VALELLY TASK 9: BARBARA JORDAN AND THE EXTENSION OF

THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT Reference: BARBARA JORDAN AND SHELBY HEARON, BARBARA JORDAN: A SELF PORTRAIT (GARDEN CITY, DOUBLEDAY & CO, INC, 1979) ISBN: 0385135998 Princeton University, Firestone Library, E840.8.J62 A33 MARY BETH ROGERS, BARBARA JORDAN: AMERICAN HERO (NEW YORK, BANTAM BOOKS, 1998) ISBN: 0553106031 Princeton University, Firestone Library, E840.8.J62 R63 1998 THIS PACKET CONTAINS EXCERPTS REFERENCING THE 1975 EXTENSION OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT. EXCERPTS ARE TAKEN FROM BOTH THE BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BARBARA JORDAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Packet pages 2-6, Book pages 208-213 (Title page also included) BIOGRAPHY Packet pages 7-13, Book pages 240-247, 383 (Title page also included)

rice-fixing mechanism which preve~ted free.ecmpetiLioq P, .-- - -". ansiherefore li;f't hiiho;ifj-run businesses. Originally-i;. had been seen as a device to help the small, independen; owner, the "Mom and Pop" stores. "I don't know whether Mom and Pop ever heard of the bill, but at least they didn't show up to testify. Only the big manufacturer came to protest my bill."

Rodino let her manage this bill on the floor of the House, and, after it passed both houses overwhelmingly in the same language, she got to keep the pen with which Presi- dent Ford signed the bill. "That's what you do up here- you collect pens." -' Most important of her @il rights work ..--+- was her exten- ~ i o n sf ~hg~,Ycbti~g .&igh@ Kct. She considered that %e right to vote, thatbasic rig fectively prohibited blacks

Lilsrr .,a,rias i,w%w

ways since they were given.it in the Fifteenth Amendaq+;anrm As Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General for Civll

Rights under Kennedy, had expressed ;t (Federalism and Civil Rights): "Only political power-not court orders or other federal law-will insure the election of fair men as sheriffs, school board members, police chiefs, mayors, county commissioners, and state officials. It is they who control the institutions which grant or deny federally guaranteed rights . . . Any elected official represents not the people in his district, but the people in his district who vote."

k b a r a rernemhe~ltharj-o&spn, when he was Presi- dent, had said that even more than we have to ensure - -- --- that --

everybody can go to the bathroom and eat &ithout-haf%sz. ment we must determine that all people have equal frak chisement.

Under him, after the civil rights marches in Selma and --- ' I I ., '

Montgomery, the original Voting Rights Act of I 965 %as ~assed, stating: C -

"No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or ap- plied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."

Additionally, the act stated that: "[Nlo citizen shall be denied the right to vote in any-

Federal, State, or local election because of his failure to comply with any test or device . . . "

This had put an end to such subterfuges as formidable application-to-vote forms required only of blacks, or difficult literacy tests requiring only blacks to define such terms as ex post facto and habeas corpus, or the financially discriminatLg poll tax, which Texas had used.

This original bill had been - tageted -- only "-.en at the *A .,+, Deep. =- [ South states, and therefore ru,s-i Texas harl%e'n ,- -W -- , . rr"-*-sC excfqljF;4. %it L

Barbara bd;"Bepun to receive a continual flood of com- 0 -.-..IT" - '̂-... - L I 1 -. ->--.

plaints concerning voting obstructions and intimidation in. I

heavily black East Texas, and from Mexican Americans who had difficulty reading the English-Fated Ea1l'dts:'She decided, when the Voting Rights Act came up for review,

L '.' NJI

that Texas should be brought under its coverage.; ----+.* .---.+-a . -a - 3 LS*. * L", *, ? %d\-&-.%. & - -L-, ..; -r +7 * -

In 1975, she introduced an amendbent to the bill's re- newal-that Texas be placed under its jurisdiction. She claimed that if a given percentage of the population had a language other than English, that ballots only in English

rr-+'*--ar"uru "u n ,*. r %." . " -%,,

would constitutg a test or device, and therefore be a ..L

violation of the v o t k g Rights Act. Every elected official in the state opposed the idea of in-

cluding Texas. Because under the Act if you made any chang; in election requirements or proceduGes, that changk

would have to be approved by the Attorney General of the United States before it could go into effect, and if com- plaints were made of discrimination in voting procedures, the Justice Department could send federal registrars into an aria' with"'ju&dictio to handle the election. i . - ,-._ S r a ~ officials Gefe?i-glikt. hderales would be intruding iQx local elections.

