minimum wage law and greatly improved benefits for injured workers.
“These were the session’s two major achievements in the field of labor-management legislation.”
Coming from the Houston Chronicle, a traditionally conservative newspaper, that was high praise indeed.
It was and continues to be difficult for a Black leader to follow his or her own convictions without being criticized by one group or another. There are still few leaders who are Black, and because that is so, they are expected to answer to Blacks of every political and economic persuasion. It is almost an impossible task. Every stand or opinion will be disagreeable to some. The militants demand militancy, the moderates a more conservative approach. What is good for the ghetto dweller is not necessarily beneficial to the Black middle class, and yet the leader is expected to represent the best interests of both groups. A Black leader is automatically exposed to the criticism that he or she is forsaking one or the other of these segments of Black society. It can be extremely unsettling to be branded a militant and a sellout on the same day and over the same issue. The successful Black leader must not take such criticisms to heart and must proceed in the manner he or she thinks best.
Barbara’s way was usually the middle path, neither radical nor extremely conservative, a steady liberalism that made her attractive to people with a wide range of political views. She was inundated with guest-speaking requests and accepted a remarkably large number of them considering the huge amount of legislative work she had. The Texas legislature is notorious for its numerous committees—it has more standing committees than even the United States Congress. Barbara’s committee load was one of the largest in the Senate.
In addition, she served on various non-legislative committees. In February 1970, she was named to the environmental health committee of the Southern Conference of State Governments. In March, Governor Preston Smith appointed her to head an interim study committee to look at programs for the handicapped in Texas. She was already on the Senate Interim Committee for Urban Affairs. In July she added the Senate Interim Committee on Election Law Study to her list of assignments.
Meanwhile she attended to the affairs of her regular Senate committees, holding hearings and presenting resolutions to improve the Texas judicial system, to raise the ceiling on welfare benefits, to improve health services to the poor, to offer disadvantaged youth greater educational opportunities at community colleges, to increase employment opportunities, to consolidate the various social services offered by the state and its communities. By now, “If you want something done, get Barbara to do it,” had become an often-heard maxim. What dedication, considering that her salary as a senator was a miserly $4,800 a year!
Because she was such a “doer,” Barbara was able to say a lot of things to her audiences that they would not take from other speakers. The makeup of her audiences didn’t seem to matter. In April 1970, when she spoke before a group of Blacks in Huntsville, Texas, she admonished both those under thirty and those over thirty:
“… Young people must learn to sit at conference tables with their elders, instead of going out and blowing up the Capitol,” she said.
“Wear an Afro haircut if you will, that is your choice. But under that haircut there is nothing other than a Black American. You were not born in Africa, so you’re not Africans.”
Those over thirty she chided for “standing on the sidelines watching the world destroyed…. You will get what you deserve suffering the clock turned back unless you find your voice.” And as for Black militants: “They say that hate and violence are necessary. I ask them, ‘What are you doing to save our country?'”
Sometimes militants would argue with Barbara, pointing out the inequities to which Blacks were still being subjected and asking how to do away with them without violence. One of the situations that particularly rankled Texas Blacks was the comparatively small number of Black elected officials in the state. As of April 1970, Texas had only twenty-nine such office holders, lower than any other state in the South. In Mississippi and Alabama, where voter registration drives had led to murder and other violence, the numbers of Black elected officials were eighty-one and eighty-eight, respectively. Houston, with a large Black population, did not have a single Black on its city council. These statistics bothered Barbara Jordan, too, but she preferred working for change within the system to the sort of violence that had scarred other areas of the South. Texas might be slow to change, but it was changing nevertheless, and as the top Black elected office holder in the state, Barbara found it difficult to complain personally.
Nineteen-seventy was another important election year in Texas, and the Democratic Party decided to stage an all-out drive for victory that would put aside factional disputes between liberals and conservatives in favor of the common goal of getting Democrats, no matter what their politics, elected. Governor Preston Smith decided that the time to start displaying this unity of purpose was at the State Democratic Convention in September. He announced that he intended to nominate former Lieutenant Governor Ben Ramsey, a conservative, as convention chairman and Barbara Jordan, a liberal, as convention secretary.
Ramsey, however, was a bit too conservative to be a wise choice. When he had served as lieutenant governor back in the 1950s, he had been staunchly segregationist and antilabor. To liberal and labor Democrats he was unacceptable, and they said so. Barbara found herself in a difficult position. She wanted to serve as convention secretary, but to serve in that capacity with Ramsey as chairman would be hypocritical. She informed Governor Smith that she would not accept the job of convention secretary if Ramsey held the gavel. If he insisted on keeping Ramsey, there would probably be a showdown vote at the convention, which would surely destroy the uneasy harmony then prevailing among the various factions of the party. Smith relented, Ramsey’s nomination was withdrawn, and Barbara became convention secretary.
“This is the first time a Black person has ever been named an officer of this convention,” Barbara told a cheering crowd. “I think it is past due.
“All of us remember the times we couldn’t even get a seat at this convention. That day is over.”
One more first for Barbara Jordan. Her list of firsts was very impressive by now. Although they primarily involved Texas, they were beginning to bring her to national attention. In December, she was named by Harper’s Bazaar as one of “One Hundred Women in Touch with Our Time” and described as the “most potent, influential voice in the state for blacks . . . a gifted, able orator.”
