Barbara Jordan
Barbara Jordan
Barbara Charline Jordanwas a lawyer, educator, an American politician, and a leader of the Civil Rights movement. A Democrat, she was the first African American elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction, the first Southern African American female elected to the United States House of Representatives, the first known lesbian elected to the United States Congress, and the first African-American woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth21 February 1936
CityHouston, TX
CountryUnited States of America
I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in 'We, the people.'
We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.
The majority of the American people still believe that every single individual in this country is entitled to just as much respect, just as much dignity, as every other individual.
Even as I stand here and admit that we have made mistakes I still believe that as the people of America sit in judgment on each party, they will recognize that our mistakes were mistakes of the heart. They'll recognize that.
We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community.
The citizens of America expect more. They deserve and they want more than a recital of problems.
What we have to do is strike a balance between the idea that government should do everything and the idea, the belief, that government ought to do nothing. Strike a balance.
Let each person do his or her part. If one citizen is unwilling to participate, all of us are going to suffer. For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us.
I have confidence that we can form this kind of national community.
My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminuation, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution. It is reason and not passion which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision.
We must have an economy that does not force the migrant worker's child to miss school in order to earn...just so the family can eat. That is the moral bankruptcy that trickle-down economics is all about.
The Supreme Court has always been the last bastion of the protection of our freedoms.
I never wanted to be run of the mill.
But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.