Meanwhile,.following Barbara's plan, the 1975 Congress expanded its definition of "test or device" to include:

"Any practice or requirement by which any State or po- litical subdivision provided any registration or voting no- tices, forms, instructions, assistance, or other materials or information relating to the electoral process, including ballots, only in the English language, where the Director of the Census determines that more than five per centum of the citizens of voting age residing in such State or political subdivision are members of a single language minority."

Under this new language-minority provision, in order to permit enforcement, the Director of the Census had to prove that more than 5 per cent of the voting-age citizens of the state belonged to a single-language minority (Amer- ican Indian, Asian American, Alaskan native, persons of "Spanish heritage"). The Director was to determine that on November I, 1972, in the last presidential election, less than 50 per cent of the voting-age citizens were registered to vote, or less than 50 per cent of the voting-age citizens actually voted. And the Attorney General was to make a separate determination as to whether the state had main- tained a "test or device" as of November 1972.

Texas, fighting this all the way, took the case to court in

1976. Secretary of State Mark White challenged the state's inclusion, claiming error on all three determinations. He claimed that the fact that 5 per cent of the voting-age pop- ulation was of Spanish heritage was unrealistic because of the large number of illegal aliens; that the fact that 50 per cent of the voters did not vote did not prove it was Mexi- can Americans who had not voted; and ;hat the all-English election of November 1972 should not be considered aiest, as the state legislature had now made all-English elections ille~al.

g u t the Supreme COG* held *, . .., unanimously < - that Tez an8, t6 make mat- h a fluke the newly

included states were t o be, cqverecj _fo~,,..h~es,~tban_those states whose eligibility had bee; kenewed from the old act of 1965.

When Barbara's bill passed the House, it had been pri- vately agreed by the Senate leadership that when the phys- ical bill itself got to the Senate, it would be held at the desk for the memgers to consider directly without sending it to committee, as they feared Senator Eastland, conservative Mississippi head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, would block it.

So, when the Senate was debating it on the floor, what they were actually debating was a piece of paper which said the Senate agrees to the House bill. After several weeks of filibustering, Senator Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.) put together a compromise to end discussion. His sugges- tion was for an extension for seven years instead of ten. However, when passed, due to the way the insertions were made in the House bill, the existing Deep South states were only covered for another seven years, while the new states

. . -

All rights reserved.

Copyright O 1998 by Mary Beth Rogers. \

BOOK DESIGN BY GLEN M. EDELSTEIN

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by

any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publisher.

For information address: Bantam Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rogers, Mary Beth.

Barbara Jordan : American hero / by Mary Beth Rogers.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-553-10603-1

1. Jordan, Barbara, 1936-1996. 2. Afro-American women legislators-Biography.

3. Legislators-United States-Biography. 4. United States. Congress. House-

Biography. I. Title.

E840.8.J62R63 1998

328.73'092-dc21

[Bl 98-19996

CIP

Photo on page ii courtesy of Frank Wolfe, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library Collection.

Photo on page 357 courtesy of Texas Senate Media Service.

Excerpts from FOR T H E INWARD JOURNEY: T H E WRITINGS O F

HOWARD THURMAN by Anne Spencer Thurman, copyright O 1984 selected by

Sue Bailey Thurman, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

Published simultaneous(y in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantarn Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell

Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books"

and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway,

New York, New York 10036.

