Eulogy for Barbara Jordan
By Bill Moyers

In celebration of the life of Barbara Jordan, 1936-1996, one of the memorial services for her was held on Sunday afternoon, January 28 at the University of Texas in Austin. After introductory comments by Max Sherman, Dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, there was marvelous music that everybody agreed “soared” and for which the angels in heaven must have bent down in awe and wonder to hear. The message, called REMARKS in the Program, was delivered by Bill Moyers, and he has kindly given Christian Ethics Today permission to share it here. And who is Bill Moyers? Why, he is Judith Moyers’ husband, of course.

When Max Sherman called me to tell me that Barbara was dying and wanted me to speak at this service, I had been reading a story in that morning’s New York Times about the discovery of forty billion new galaxies deep in the inner sanctum of the universe. Forty billion new galaxies to go with the ten billion we already knew about. As I put the phone down, I thought: it will take an infinite cosmic vista to accommodate a soul this great. The universe has been getting ready for her.

Now, at last, she has an amplifying system equal to that voice. As we gather in her memory, I can imagine the cadences of her eloquence echoing at the speed of light past orbiting planets and pulsars, past black holes and white dwarfs and hundreds of millions of sun-like stars, until the whole cosmic spectrum stretching out to the far fringes of space towards the very origins of time resonates to her presence.

The day after her death, the headline in the Houston Chronicle said: “A voice for justice dies.” And I thought: Not so. The body, yes: “dust to dust and ashes to ashes.” The voice that speaks for justice joins the music of the spheres. What does the universe even know of justice unless informed by a Barbara Jordan? Cock your ear toward the mysterious and invisible matter that shapes the galaxies and sustains their coherence, and you will hear nothing of justice. On matters of meaning and morality, the universe is dumbstruck, the planets silent. Our notions of right and wrong, of how to live together, come from our prophets, not from the planets. It is the human voice that commands justice to roll down “like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

And what a voice this was!

They say that after Theodore Roosevelt was in heaven a few days, he complained to St. Peter that the choir was weak and should be re-organized. “All right,” said St. Peter, “re-organize it.” And Teddy Roosevelt replied: “Well, I’ll need 10,000 sopranos, 10,000 altos, and 10,000 tenors.”

“And what about the basses?” asked St. Peter.

“Oh,” said Teddy Roosevelt, “I’ll sing bass.”

Well, they can all retire in heaven now. Sopranos, altos, tenors—and Teddy, too. There’s a new choir in town, and she’s a Baptist from the Fifth Ward in Houston.

Barbara was singing the last time we were together. There were two score of us at Liz Carpenter’s up on Skyline Drive, belting forth old favorites from the Broadman and Cokesbury Hymnals. “Standing on the Promises,” “Throw Out the Lifeline,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” And spirituals, too. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Deep River,” “My Lord, What a Morning.” Friends have said her music often eased the smarting wounds of her long battle with multiple sclerosis. But this night some other wellspring opened as she sang one of her favorite blues. Hands on the arms of her electric chariot, that big head tilted back, a mischievous gleam of light in her eyes, she sang: “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out. It seems mighty strange without a doubt. But nobody knows you when you’re down and out. I mean, when you’re down and out.”

As I recall that moment now, the Barbara Jordan who appears in my mind’s eye is not the mature, powerful, accomplished, and celebrated woman whose music filled our circle of fellowship that night. No, I see a small child in Houston looking up at a water cooler posted “Whites Only.” I see a little girl riding in the back of the bus to a movie she has to enter through a side door to sit in the balcony as prescribed by law. I see a teenager in a segregated high school preparing to go, as expected to an all-black college. And I see the young collegian leading the Texas Southern debating team and placing first in oratory against all white opponents but required, even in victory, to sleep in quarters and eat in restaurants “For Colored Only.” I see a young woman coming back from Boston to open her law practice on the dining room table of her parents’ modest brick house at a time that no white firm would hire her. I see her running for office and losing. Running again—and losing. But each time, getting up and coming back without bitterness or rancor, and on her third time, winning. I see her arriving in Austin, a political oddity and outcast, and I see her just six years later, Speaker Pro Tem of the Texas Senate.

How does it happen—when “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out”? Well, Barbara knew herself. All along the way, with the shadow of Jim Crow falling across her every step like an eclipse of the sun, she knew herself. She knew her family, too—her mother, Arlyne, and father, Benjamin, who told her once: “I’ll stick with you and go with you as far as you want to go.” And Rosemary and Bennie—she knew her sisters and the songs they sang together. And she knew the people of Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church, where reportedly God called often.

She knew her ancestors, too. Not only the bloodlines running back to the sharecroppers and tenant farmers and former slaves and proud Africans, but her political lineage as well.

Socrates was Barbara’s kin; with him she believed you cannot have a healthy State when “you have one half the world triumphing and the other plunged in grief.”

And Plato was her kin, exhorting young people, as she did, to “take part in the great combat, which is the contest of life.”

Montesquieu was her kin, who said the state of nature bestows on us an equality that society then robs from us, and we recover it “only by the protection of the laws.” With him, she would hold that “a government is like everything else; to preserve it, we must love it.”

Edmund Burke was her kin, who held that “all persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with the idea that they act in trust; and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.”

And Lincoln—Lincoln was surely Barbara’s kin, who said, “We will make converts day by day. And unless truth be a mockery and justice a hollow lie, we will be in the majority after a while…” Who also said: “The battle of freedom is to be fought out on principle.”

Dead white males—from Greece, France, England, and Illinois. And a black woman from Houston. Kin. Not by blood. Not through the color of skin. Not from place of birth or tribe of origin. Not by station, rank, or office. No, kinship in this universal republic is forged from the love of a vision of truth, passion for the spirit of liberty, and the conviction that justice is so embedded in the social fabric, it can not long be denied if a people are to prosper.

