When Dean Max Sherman called to tell me that Barbara Jordan was dying and that she had asked 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 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 so great a soul. The universe has been getting ready for her.
So begins the eulogy Bill Moyers spoke for Barbara Jordan, entitled as is this diary. It is yet one more chapter in his new book, Moyers on Democracy, about which both Inky99 and yours truly wrote yesterday. Please indulge me with one more diary as I urge you to read this fantastic book.
Bill Moyers is among the best of our public intellectuals. We have experienced him through the many wonderful documentaries he has produced, the books he has written, and his thoughtful discussions with others on television, often submerging his own powerful intellect in order to let us experience the wonders of another. Many of us first experienced this in his documentary series on Joseph Campbell, "The Power of Myth." Those who know his work understand that Moyers takes the time to absorb and understand the work of those he shares with us.
And yet when he unleashes his own voice, it is so powerful, even as it gives us a connection with someone about whom we thought we knew a lot. Barbara Jordan became a national figure at the House Impeachment Hearings with her opening remarks, and again reminded us of the power of her intellect and her voice with her keynote address at the 1976 Democratic Convention. And yet, as much as I knew and admired her, I felt as if I were not only being reminded about her, but also getting to know her in a new way, almost for the first time, as I read these words by Moyers.
Shortly after that introductory paragraph, Moyers words are
The day after her death, the headline in the Houston Chronicle read A VOICE FOR JUSTICE DIES. But 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?
He reminds us of her early life, with segregated schools, segregated movies, an all-black college, all of which he can see in his mind's eye, and adds
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."
Still, despite the legacies of slavery and segregation, Moyers sees as we also must that Jordan came from a broader background:
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 kind, exhorting young people, as she did, to "take part in the great combat, which is the contest of life."
He adds her kinship with Montesquieu, Burke, and especially Lincoln , the Lincoln
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 on principle."
Barbara Jordan lived words like that. Moyers reminds us that she lost her first two attempts at public office, and yet six years later was Speaker Pro Tem of the Texas Senate, greatly honored by her colleagues. He does not remind us, but I remember, that when she was elected to the U. S. House, she was so respected that both the Governor and Lt. Gov. arranged to simultaneously be out of state for one day so that Barbara Jordan could be Acting Governor of her beloved Texas for one day. He does tell us that
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.
Moyers places her in the context of her personal political heroes, FDR and LBJ, reminding us of how the government had used its resources to improve the nation structurally, thereby improving the lives of all, and that she argued, as had they,
that the fruits of democracy belonged on the table of the simplest home no less than in the banquet hall of the grandest mansion.
If you want to understand the power of this eulogy, you can already read it online at Christian Ethics Today. Perhaps that is an appropriate place as well in which to read about Barbara Jordan. She was devout in her faith, and fierce in her ethics. She served as an ethics advisory to Gov. Ann Richards, and cut her good friend no slack: when a protege of the Governor was found to have exaggerated her academic credentials Jordan insisted the offense required her to leave her office. That perhaps provides the context for how Moyers brings his eulogy to a close. He tells us how when he was reporting on Iran Contra, as we celebrated the 200th anniversary of our governing document we were also confronted with an attempt to undo it, and how Jordan's words at impeachment gave him comfort - he had no doubt that had she been able she would have fit right in with the small group of men struggling to create the Republic from which we have benefited. I am going to conclude with a somewhat more extensive quote, beginning after Moyers has set that context, because what he has to offer is not only a tribute to Barbara Jordan. At least some of the words you will read should serve as a challenge to those currently in office to take seriously the challenges to our republic as Jordan did almost 4 decades ago in the House Committee's hearings that first made her a national figure.
George Mason had asked:"Shall any man be above justice?"
Edmund Randolph had declared: "Guilt wherever found ought to be punished."
And Gouvernor Morris had said: "The Magistrate is not the King. The people are the King."
Here is what Barbara Jordan said: "If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority." And 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 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 o 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 at the 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?
That is no small thing. Call it grace.