For my parents -

Frank and Anita Hicks Coniglio

C H A P T E R 1 5 n

m < 0 3s '%A

2 w-3 s -- F_) Dli K I S G TH E S P K I N G of 1975, even when she was embroiled in the

Connally testimonj; Barbara Jordan was i s o at the center of congressiond efforts to extend the Voting Rights Act. She had become the most promi- nent and powerful black membcr of Congress. Because of her close ties with Texas conservatives and other southern Democmts, she could probably in- fluence as many as fix~ to f i fh votes on a piece of legislation important to her. No other hlack member of Congress had that span of influence, and othcr than the Speaker or the minority leader, few white members had it either.

Jordan felt that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the most impor- tant-and effective-piece of civil rights legislation ever p s w d because it opened the doors for inillions of southern blacks to participate i n the Arner- ican system. But the act would end August 7, 1975, unless Congress ex- tended it. For Jordan, the right to vote was the paramount civil right. From this one right could come the politicd opportunity to acquire decent jobs and income, cducation, health care, housing, and the other gc)ods people

+ needed to live without s~r temic humiliation or private misery. While the notion of exactk what constituted a civil right sometimes

got lost in the mc)vements, marches, struggles, shouts, and litigation, Jor- dan's penetrating mind always went straight to the heart of the concept of rights. A civil right, to her, simply meant having the freedom to carry out the ordinary activities of private or public life and enioy the benefits of socicty. She believed that certain rights were "f~~ndamental."

Fr- "The addition of 'fundamental' adds something . . . it is not surplus w verbiage . . . it enhances the concept of right exponentially. . . ."' In

Jordan's mind, civil rights ac re "entitlements" of citizenship.. Citizenship

I i

depended on an unfettered right to vote, and to have one's vote count in a 241 i\qr that one could be represented. Jordan had always believed that if "her

had full access to this right, thev could make the polincizl clrnnges I

I necessary to secure other rights and benefits. President Johnson and the Congress had also recognized that voting

1

were fund~mental elements of civil rights protection. The 1965 vat- ,

ins lilw had prohibited stetr or uthrr political -jurisdictions from im- I psing voting requirements to denv or abridge the right to vote on account of color or race. Designed to end sevent)--five years of discrimination

southern blacks, thc la^ gave the attorncy general and the Justicc I dspartrnent discretionilru power to appoint federd officials as voting "ex- aminers" \vho made sure that A4frican .Americans could register to vote iiitl~out interference. The Voting Kigllts Act also abolished literacy tests, lvl~ich scven southern states still used to keep blacks from voting. The most contro\-crsial provisio~~ of the law, howe~.er, required seven Deep South states to obtain federal approval, or "prc-clearancc," of nlzjl chal~gc in law or

that might affect the rights of minorit! voters.'

i When African Americans in the South had begun to participate in

electoral politics in greater llun~bcrs as a rcsuit of the civil rights movement, rcl;ildtrant white officials quic* figured out that they could minimize the inipct of large blocs of black voters througll structural changes like gcrry- mandercd districts, at-large elections, and the consolidation of voting dis- tricts, a-11ich could dilute the power of the black vote to influence the outcome of an election:'

I The pre-clearancc section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 halted

milm. of the most blatant of tl~esc practices in thc South. Reprcscntative : i

Andrew Young's c ~ n ~ r e s s i o ~ ~ ~ l sear in L\ttlanta was effectively spared by the pre-clcarancc requirerncnt. After the 1966 elections, in which Young and Barbara Jordan became the first African A~ncricans elected to Congress from the modern S o ~ ~ t h , the Georgia lcaislaturc redrew the state's congres-

, I

sionnl district boundaries, ei'fcctivelv eliminating J'oung's district and re- placing it with one in which the black rote would be so diluted that bung-or anv black-:uould have no hope of winning. Becausc the new districts had to be submitted to the Justicc Department for approval, how- ever, the gerrymandered plan was thrown out and Young's district rcmained csscn tiallv intact.