Now what made Barbara so effective is the way she brought those ideas to downhome politics. True, she was an extraordinary speaker. (It was said of the famous Methodist preacher, George Whitfield, “He could make men laugh or cry by pronouncing the single word ‘Mesopotamia’.” Barbara could do it with the word “Constitution.” But her ambition was not a few lines of Immortality in Bartlett’s Book of Quotations: nor was she content just to capture your heart. She wanted your vote.

No nonsense.

Over in Houston, she began in politics licking stamps and knocking on doors; they still talk about the time she organized the city’s first black precinct drive for Kennedy and Johnson in 1960. Here in Austin, half the bills she submitted for consideration were enacted into law. In a legislature that was practically an oligarchy, she made things happen for laundry workers, domestic helpers, and farm laborers.

And up in Washington, for only three terms, she so mastered the process and details of procedure that not even the craftiest patriarchs of Congress could outfox her. Her 1975 campaign to hold Texas accountable to the Voting Rights Act was a triumph over entrenched and powerful opponents. A journalist colleague of mine said she was “as cozy as a pile driver, but considerably more impressive.” But in her study of the art of politics, she had clearly listened to the counsel of the experienced, which holds that “as with sailing, so with politics; make your cloth too taut, and your ship will dip and keel, but slacken off and trim your sails, and things head off again.”

Maybe she got that from her political godfathers, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Roosevelt was a hero because her family owed to his election the little brick house that her grandfather was able to buy in Houston with help from the Home Finance Corporation. And LBJ showed her how to maneuver among movers and shakers without being moved and shaken from her own principles. Like both of them, she understood that America’s development owed much of its story to the affirmative action of government. From the common purse, throughout our history, had poured money for just about every improvement you could name—canals, dams, roads, forests, river channels, mining and fishing rights, and even orange groves. So she argued, as both Roosevelt and Johnson had argued, that the fruits of democracy belonged on the table of the simplest home no less than in the banquet hall of the grandest mansion.

But she was no creature of government. She went, she served, and she came home. After just six years in office, she voluntarily imposed term limits upon her career in Congress, long before there was a national movement to make them mandatory. Woodrow Wilson had said, “Things get very lonely in Washington. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city.” Not for Barbara Jordan. She heard the voice of the people, and she gave the people a voice.

No wonder they held her in respect approaching reverence. After her death, people who had never met her poured out their personal eulogies. I came on one last Friday in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. It was signed by a twenty-four-year-old immigrant from Chile named Fabio Escobar. Here’s what he said: “I did not grow up in the United States. I do not remember the Watergate Hearings or Jordan’s keynote address at the 1976 Democratic Convention. I only learned of her career while studying philosophy and political science at Cal State a few years ago. I never met her except through the books and tapes of her speeches. But I know Barbara Jordan’s accomplishments extend far beyond the narrow scope of political realm. She spoke for millions of individuals who yearned for leaders who would commit themselves to a core set of issues grounded not in polls, but in the solid footing of raw, personal conviction. No American politician of recent times has done that better than she did. She stood on conviction and fought for what she believed was right. This is the noblest and most difficult task a person can undertake, and she did it with exceptional quality.” This, from a young man whose native language was Spanish.

To people like Fabio Escobar, Barbara Jordan was an inspiration; to others, a hero; to the lucky, a friend. To me, she was all these things, and something more. In 1987, she became my muse.

That summer was the 200th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where remarkable minds had talked the United States into being. So I made the Constitution, 1987, my”beat” on PBS.

Some of the programs we were producing were unabashedly celebratory; I still marvel that any group of 56 prickly men, meeting in the breathless heat of an urban summer, could have agreed on anything, let alone a firm and lasting foundation for a new kind of nation no one had ever seen before. But some of our programs that summer were much less hopeful and much less proud—because even as in 1987 we were celebrating the making of the Constitution, we were also watching its attempted undoing as the Iran-Contra Scandal revealed yet one more conspiracy to subvert the Constitution by those who had sworn to uphold it.

Reporting on the Iran-Contra Scandal that summer, I took heart in recalling Barbara’s stirring words during the Watergate Hearings scarcely a decade earlier. There, she had famously declared her whole and total faith in the Constitution despite having been excluded from it. The Convention of 1787 had decided people like her were “0% a person,” which is how slaves and others were to be enumerated for the purposes of representation. But the truth is, Barbara Jordan would have fit right in with any of the 100% white men in that hall, 200 years ago, in her understanding of justice.

George Mason had asked: “Shall any man be above Justice?”

Edmund Randolph had declared: “Guilt wherever found ought to be punished.”

And Gouveneur Morris had said: “The Magistrate is not the King. The people are the King.”

And what might Barbara Jordan have said?

This, perhaps: “If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.”

Certainly this: “Justice of the right is always to take precedence over might.”

The founders would have been lucky to have had her in that Constitutional Convention. If she had been present, it would have taken far less time for Barbara Jordan to be recognized as a whole person in the sight of the law, or for this country to fulfill its promise.

As it is, the good fortune has been yours and mine. Just when we despaired of finding a hero, she showed up, to give the sign of democracy.

Do you know what the odds of this happening had to be? That in a universe existing billions of years, with fifty billion galaxies and more, on a planet of modest size, circling an ordinary sun in an unexceptional galaxy, that you and I would have arrived in that same time zone as Barbara Jordan, at such a moment of serendipity to be touched by this one woman’s life, to encounter her spirit and her faith.

This is no small thing. This is grace.

September 1996