Barabara Jordan Us House of Representatives Democratic Party

Barbara Charline Jordan was born in Houston, Texas, on February 21, 1936. She graduated from Texas Southern Academy in 1956 and from Boston University Law School in 1959, and so returned to Houston to open her ain law practice. After participating in the Kennedy-Johnson presidential campaign of 1960, she decided to run for the Texas Legislature and won a seat in the land senate in 1966. She was the beginning African American land senator since 1883, and the first black woman to serve in that torso. Reelected in 1968, she served until 1972. In that same yr, she also served briefly equally acting Governor of Texas.

In 1972, she was elected to the Usa House of Representatives and became the kickoff black adult female from a southern country to serve in that body. She served equally a member of the Business firm Judiciary Committee, and she rose to national prominence for her televised speech before the committee's hearings on the impeachment of President Richard Nixon in support of constitutional principles.

I never intended to go a run-of-the-mill person.

She was perhaps all-time known for every bit ane of America's greatest orators. She had a constituent who once heard her on the radio and said "it was like listening to the vox of God." Her speech at the 1976 Autonomous National Convention is considered by many historians to exist the best keynote speech in modern history. Every bit one senator remarked well-nigh her speeches, "Her message united people from vastly different walks of life, bringing them together to stand as ane and nod their heads in unison and say: 'Yes, each ane of the states can make a difference, and together we tin make this nation stronger.'"

During her career, she was the recipient of 31 honorary doctorates and numerous national awards. In 1994, President Bill Clinton presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that tin can exist bestowed upon a civilian. In 1993, she was the first recipient of the Nelson Mandela Award for Wellness and Man Rights, given by the Kaiser Family unit Foundation.

In 1973, Jordan began to suffer from multiple sclerosis. The affliction eventually acquired her to be confined to a wheelchair, and she retired from politics in 1979 and became a professor at the University of Texas at Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

My faith in the Constitution is whole, information technology is complete, information technology is total and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
— Testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, July 25, 1974

She passed abroad on January 17, 1996, and is buried in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. Fifty-fifty in death, she broke barriers as the showtime black adult female to be interred there.

Barbara Jordan served on the board of trustees of the Kaiser Family Foundation from 1985–1993. As a member of the board, she played a pivotal role in the determination to completely brand over the Foundation under new leadership in 1990, and in the early decisions that shaped the Foundation's function today every bit a leader in health policy and communications. She also inspired the Foundation's special and now longstanding delivery to Due south Africa.

The Barbara Jordan Conference Eye in Washington, D.C., is our tribute to the indelible marking that she left on the Foundation's people and mission. In 1999, the Foundation created the Barbara Hashemite kingdom of jordan Health Policy Scholars Programme in order to honor her and aggrandize the potential pool of immature leaders of color interested in the field of health policy and public service, a purpose nosotros are sure Barbara would take applauded.

America's mission was, and even so is, to accept diversity and mold it into a cohesive and coherent whole that would espouse virtues and values essential to the maintenance of civil order. There is nix easy about that mission, simply it is non Mission Impossible.

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Source: https://www.kff.org/about-barbara-jordan/

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