The IToting Rights Act would expire in August 1975, and it was ques- flo~~able cvhethcr the old civil rights communih, with its fragmented lcnder- ship, could ralli- for onc more battle for its extension. hlany observers felt

I

thar the punch was gone from the Inwelnent, and that it niizht be difficult !

to pass a \reto-pruof law that would rncct Kcpublican president Gerald I Forifs approval, or even to pass mzytbirzg through the Scnate, whcre Missis- sippi's conservative Democratic senator Jaincs Eiistland was chairman of the

I

Judiciilrv Committee. Yet if the act expired, the "New South" mizht revert

back to its old ways. While it was unlikely that the most egregious abuses of the old days would be reinstituted, leaders in the c i ~ d rights communin/ feared that structural changes could so dilute minority votes that the hard- fought gains of the past ten !.ears would be lost. By 1974, there were ap- proximately 3,200 black elected ofticials in the nation.-' But that could change-particularly because a new reapportionment would be mandated after the 1980 census. Federal pre-clearance was the nlnst valuable tool to prevent such structural fbrms of discrimination and exclusion.

Jordan's legislarive aide Rob &cock and her administrative assistant, Bud ;2fyers, were enmeshed with the key Capitol Hill staffers and civil rights advocates who cared most about the extension of the Voting fLghts Act. AIcock, in particular, was plugged into \vliat he called the "Title Su- ers," the advocates of applying the nondiscrimination clauses and enforce- ment powers of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to r wide range of federal legislation, from revenue-sharing to law enforcement. T h e group illcluded members of the staffs of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the N 1 W P Legal Defense Fund, the h.lexican rlmerican Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), key executive agencies, and some House and Senate Judiciary Committee staff members. AIcock remembers that they began talhng about the upcoming Voting Rights Act extension as early as 1973.

The U.S. Civil K g h ts Commission had accumulated enough evidence of voter intimidation in the Southwest to concludc that English-language- only election materials had been used as a means to kcep Spanish-speaking people from participating in the political process. Its staff was preparing a recommendation that Mexican American voters be included in anv exten- sion of the Voting Rights Act. The consensus of the Title Sixers was that the extension was "something Barbara should be interestcd in," recalled Alcock. They wanted her to brjng Texas into the full colrerage of the act by adding Texas to the original seven states subject to prc-clearance.

"hIALDEF was pushing bilingual ballots, and since mJr mother had been born in illexico, I could see the logic of that, but a h & they talked about covering Texas, at first it mas too big a leap for me," Alcock said. President Lyndon Johnson had deliberately not included Texas in the origi- i nal legislation to placate his own political friends in the statc. Now the Title Sixers wanted Barbara Jordan to do what Johnson had been unwilling to tackle. Thev left it up to Alcock to persuade her.

~ k o c k , a sandy-headed, affdble Californian, had developed a. solid working relationship with Jordan during her first session. H c was a "heads- down, do-your-work" kind of guy who knew both the workings of the H a and the peculiarities of Texas State government. Jordan hired him to be her chief legislative aide shortly into her first session in Congress and would delegate most of the detail work to him and Bud Rlvers. Jordatl had a small staff, as congressional staffs go, but she expected a tot from them. I

i

--.., ,. ...-.--. .I- - y > ; , -':'zY? I "We would take her mail and messaEes over to her, and sit in the -

Rayburn Room off the floor to go over things with her," Alcock remcm- bered. "She was pretty insistent that everything be organized and in order. She wanted to be informed, and she didn't want surprises." Alcock had ~ ~ e l ~ e d Jordan organize her research during the \Vatergate inquiry, and be- cause he was conscientiolis and good at anticipating what she might need in the way of documentation, she came to trust both his work and his judg- ment. Extending the Voting Rights Act to hlexican Americans involved a host of legal technicalities, and Xlcock said he was not sure he ever mas- tered it. "But she did," he said of his boss.

