Today’s post is a part of University Press Week 2024’s blog tour. This year, the members of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses)—an organization of 160 mission-driven publishers in the United States, Canada, and around the world—have chosen #StepUP as the theme for University Press Week. Every day, university presses worldwide step up to educate and enlighten, motivate and inspire, support and act.
To kick off University Press Week, we offer an interview with Mary Ellen Curtin, author of She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan’s Life and Legacy in Black Politics. Apropos of the week’s #StepUP theme, Jordan stepped up to become the first the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress when she was elected in 1973 to the U.S. House of Representatives. Even before then, Jordan had stepped up to break down barriers, as the first Black woman in Texas to ever be elected to the state legislature. Jordan is well known for her oratorical skills, which were on powerful display during the Watergate hearings. Indeed, at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, Jordan offered a prescient observation in that bicentennial year: “Are we to be one people bound together by a common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.” Jordan’s star was on the rise, and many assumed she would become a US senator or a Supreme Court justice. But illness and disability, along with the obstacles she faced as a Black woman, led to Jordan’s untimely retirement from elected office—though not from public life. Until her death at the age of fifty-nine, Jordan remained engaged with the cause of justice and creating common ground, proving that Black women could lead the country through challenging times.
Penn Press history editor Robert Lockhart sat down with Curtin (over zoom) to discuss what inspired her to step up and write a biography of Barbara Jordan.
Robert Lockhart: Your first book was about Black prisoners in Alabama after the Civil War [Black Prisoners And Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900 (University Press Of Virginia, 2000)], a pioneering work in what is now known as “carceral studies.” What were the motivations—intellectual, personal, or otherwise–that inspired you to turn your attention to Barbara Jordan?
Mary Ellen Curtin: I have to say that I don’t feel like I chose this topic. I feel like it chose me. I was still finishing my Black prisoner book when I heard the news that Barbara Jordan had died. This was in 1996. I was brought up short, and I thought, oh my goodness, whatever happened to Barbara Jordan? I remembered her from when I was young, a teenager in the 1970s, during Watergate, and then suddenly it seemed she had left the public sphere. So, I started looking her up, even though I was still working on the first book, because I was so moved by my memories of her and so puzzled by why she had been seemingly forgotten, or at least not so much forgotten, but remembered in a particular way that had divorced her from the civil rights and Black power movement, even though here she was a pioneering Black woman figure in that struggle. At the time of her passing, she seemed to be out there floating around by herself. And I just thought that can’t be true, that can’t be right. This launched me on this biography.
Even though the two topics don’t seem to have much in common on the surface, they are in two ways. In both projects, I was trying to situate individuals whose voices had been neglected within their particular historical context. And in order to do that, you have to understand Black institutions, you have to understand segregation, you have to understand white power. You have to understand all kinds of things that you wouldn’t unless you were really committed to writing Black history, from a Black perspective. And so I think that experience with the first book really enabled me to ask good and new questions about Jordan and her political origins and her life. And the second thing is that Jordan’s grandfather had been incarcerated. I didn’t think that this was going to be a factor at all in the biography. And yet, it turned out incarceration is a hidden story in many aspects of Black history and Black life. And so the first book helped me to open up that door understand its significance.
RL: You mentioned Jordan’s grandfather, and I’d like to follow up with you on the people who influenced her. But first, I am interested to hear more about Jordan. Jordan was a pioneer in a number of ways. She stepped into the national spotlight as the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress. But even before that point, she was active in her hometown of Houston, and also at the state level in politics. What was Jordan doing before she entered the national political stage?
MEC: I first knew Jordan only as a national figure, and I started work on the biography with some pretty basic questions. Where did she come from? What shaped her as a person? It turns out that she was an activist in her community, the historically Black Fifth Ward in Houston, and had stepped up to be the first Black woman in Texas to ever be elected to the legislature in 1966. so just unpeeling the story of how she managed to do that is a huge part of the book, and I think sets up the second half, which is the national story. She stepped up in so many ways, and I think it does have to do with her upbringing and segregation during the Cold War. She was inspired by her teachers to become a highly skilled and recognized debater, both in high school [Phillis Wheatley High School] and college. [Because of segregation, Jordan was barred from attending the University of Texas at Austin and instead enrolled at Texas Southern University.] Jordan always had that kind of ambition, and her and teachers really pushed her to believe in herself, even in the face of white racism. I think Jordan’ s experience as a college debater she’s debating white men, white women was a huge part of her understanding that she could compete with anyone that these you know,.
Law School at Boston University was a different challenge. Moving out of Houston, I think, was important. it was intimidating at first, but it gave Jordan experience in being able to succeed, to graduate from law school, and to live sort of happily and successfully in a different environment. That gave her confidence. When she returned to Houston, there was this period of uncertainty. Jordan was one of only two or three Black women lawyers in the whole state. And the Texas Bar Association wasn’t even admitting Black members at the time. So how was she supposed to get work? And moreover, the law was a professions for men. So again, she was relying on her family and community to support her, and they do. As she takes on legal cases, she’s also giving speeches about civil rights to her local constituents, and she becomes part of a movement, a local movement to upend the elite segregationist white supremacist leadership of the Texas Democratic Party, and she joins forces with other liberals to get more Black voters out to support the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in Texas and to oppose segregation and to oppose poll tax. So being in the civil rights movement in Texas was her entrée into electoral politics.