Soon political and population changes in Texas would pave the way to increased national attention for her. Nineteen-seventy was a census year, and the increase in the population of Harris County that had occurred over the past decade would almost certainly create the need for a fourth U.S. congressional seat for the county. If a fourth seat in Congress was warranted, liberal Democrats were prepared to push for another redistricting of the county that would create a congressional district out of the Black, Mexican American, and poor white precincts surrounding Houston. Such a district would be tailor-made for a liberal Democrat with a good record on integration and programs for the poor. State Senator Chet Brooks, State Representative Curtis Graves, and Harris County Judge Bill Elliott all had expressed interest in the creation of such a new district. And no one had to ask if Barbara Jordan was interested. It would be perfect for her, and she had made it known she would like to move up to Congress. Early in 1971, Barbara found out that she had been one of the targets of an army spying operation in Texas. Walter Birdwell, a twenty-eight-year-old Houston postman, came forward with the information that while he was attached to the 112th Military Intelligence Corps from 1965 to 1967, he had attended meetings and demonstrations and taken notes on who was present. The army’s chief interest had been in people who were against the war in Vietnam, and Birdwell had paid particular attention to members of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Texas and to the heads of various committees against the war. But he had also collected information on Muhammad Ali, whose refusal to serve in Vietnam had cost him his world heavyweight title; Representative Curtis Graves; and Senator Barbara Jordan.
Barbara had made a number of antiwar speeches, but needless to say she had never regarded herself as an enemy of the country. According to Birdwell, her file in the Federal Building at Houston had been only one-quarter-to-one-half-inch thick, which indicated the army had been unable to find much “on” her. Yet the very idea that such spying activities were going on disturbed her. More disturbing than her personal discomfort was the idea that the Bill of Rights, which guarantees individual liberty and privacy, was being subverted.
The disclosure of the army’s spying on her did not affect Barbara’s legislative work. She was as busy and as productive as ever. In February, she was co-sponsor of a bill to add an amendment to the state constitution that would guarantee equal rights for women; it was unanimously passed by the Senate. Later in the month, she introduced bills that would create a fair employment practices commission and require that all publicly funded contracts include provisions against discrimination. She also introduced a bill to establish a department of labor in the state. In March, she sponsored bills to create a state department of human affairs and to establish a nonprofit corporation to make loans for low-income housing. And in April, a bill she sponsored to create a state department of community affairs was passed in the Senate. But as the spring wore on, she concentrated on the pending congressional redistricting, the need for which, as expected, had been shown by the results of the 1970 census.
As mentioned earlier, if a new district could be carved out of the poor and primarily minority wards near downtown Houston, several Houston officeholders would be in a position to benefit. In the Senate, those officeholders were white liberal Democrat Chet Brooks and Barbara Jordan; and when it came time for Lieutenant Governor Barnes to choose the members of the subcommittee to study redistricting and draw the boundary lines of the new district, both wanted to be on it. One made it. Barbara Jordan was not only named to the panel, she was appointed vice-chairman.
At the end of May, Barbara formally recommended a redistricting plan that involved the entire state, wherever population changes required district changes.
In Houston, her plan did not unduly disrupt the districts of the three U.S. congressmen already serving in Washington; they would be able to run safely in them again. But the new fourth district was made up of just the people she had so ably represented in the Texas Senate. It was perfect for her. Early in June, both the House and the Senate approved the bill. The following year, 1972, the first U.S. representative from the new, 18th Congressional District would be elected. There were grumblings from some legislators about the results. Barbara Jordan had ordered up a congressional district for herself, and it had been served to her on a silver platter! But even the grumblers had to admit to her political cleverness. She had managed it all without threatening the re-election hopes of the three Houstonians already in Congress.
Congressional elections were a year away, but the idea that Barbara Jordan would be the newest Texan in Congress was already set in the minds of many. That may be one reason why she found herself the subject of special honors in the fall of 1971. To be sure, she had earned the respect and admiration of many in the state, but it is also likely that some of them were rushing to get a front seat on the Barbara Jordan bandwagon.
At the end of September, Mayor Louie Welch proclaimed Friday, October 1, as Barbara Jordan Appreciation Day in Houston. But the major testimonial came toward the end of October, when former President Lyndon B. Johnson headed a list of leaders honoring her as “the epitome of the new politics in Texas.” Among the others were Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes; Mayor Louie Welch; and her old debating team partner, Otis King, who had since become dean of the law school of Texas Southern University.
There were many speeches. Barnes called Barbara “the person who worked hardest for single-member districts and worked hardest to make sure Ben Barnes stood up for single-member districts in Harris County.” Welch called her a “responsive” legislator “who was responsible for legislation to make Houston, Dallas, and the municipalities in Texas better places to live.” But of course, the most important words to be spoken came from Lyndon Johnson: “Barbara Jordan proved to us that Black was beautiful before we knew what it meant,” he said. “Wherever she goes, she is going to be at the top. Wherever Barbara goes, all of us are going to be behind her.”
Barbara thanked Johnson. “You made us all feel like first-class Americans,” she said, “and we all enjoy feeling that way.”
As to where she was going, there was little question in anyone’s mind, least of all Barbara’s. Her only regret was that she would not be the first Black woman to sit in the U.S. House of Representatives. “I do not view with any great favor being only the second Black woman elected to Congress,” she said. “I would like to have been the first, but Shirley Chisholm beat me there. I would like to join her.”