"She was intrigued when I laid it out for her," rilcock said. "Barbara initially really didn't understand the pre-clearance process becausc Texas had not been included in the original bill. Her political life didn't include this concept. So we sat down with her and tried to explain this in real terms so she would understand just how a Texas politician wrould feel about having to submit these election law changes to the Justice Uepartmcnt. And she didn't have any hesitation once she saw it." When Jordan realized that she might be able to end the practice of g-errymandcring and at-large districts that had prevented her own entry into politics thirteen years earlier, she enthusiastically agreed to sponsor a bill that would bring Texas under the act. It would extcnd greater protection to black voters, "her people," but she wanted to be sure bIexican American voters would be includcd, too. She sent Alcock off to work out a formula to include &lexican Americans in the Southwest without a blanket coverage of all the southwestern states, which she thought would endanger passage of the bill.

The formula Alcock and the Title Sixers, along with U.S. Census Dcpartmellt officials, worked out for her was based on a mix of the relative percentages of low voter turnout and large conceiltrations of non-English- speaking voters. 3n anv girren area, a voter turnout rite below 50 percent and a 5 percent conce~ltration of uon-English-speaking voters would triggcr the pre-clearance sections of the Voting Rights Act and mandate the use of bilingual ballots. The key legal justification for requiring bilingual ballots ~ o u l d be to establish that English-onlv ballots were in the same category as Iiteracy tests.

Two issues had to be resolved: finding a legall? acceptable term to describe RIexican American voters, and detcrmining the exact triggm mechanism. The Fifteenth Amendmcnt language potecting the voting rights of African Americans was based on "race, color, or prc~;ious condition of servitude." T h e logical constitutiorlal question that had to be considered was: Do Mcxican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Kican hmcricans, constitute a race or color? As she always did, Jordan dug deeply into the constitutional issues. She came to the conclusion that Fifteenth Amend- ment protection "is not limited to blacks. Any denial of voting rights, on the gl.oiind of race or color, would contravene the Fifteenth Xmendn~cnt."'

Jordan contended that because the phrase "race or color" did not have a precise, gencral1)- accepted meaning, it could bc applied in a general way to Spanish-language voters. She produced a memo from the Justice Depart- ment stating that antidiscrimination laws were alreadv being enforced as if "race or color" did in fact apply to XIexican Americans.

Another issue was whether /n~zgtinge was the primary form of discrimi- nation faced hy .\lcxic;m zlmerj.cans. Jordan slid: "Probabh. not, but it is characteristic of the n~yriad of problems Mexican Americans face. Just as the Congrcss seized upon literacv tests as characteristic of the voting prob- ; lems facing blicks in the South, so too are English-univ ballots among a : substantial Spanish-speskil~~ population. Printing of Spanish reg' ristration forms and St~anish ballots will not cure voting discrimination in the South- W C S ~ . . . but T iiln think of no clearer alternative criterion which is both i characteristic of L:Iexican American voting problems and provides clearer i direction to the rxecutix-e than thc ernployrnmt of an English-only ballot." Jordan's bill used the Census Bureau's legal term "mother tongue" to define i those r h o would be covered under her bill, which called for the use of ' bilingual ballots whcn at least 5 percent of the population of a jurisdiction .: spoke a "mother tongue" other than English.

When Jordan presented her bill to the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, she used an exhibit Rob Alcock had prepared show- I ing the proposed ncwlr co~rerediurisdictions colored in pink on a U.S. map. j W of f i x i s was included, as were counties with a heavy concentration of 4 Mexican Americans in New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, and California. The i surprises on the map-even to Jordan-were the pink-colored counties in Maine. I21assachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsvlvania, and Vermont. Al- cock's non-English "mother tongue" census categuries, in combination with :, the low-voter-turnom criterion, had picked up German, Amish, and French ethnic communities that had n r w r been discriminated against. Jordan was appalled and told committee members she would happily change her for- mula if thee could come up with a better one. After the hearing, she ad- monished hcock. 'You've got me in a hole, Bob. Nojw go back and find a better trigger!"

