ESSENTIAL QUESTION
How did Barbara Jordan call for a national community?
CONTEXT
In 1966 Barbara Charline Jordan (1936-1996) became the first African American elected to the Texas Senate since 1883, and six years later she was the first African American woman elected to the US House of Representatives. A lawyer, educator, politician, and gifted orator, she gave remarks during the impeachment hearings of President Richard Nixon (1974). She was the first woman and the first African American to give a keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, and it is from that address that this text is drawn. She retired from politics in 1979 and taught at the University of Texas at Austin. She received many awards, including election into the National Women’s Hall of Fame (1990) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1994). She died in 1996 from complications from pneumonia and became the first African American to be interred in the Texas State Cemetery.
In 1976 Jordan was chosen to give the Keynote Address to the National Democratic Convention in Madison Square Garden, New York. Only two years after the Watergate Scandal involving President Nixon and others, 1976 was a time of deep national divisions and distrust of government. The Convention nominated Jimmy Carter, who defeated incumbent Republican Gerald Ford in the 1976 election.
TEXT
…We are a people in a quandry about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community…
We must restore our belief in ourselves. We are a generous people so why can’t we be generous with each other? We need to take to heart the words spoken by Thomas Jefferson: Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and that affection without which liberty and even life are but dreary things.
A nation is formed by the willingness of each of us to share in the responsibility for upholding the common good.
A government is invigorated when each of us is willing to participate in shaping the future of this nation…
If we promise as public officials, we must deliver. If we as public officials propose, we must produce. If we say to the American people it is time for you to be sacrificial; sacrifice. If the public official says that, we (public officials) must be the first to give. We must be. And again, if we make mistakes, we must be willing to admit them. We have to do that. 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.
…But a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny. If each of us remembers when self-interest and bitterness seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny…
INQUIRY
- What is a quandry?
- According to the text, how is a nation formed?
- Why does Jordan quote Thomas Jefferson? According to Jefferson, what are the consequences of not seeking “that harmony and that affection”?
- What are the responsibilities of public officials?
- How is a government invigorated?
- Jordan speaks of a balance. Describe the balance and how that balance might be achieved.
- What is the “common destiny” that Jordan references? Why is it important to remember that “common destiny”?
- In what ways can we encourage harmony in our lives?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
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