President Barack Obama walks with Vernon Jordan (left) after attending the 2016 Alfafa lunch at Jordan’s house.
Vernon Jordan, civil rights activist, economic and political power broker who advised presidents and business people, died Monday night at his Washington, DC home
“My father died around 10pm last night, surrounded by loved ones, his wife and daughter by his side,” his daughter Vickee Jordan Adams said in a statement to news organizations.
Jordan was born in a separate part of Atlanta, Georgia in 1935 and raised by a postal worker and caterer. The family moved north to Indiana as the great black migration left Jim Crow South. He attended DePauw University and was the only black student in his senior year. He then attended and graduated from Howard University Law School in Washington, DC
In one of his books, Make it Plain: Getting Up and Speaking, he told a series of stories about events that had a major impact on his life.
As a clerk for Donald L. Hollowell, “the great Atlanta civil rights attorney,” he helped prepare the successful lawsuit that ended the University of Georgia “whites only” status – and paved the way for the first two blacks to be admitted – the late Hamilton Holmes (renowned orthopedist) and Charlayne Hunter-Gault (famous journalist and civil rights activist). He personally led Hunter-Gault to the university admissions office, past a group of angry white protesters.
He found “someone who applied to the University of Georgia at the same time as me, had the same credentials and still got on and I didn’t,” Hunter-Gault said in a PBS NewsHour interview. “He and his assistants went through thousands of documents and he was the one who found the critical document,” that was a key to winning the case and making history.
Jordan left private law practice in the 1960s to become a field director for the NAACP in Georgia. During his 1961 annual meeting in Philadelphia, he was introduced to then attorney Thurgood Marshall. Marshall paused and said, “I know this boy … he worked with Hollowell on the University of Georgia case.”
Six years later, shortly after Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court and after Jordan vowed to petition the court, he said, “I looked straight at Marshall for a moment and, holding his face impassively, he was quick, but unmistakably blinked his eye on me. “Jordan’s mother later told him,” That gesture was like the laying on of hands. “
Jordan held leadership positions at the Southern Regional Council, the Voter Education Project, and the United Negro College Fund before heading the National Urban League in 1971, still in his thirties.
“Today the world has lost an influential figure in the struggle for civil rights and American politics, Vernon Jordan,” said Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP, in a written statement. “As an icon of the world and a lifelong friend of the NAACP, his contribution to moving our society towards justice is unparalleled.”
Jordan also advised numerous business leaders and politicians. He was a close friend and advisor to President Bill Clinton and played a leading role on the transition team after Clinton’s election in 1992.
“Vernon Jordan was a wonderful friend of Hillary, Chelsea and me,” Clinton said on Twitter. “We worked and played together, laughed and cried, won and lost. We loved him dearly and always will. “
For the past 20 years, Jordan has served on the boards of numerous Fortune 100 companies and a senior managing director of one of the country’s leading investment banking companies.
One of his closest friends, Ursula Burns, former CEO of Xerox and the first black woman to run a Fortune 500 company, said Jordan was “incredibly consistent and incredibly strong … He wasn’t a corporate person to me. He wasn’t a political person. Not a legal entity or financial person. He was all of them, and I’ve seen him act in all of these areas without breaking the mold. “She made the comments on PBS ‘NewsHour.
Jordan gave words of encouragement and direction in numerous speeches to students across the country. Celebrating with multi-faith graduates and their families at Stanford University in 2015, Jordan said, “I come today to ask, like Isaiah, Who will go and who should we send? And I pray your answer is, “Here I am, send me”. ”
Vernon Jordan, longtime confidante of President Clinton, shows his hat to the press gathered at his Washington home during the impeachment trial of Clinton.
Jordan continued, “Send me to clean up the debris of racism that is still littered this country. Send me to one of the bulldozers in the name of equality and in the cleanup crews against injustice. Send me to disturb the injustice. “
“Vernon Jordan knew the soul of America in all its goodness and all its unfulfilled promises,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Tuesday. “And he knew the work was far from over.”
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