.Judiciary chairman Peter Rodino and the subcolnmittee chairman, Don Edwards, had introduced a simple extension of the bill for ten years. Some nlrmbers, like hlassacliusetts representatit-e Robert F. ~ i i n a n , rvanted to add general election reforms and national rroter registration pro- cedures to thc Voting Rights Act, but there was sentiment on the commit- tee and within the civil rights communio against turning the bill into a 'Yudiciary Christmas tree" by hanging every conceivable reform on the bill. There was even opposition among older Mrican American civil rights lead- ers against extending protections to Rlexican Americans. "It's not that the civil rights. leaders don't want hrown people, Mexican American people,

included," Jordan explained. 'They just don't want to jeopardize the possi- 0 13

ble extension of the act by an effort to expand it,"' Although Andrew Young favored inclusion of &Iexican Americans in

the bill, he wanted to keep general election and voter registration reform out the extension arguments. Dr. Aaroll Henrv, ~r rs ident of the Slissisippi

State Conference of the NAACP m d nationd 1obbr.ist for the NAACP Lendership Conference on Civil Rights, did not want bnything but a si~nple extension of the act. "I do not want to lose. I do not want to give anybody gn excuse to vote against what we have got now under the ruse of t ~ i n g to

it. . . . If we have the votes for it, I am completely supportive of rilat idea. Rut 1 do not want to amend the act to perfection and then lose the ~vholc thing."'

Barbara Jordan, wit11 Bob Alcock at her side, outlined and explained her bill at the stibcomn~ittee hearings. "1 knolv firsthand the d i f f icul~ mi- norities ha\re in participating in the ~olitical process as equals. The same discriminatory practices which motred the Coi~gress to p s s the Voting Rigl~ts Act in 1965, and renew it in 1970, are practiced in Texas today."'

Caldwell Hatlcr from Virginia, the leader of Republican efforts to - -. - -. ~ - block the extension, commented somewhat facetiously to her in the hearing that "if voting rights could have been four years earlier in Texas. h s this time you would probably be President of the United Scrtes."'

When the subcommittee b e g n its markup of the bill, the basic exten- sion of the act for ten years was included in a separate Title 1, which also pmnanently outlawed litcracy tests. Jordan, along with nvo Hispanic mem- bcrs of Congress, Edward Koyh;d of Los Angeles and Herman Badillo of Sorv York, and their staffs then sat down to work on sections of the bill that dealt with expansion of co~~eragc to foreign-hnyage-speaking minorities. Thcv dcfined Spanish-language voters as persons of "Spanish heriragc" and kept Jordan's 5 percent minority population. trigger to require bilingual bal- lots for specific language minorities. Then they included American Indians, Asian Americans, and Alaskan natives in the bill. They added the pre- clearance requirement for the state of Texas and for certain counties in other strtes, and redefined English-onlv ballots and election materials in affected jurisdictions as a "test and device" that resulted in discrimination. "ln its sinlplrst form . . . my b i U amends the definition of the phrase 'test or dcriccv to make rnplicit the rulings of federal courts that the failure to provide bilingual registration forms and b:~llots constitutes the use of a literacv test," Jordan said.'"

In the meantime, Jordan's actions were setting off a political furor among politicians in Texas who vehemently opposed Texas's inclusion in the federal law. T h e Texas legislaturc was so fearful of the possibilih of having to pre-clear 9 of its voting and elcction laws with the Justice De- partment that ir hastily passed its own bilingual ballot bill in the hope of

forestalling inclusion in the bill. But the full House Judiciary Commitbe made no changes in Jordan's consensus subcommittee bill and reported it out on R l a ~ 8. The committee's report to the House filled more than thir- tern hundred printed pages with detailed evidence of discrimination againn Mexican American mtcrs to j~istifv their inclusion in the act. The full House debatc began on June 2. with Representative Ed~v;~rds managing the bill and C a l d ~ d l Butler orchestrating the opposition. Jordan took up her customary place on the Housc floor to line up key \!otcs ro fight off seven- teen crippling amendments, including one to remove Texas from the b a altogether. I r ~ n i c a l l ~ , it was proposed bv the first Hispanic member of Congress from Texas, Dc.:~~ocrat Henrv B. Gonza le~ of San Antonio.

