Barbara Jordan
Her Voice--and
Vision--Survive
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the Texas Observer.
The class was debating the decision-making process that led President Truman to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Some of the students in the small seminar room argued that the act itself was so immoral, so unethical, that the decision-making process must have been flawed. Others said that it was unfair to apply today's values to events and circumstances of a half-century ago. They noted that military officers, clergymen, physicians and a variety of others had been invited to offer advice--wasn't that enough?
The professor slowly turned toward me. The class grew quiet; the small seminar room seemed to shrink. The voice that had intimidated at least one President, the Texas Senate, and scores of quivering graduate students was brought to bear. "Brett," Barbara Jordan intoned, "what do YOU think?"
Since her death last month, most of the tributes to Jordan have focused on her public career in the Congress and the Texas Legislature. Most ended with her 1979 retirement from Congress, followed by a brief mention that she had taught at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs. Many of her admirers must have wondered: why did this most impressive of politicians give up political power just when she'd accumulated enough to make her a national figure? Some speculated that her multiple sclerosis had left her too enervated to continue fighting the political wars.
If those people ever sat a few feet away from her in class, as I did in the fall of 1986, they would have been quickly disabused of the notion that Jordan was too tired to fight. The truth is much simpler: Barbara Jordan was, at heart, a teacher, and she loved to teach almost as much as those of us who were lucky enough to be her students loved to come to her classes.
Even in her most celebrated moments during the 1974 Watergate hearings, Jordan merely occupied a larger classroom: the world stage, where she eloquently reminded politicians, reporters and citizens just what the nation's founding document really said--and meant. She also taught by example, showing African- Americans in Texas and elsewhere how to fight an oppressive system and, occasionally, get the better of it.
Some students no doubt signed up for her classes at UT because they wanted to be near a celebrity, and like many public figures who retire to academic pastures, Jordan could have merely rested on her reputation. But she worked hard at teaching, and expected no less of us. Even I, who had survived UT Law School's notoriously crusty constitutional scholar and former Nixon lawyer, Charles Alan Wright, in a small seminar setting, found myself getting to the library in the early morning hours to brush up on the reserve readings. I didn't dare get caught unprepared or unable to back up my position. When she asked your opinion, as she did mine in the atomic bomb question, you'd better have one--and be able to back it up.
That's right: she asked our opinions, about atomic bombs, balanced budgets, equal opportunity, and other public issues she discussed in her ethics and policy classes.
She was no curmudgeonly Kingsfield out to embarrass students, no pundit out to harangue a captive audience. Rigorous, yes. Demanding, absolutely. Her goal seemed to be to inspire debate, not obedience or conformity. She encouraged us to develop informed opinions, argue and defend them well, and modify them if justified. Her very certainty made us ashamed to emit half-developed thoughts. To push students to take stands, she would assign complex, contradictory readings on controversial subjects, then ask us to summarize one of the arguments. Then she'd ask whether the student agreed with the argument. If so, why; if not, why not. This proved much harder for the wonks-in-training who didn't want to make value judgements. If the student agreed with the argument, she'd ask him to summarize a contradictory reading, then explain why that one was wrong. Or she'd get two students who agreed with opposing arguments to fight it out in class, defending their respective positions. When it got really heated, she'd lean back a bit and a grin would nudge the corner of her mouth.
There was more to BJ than her politics. Once, another student and I were driving her home from a civil rights symposium at the university. It was an early spring afternoon, and the wild flowers along the I-35 median and surrounding hillocks were in full bloom, a long bouquet of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes. As we tooled down the highway, the talk naturally turned to politics and civil rights. Just as I was making some point, The Voice boomed from the back seat. "As we discuss these weighty issues," she interrupted, "do not fail to appreciate the great beauty that surrounds us at this moment."
Oh yes, The Voice. That Boston-ish, clearly enunciated style thundered conviction in every syllable. But sometimes in class, she'd lapse into a real southern drawl, g's dropping off the end of gerunds like gravy dripping off a biscuit, especially when she was talking about the practical side of politics. It was as if she had to return to her linguistic roots in order to discuss the horse-trading for which Texas politics is so notorious.
As former Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby has noted, in an age of blabbering politicos who orate for hours and say nothing, "she didn't speak unless she had something to say. When she had something to say, she said it without a wasted word." And with utter conviction, as though some scrivener angel was carving her words in stone tablets. It's hard to imagine that voice stilled; when I first heard that she'd died, I couldn't believe it. She seemed an institution as weighty and granitic and permanent as the LBJ Library itself.
Yet I think that remembering her for The Voice, as so many of her eulogizers did, obscures what the voice was saying. There are others who can speak eloquently, but it was the values behind the voice that lent her speech moral authority. Even in our nuts-and-bolts policy development class, she always talked about the place of values and ethics. These are subjects usually missing in political discussion, then and now. But she leavened those lessons by making us acknowledge the realities of power politics that often interfered with morality.
Barbara Jordan survives in me and every other student who learned from her, first hand, the importance of being serious about what we do, and about the central place of values in government. And, yes, her voice survives, the voice in our heads that still rings out when we confront or assess any ethical dilemma, whether in public life or in our own lives.
Barbara Jordan could inspire audiences of millions with her voice and her vision. But she was one of those rare people who could elevate you by example -- just by the way she carried herself, her rigorous way of thinking, the way she spoke, the things she valued. For all her public triumphs, even greater might have been those last unheralded years spent in a small seminar room, teaching twenty-somethings some lessons -- lessons that were, in these times, revolutionary.
Brett Campbell