“My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole”: Barbara Jordan, Gus Adair and the Fight for Texas Democracy

Builders of Multiracial Democracy · Part 3 of 5

On July 25, 1974, a freshman congresswoman from Houston leaned toward her microphone in the House Judiciary Committee hearing room and told the nation why she would vote to impeach a president. "Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: 'We, the people,'" Barbara Jordan said. "But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that 'We, the people.'" Amendment, interpretation and court decision had finally included her. "My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total," she said. "And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution."

Half a century later, Texas is once again testing whether the Constitution includes everyone. Jordan's own congressional seat, the Eighteenth District, has been redrawn twice in a decade, and in 2026 the state's Republican legislature reshaped the Houston map so sharply that two Black Democratic incumbents had to run against each other.

The Fifth Ward and the Debate Team

Jordan was born in Houston's Fifth Ward on February 21, 1936, the daughter of a Baptist minister and a domestic worker. She learned to argue at Phillis Wheatley High School and on the champion debate team at Texas Southern University, where she graduated in 1956. At Boston University School of Law, she later said, she realized how much a segregated education had cost her and worked to make it up. She returned to Houston in 1959 and practiced law from her parents' dining room table.

Into the Texas Senate, 1966

She lost two races for the Texas House, in 1962 and 1964, in countywide elections that let a white majority swamp Black votes. Then the Supreme Court's one-person, one-vote rulings forced Texas to draw single-member districts, and in 1966 Jordan won a new Harris County seat in the state Senate. She was the first Black person to serve there since 1883 and the first Black woman ever.

She chose to master the institution rather than shout at it. She learned the rules, won over conservative white colleagues and passed the state's first minimum-wage law covering many workers left out of federal law. In 1972 her colleagues elected her president pro tempore, and on June 10 of that year she served as "governor for a day," the first Black woman to act as governor of any state.

The Staff Behind the Speech, 1973

Elected to Congress in 1972 from the new Eighteenth District, Jordan and Andrew Young of Georgia became the first Black members elected from the former Confederacy since the turn of the century. Lyndon B. Johnson was instrumental in that first congressional victory. The former president had come to admire her command of the Texas Senate, lent his name and his network to her 1972 campaign, and then worked the House leadership to win the freshman a seat on the Judiciary Committee, the assignment that would put her at the center of the Nixon impeachment two years later.

She also joined the Congressional Black Caucus just as it was building a professional staff. In 1973 the caucus hired Augustus "Gus" Adair, a Morgan State University political scientist and former congressional fellow in the office of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., as its first executive director. Adair's job was to turn thirteen to sixteen members with different styles into a legislative bloc with a common agenda. Papers preserved in the Barbara Jordan Archives at Texas Southern University show that staff work up close. Jordan was never a caucus loyalist by temperament; she guarded her independence and her Texas relationships. But the combination mattered: an inside player who knew how committees worked, and a caucus staff that could carry Black priorities from one bill to the next.

Votes for Language Minorities, 1975

Jordan's oratory made her famous. Her most lasting work was quieter. When the Voting Rights Act came up for renewal in 1975, she pushed to extend its protections to "language minorities," including Mexican American voters in Texas and the Southwest, who faced English-only ballots, intimidation and gerrymanders much like those Black Texans had faced. The extension brought Texas under federal preclearance for the first time, requiring the state to clear changes to its election rules with the Justice Department or a federal court.

It was a deliberate act of coalition-building. Jordan understood that Black and Latino Texans had a common interest in fair maps and open ballots, and that neither group could win them alone.

"We Are a People in a Quandary," 1976

In July 1976 she became the first Black woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. She described a party, and a nation, searching for a common purpose, and asked Americans to build "a national community" in which every citizen shared the burdens and the promise. She retired from Congress in 1979, taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994. She lived for years with multiple sclerosis and died on January 17, 1996. She was the first Black woman buried in the Texas State Cemetery.

The Inquisitor and the Court

Jordan's defense of the Constitution did not end when she left Congress. In September 1991 she returned to Capitol Hill to testify against the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas before the Senate Judiciary Committee, warning that his record on civil rights remedies threatened the equal-protection gains she had spent her career defending. It was the same argument she had made in 1974: the Constitution's promise to "We, the people" had to be enforced, not merely recited.

Two years later, President Bill Clinton considered appointing her to the Supreme Court itself. Her declining health kept her in Austin, where she taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, but the fact that a president weighed her for the Court showed how she was regarded: as one of the finest constitutional minds of her generation. The PBS documentary Barbara Jordan: The Inquisitor traces this arc, from Johnson's sponsorship of her first congressional race to her testimony on Thomas and her place on Clinton's list.

The Eighteenth District in 2026

Jordan's seat has had a Black representative since she won it in 1973, through Mickey Leland, Craig Washington, Sheila Jackson Lee and Sylvester Turner. In 2025, at President Trump's urging, the Texas legislature redrew the state's congressional map in the middle of the decade to create five more Republican-leaning seats, and the Supreme Court allowed the map to take effect. The new lines made Rep. Al Green's Ninth District more Republican, and Green chose to run in the Eighteenth against Rep. Christian Menefee, who had won the seat after Turner's death. Menefee defeated Green in a May 2026 runoff.

The Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais in April 2026 narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and Shelby County v. Holder had already ended the preclearance Jordan helped extend to Texas. The protections she built are largely gone. What remains is her example: master the institution, build coalitions across color lines and insist that "We, the people" means everyone.

Editor's note: On the evening of July 12, 1976, I was an eight-year-old boy sitting in front of the television with my father. He always encouraged me to read the newspaper and to follow the events shaping our country, so in our house the national conventions were appointment viewing. That night Barbara Jordan stepped to the podium at Madison Square Garden, and I had never seen anyone carry herself like that. She spoke with a certainty that left no room for doubt, with a poise and an authority few people possess, and with a dignity and strength that filled the hall and reached all the way into our living room. Nearly fifty years later, that stentorian voice still echoes in my mind. She has loomed large in my imagination ever since, a model of what it looks like to claim the Constitution, and the country, as fully your own. — Stephen G. Hall, PhD, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, HistorianSpeaks

Builders of Multiracial Democracy

This piece is part 3 of five in the HistorianSpeaks series Builders of Multiracial Democracy, tracing how Black leaders built the coalition at the center of American democracy:

1. Cultivating Democracy: Jesse Jackson and the Multiracial Bench 2. Unbought, Unbossed, Unfinished: Shirley Chisholm and the Road to Hakeem Jeffries 3. “My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole”: Barbara Jordan, Gus Adair and Texas (you are here) 4. The Chicago Blueprint: Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson and Carol Moseley Braun 5. Alexis Herman Opened the Doors of Labor

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