Barbara Jordan and the ongoing struggle for voting rights

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the voting rights advocacy of Congress member Barbara C. Jordan. Drawing on some of Jordan’s lesser known speeches, including an address commemorating the 75th anniversary of the nineteenth amendment and congressional testimony on the Voting Rights Act of 1975, I highlight how Jordan rhetorically refigured dominant understandings of the meaning of the vote based on gender, race, and ethnicity. Although she was certain to commemorate past suffrage successes, Jordan also contested and nuanced these notions, reminding her audiences that the quest for equitable voting rights was a long, ongoing, coalitional struggle.

KEYWORDS:

• Barbara Jordan
• Voting Rights Act
• suffrage
• coalitions
• public memory

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges research staff at Texas Southern University, University of North Texas, and the National Archives and Records Administration (Tab Lewis and Jessie Kratz) for their efforts to locate and digitize archival materials for this project. She would also like to thank attendees at the 2020 ORWAC Citizenship at the Intersections conference (especially participants in the opening keynote session: Annie Hill, Catherine H. Palczewski, and Isaac West) for inspiration and initial feedback on this work. Finally, thanks to Karrin Vasby Anderson, Kristina Lee, and Damien Smith Pfister for their assistance in moving it to publication.

Notes

1 A fuller biographical sketch is available in Deborah F. Atwater, African American Women’s Rhetoric: The Search for Dignity, Personhood, and Honor (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 109–14.

2 Barbara Jordan and Shelby Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self Portrait (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1979), ix.

3 For a more detailed version of this argument, see Carly S. Woods, “(Im)Mobile Metaphors: Toward an Intersectional Rhetorical History,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 85–91.

4 Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton), Twitter post, November 13, 2019, https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton.

5 Holly Bass, “75^th Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage,” Washington City Paper, August 25, 1995, https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/article/13006808/75th-anniversary-of-womens-suffrage. Video of the rally is available at “19^th Amendment 75^th Anniversary Rally,” CSPAN, August 26, 1995, https://www.c-span.org/video/?66864-1/19th-amendment-75th-anniversary-rally.

6 Richard Pearson, “Ex-Congresswoman Barbara Jordan Dies,” Washington Post, January 18, 1996, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/01/18/ex-congresswoman-barbara-jordan-dies/27842197-c6d7-4dab-8aff-70800cf3c002/. Materials evidencing Jordan’s intended appearance in the event are available in A1 170, Box 39, Record Group 64: Records of the National Archives and Records Administration, Office of the Archivist of the United States/Public Affairs Staff, Program Subject Files, 1985–1996, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

7 The speech is also reproduced in former Texas Southern University archivist Sandra Parham’s edited volume, Barbara C. Jordan: Selected Speeches (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1999), 23–6.

8 Carroll C. Arnold found it useful to discuss undelivered speeches, which he deemed necessary to “preserv[e] in context” and “no self-contradiction.” See “Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 no. 4 (1968): 204–5.

9 Barbara C. Jordan, “National Archives Address, August 26, 1995,” in Parham, Barbara C. Jordan, 23.

10 Lisa A. Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15 no. 4 (2018): 349–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1526387.

11 Jordan, “National Archives Address,” 23.

12 Jordan, “National Archives Address,” 24.

13 See Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley’s intersectional rhetorical commentary on this speech in “Mammies and Matriarchs: Feminine Style and Signifyin(g) in Carol Mosely-Braun’s 2003–2004 Campaign for Presidency,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 38.

14 “About Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” The United States Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/crt/about-section-5-voting-rights-act (accessed May 28, 2020).

15 “Our Documents: Voting Rights Act of 1965,” National Archives, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=100 (accessed May 28, 2020).

16 For more on the history of challenging discriminatory voting laws in Texas, see Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003).

17 Jewel L. Prestage and Franklin D. Jones, “Contemporary Black Texas Women: Political and Educational Leadership, 1974–2000”, in Black Women in Texas History, ed. Bruce A. Glasrud and Merline Pitre (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2008), 198; Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan, 209.

18 Aimee Carillo Rowe, “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation,” NWSA Journal 17 no. 2 (2005): 18.

19 For a more detailed account of the process of extending and expanding the VRA, see Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan, 208–13; Mary Beth Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero (New York: Bantam Books, 1998), 241–7; Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), 105–13.

20 Extension of the Voting Rights Act: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, 94^th Cong. 1 (1975) (statement of Clarence Mitchell, Washington Bureau Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

21 “Jordan Bucks Rights Groups on Vote Act,” Houston Chronicle, March 2, 1975; “How Jordan and Brooks Can Justify Opposing Stands on Voting Rights,” Houston Chronicle, April 27, 1975. Scrapbook of the Voting Rights Act Expansion, 1975, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, credit Texas Southern University.

22 My thinking about this topic is indebted to the scholarship on coalitional rhetorics, such as Karma R. Chavez’s Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Belinda Stillion Southard’s How to Belong: Women’s Agency in a Transnational World (State College: Penn State University Press, 2018). These authors rightly trouble state-based citizenship as an encompassing framework for social change. Ersula J. Ore explains that when citizenship is viewed as synonymous with the “white citizen race,” anti-Black violence, too, is a “rhetorical enterprise intended to forge and maintain alliances, create and sustain community, and direct future action” in Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019), 54. I am mindful of these important arguments while exploring how Jordan used rhetorics of coalition and the imperfect possibility of inclusive citizenship within U.S. institutions.

23 Extension of the Voting Rights Act: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, 94^th Cong. 1 (1975) (statement of Hon. Barbara Jordan).

24 Jordan, Extension of the Voting Rights Act.

25 Michelle Kelsey Kearl, “‘Is Gay the New Black?’: An Intersectional Perspective on Social Movement Rhetoric in California’s Proposition 8 Debate,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 63–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2014.995684; Isaac West, “Analogizing Interracial and Same-Sex Marriage,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 48, no. 5 (2015): 561–82.

26 Berman, Give Us the Ballot, 113.

27 Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan, 208.

28 Rose Mary McGowan, “Remembering Barbara Jordan,” The Statesman, modified September 25, 2018, https://www.statesman.com/news/20160904/mcgowan-remembering-barbara-jordan. This is one of the many reasons that Jordan’s family and friends have objected to the way her rhetoric has been recently co-opted by immigration restriction groups. For more on this topic, see Carly S. Woods, “Networked Memories: Remembering Barbara Jordan in 21st century Immigration Debates,” in Networking Argument, ed. Carol K. Winkler (New York: Routledge, 2019), 394–9.

29 See, for example, Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women’s Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 107–32; Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (Basic Books, forthcoming); Cathleen Cahill, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming).

30 Richard Salame, “Texas Closes Hundreds of Polling Sites,” The Guardian, March 2, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/texas-polling-sites-closures-voting.