RL: You noted that Jordan was a successful debater in high school and college, and she became nationally known as a powerful speaker. It struck me working on the book with you that the fame or notoriety she achieved as a speaker really gave her a highly individualized sort of profile. But I know that it was very important for you to emphasize that, though Jordan was a pioneer in many ways, she emerged from a particular familial and social milieu, and stood on the shoulders of others who came before her. And so I’m interested to hear you talk about some of her elders. Who were some of her elders and peers that she that shaped her as both an individual and as a political figure?
MEC: Well, I think her minister, Reverend Albert Lucas, who was head of the Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church, was an influential figure in her life, not only as a speaker, but also as somebody who believed that you had to mobilize church members for political change. He was doing that in the 1940s when he first got his congregation and many other congregations in Houston to support the legal battle that he waged with the NAACP against the white primary. We’re familiar today with souls to the polls and using churches as an important institution for mobilizing the Black vote. But you can really see it happening in the 40s, when Lucas did that to raise money and gather support for this very important Supreme Court case [Smith v. Allwright].
Another important figure in Jordan’s life was Mrs. Hattie Mae White, who was the first Black Houstonian to be elected to the school board in Texas. White wasn’t a partisan figure. She wasn’t a Democrat, but considering that Texas still had segregated schools, to have a Black woman on this elected position on the school board was extremely important because it gave a political voice, for the first time since Reconstruction, to Black Houstonians, and that voice was being exerted by a Black woman.
RL: Speaking of the Democratic primaries, does the book have a larger argument to make about the Democratic Party and its direction in the postwar era and especially Black women’s leadership in the party? What was Jordan’s role in the party?
MEC: Again, you have to look at what she’s doing in Houston and in Texas. There she’s part of this liberal coalition that includes white liberals, labor, some Latinos, and then Black organizations, and their shared goal, even though they’re coming from different places, was to upend the conservative segregationist leadership of the Democratic Party in Texas. And so you have this split in the Party. In the south at this time, the Democratic Party was the party that ruled. It’s a one party system. There were no Republicans in office yet, but the Democratic Party is splitting into two wings, the liberal and the conservative. And the first time that that liberal wing is able to have a more effective presence in state politics is because of redistricting in 1966. When Jordan enters office that year, she is joined by other liberals, who aren’t a majority, but they can exert leverage with their 11 members, in a 31-member state legislature, and so they have enough votes to block segregationist legislation if they stick together. The problem is learning how to stick together. Jordan understands that part of the reason she’s elected is that she had been part of this activist wing that was throwing stones and being very critical of established government. But then once you’re elected, you’re part of this system that you had been criticizing all this time. Now, what do you do? How do you oppose the system while being part of it? And this is the dilemma, I think, that all politicians who really want to enforce change face, and it’s a dilemma that’s especially poignant for Black politicians, For Jordan, she’s always thinking, “How do I use the power that I have? How do I leverage the power that I have? What can I do to make my voice heard and to be, not just heard, but effective? And so she is really in this challenging situation that’s common among former activists who enter electoral politics. If you want to stay in the system, it’s something that you have to come to grips with. And it’s not easy.
RL: You’ve alluded to this dilemma of activists entering electoral politics, and I’d like to take that opportunity to pivot to perhaps a more contemporary question, if you’ll allow me. You were working on the book when Barack Obama was elected president. And very interestingly, your book was at the printer when Kamala Harris formally announced her candidacy for the President. What was your reaction was at the time when you heard the news about Kamala Harris
MEC: Well, I was thrilled. I was thrilled. But not surprised. And I’ll tell you why I wasn’t surprised. I always knew that Black women would be an important leveraging force in this election. I think that’s an important element of the Democratic Party, from Jordan to Harris. That’s one of the things I’m seeking to show in the book, how important Black women’s organizing is, how they took the genius and talent for institution building, and then turned that to party building in the South, because they were really creating a new Democratic Party in the South. This was a party that had been dedicated to white supremacy. But when Jordan and others became active, it was staking out a new identity as part of the civil rights struggle, and Black women are central to that. This was true in Jordan’s campaign, where there’s an acknowledgement that you can’t take the Black vote for granted. You gotta get people out to vote. You gotta go door to door. Black women have been doing that for decades now, two generations at least. And so I always knew that. And we know this from Obama’s election, as well as Senate races, congressional races, even in primary elections that had leveraging power. So that I was confident about, but I didn’t fully appreciate how Harris would emerge as the leader, and for that, I have to say, my reaction was almost fear, because I understood from my research on Jordan just how deeply challenging it is for a Black woman to achieve power in American politics.
