This morning I attended an excellent panel, Juneteenth and Justice for All: Black Struggle, the Constitution, and Democratic Futures, on campus at Rice. From it I learned (among many things) that Mary Ellen Curtin’s forthcoming biography of native Houstonian Barbara Jordan is now available for preorder.
As we listened to a recorded snippet from Representative Jordan’s famous 1974 impeachment speech, I couldn’t help but think about the circumstances surrounding what was likely her first time speaking on the Rice campus. In 1963, while the university was still segregated and just beginning a lawsuit to revise its founding charter, Jordan was invited by the Young Democrats to speak at one of the university’s residential colleges. But her appearance was reported in the student newspaper only after it had occurred.
Many years later, in an untitled 1989 speech now available only in his archival papers, English professor Alan Grob claimed that “the first black speaker at Rice” was “a very young woman who had recently graduated from Texas Southern and Boston University Law School, Barbara Jordan, who was apparently surreptitiously brought to Jones College to speak in behalf of desegregation (which she did extremely well) and the right of people like herself to be considered for admission to Rice.”
Grob was wrong about Jordan’s being the first Black speaker on campus. He was not wrong—I am sure of this—to remember her speech as a powerful one. And it was not her last appearance at Rice. When she returned to campus two years later, Jordan’s photograph was featured on the student newspaper’s front page, opposite a report on Rice’s ongoing litigation about changing its charter. Her subject: redistricting in Texas to provide more equitable representation to cities and end rural domination in the state. “For the first time in Texas,” she said on that occasion, “we are going to have legislators who represent people, not cattle.” It was the kind of richly layered comment that typified Jordan’s speeches. I’m looking forward to reading Curtin’s new biography.