"IIenry B.'-as he was often affectionately callcd-had been the first Mexican American in almost as rnanv settings as Barbara Jordan had been the first African American. I-Ic was incensed that he had not been included in anv of the deliberations about the inclusion of klcxican American voters in the bill. H e bi t ter l~ resented Jordan's intrusion into his business-which he considered to be ar<~thirlg that had to do with &lexican American politics or power. Gonzalez had also been at war with the hIexican American Legal Defe~ense and Education Fund over some local turf battles, and he was furi- ous because Jordan had worked with hIALDEF, which had submitted an annexation decision on San Antonio as a prime example of hlexican Ameri- can vote dilution. He called the subcommittee's report, with the MALDEF exhibits, a "lie" and "an outright mendacious fabrication of the truth" about San Antonio." H e spoke angrily in defense of his amendment to drop Texas from the bill.12 The debntc degenerated when Gonzalez and Roybal 1 got into a shouting match about thc realip of discrimination against Mexi- can Ainerican voters. By this time, however, the voting rights extension had the full backing of the civil rights communitv, the Congressiond Black Caucus, the Democratic leadership in Congress, a host of moderate Repub- licans, and Mexican American activists in the Southu-est-minus Henry B. Gonzalcz, whose amend~nent failed on a division lvote. The House over- whelmingly passed the h l l bill on Junc 3 bv a 341-70 vote. Jordan had i

persuaded two-thirds of the Texas delegation to vote with her on a hill that rvould wbiect Texas to the same federal oversight as the states of the Deep South. I t rvas a remarkable feat considering the oppositio~l to the measure at home. Gonzdez was recorded as present and not r~)t ing, still mad as a hornet at Jordan and his Hispanic colleagues in Congress.

The bill had a more difficult time in the Senate, howelrer, because Mississippi senator Eastland refused to call a hearing of the Judicia?. Com-

. mittee. It took a cloture motion by Senate Democratic leadcrs Mike hlans- field and Barbara's new friend, Senator Robert C. Byrd, to call up the bill, and they stiil had to fight off a filibuster attempt bv imohng another

i cloture vote to limit debate. Senntor Bvrd put together thc compromise to get Senate passage. and President ~ o r d signed the bill on August 6, 1975, ,

one day before it would have expired I t was ten years to the d q that Lyndon Johnson signed the first version of the landmark Civil Rights Act.

ZY 7 Jordan was so happy at the bill-signing ceremonJr rhat she asked Presi-

dent Ford to give her the big index cards from which he read his remarks before signing the bill. She wanted him to autograph them, too. Ford gave her the cards with his signature. She said that although she was not much of 3 collector, "this is my first big legislative victory and I wanted a ine- mento."'j She was also savoring her lrictory over the president. Gerald Ford had tried to stop the bill in the Senate, and Jordan took great delight in hearing him read from his cue cards "about how he had ~vorked for its juccessful passage."

Jordan operated at her highest level during the Voting Rights Act deliberations. She did her research, spoke with eloquence, hammered out [he details of the deal, inade the necessary compromises, recognized the political consequences of carrying a good idea too far, bucked the politicians in her own state, and used her influence with Housc conservatives to get thcrn to vote for something they would have normal117 voted against. It didn't hurt that she had made a friend earlier in the year with the Senate's second most powerful man, Robert Bvrd, who was responsible for shaking the bill loose in the Senate.

Jordan was busy on several other legislative fronts during 1973'. She sponsored and passed in July a consuiner protection measure eliminating the practice of price-fixing among man~lfacturers of consumer goods, saving coilsumcrs an estimated $3 billion in excess payments. Judiciary Committee chairman Peter Rodino assigned her thc responsibiliq of managing the floor debate on the bill, which she thoroughly c n j ~ ~ e d . ~ W o u s e Democratic leadcrs recognized both her abilities and her appeal and began to invoive her in some of their deliberations. Jordan's influence on the ten-mcmber Demo- cratic Steering and Policy Committee had secured a second "black" seat on the powerful House Ways and RIeans Committee, which went to new Caucus -member Harold Ford of Tenncssee.

Jordan was also active in the Judiciary Committee's efforts to curb abuses bv the federal intelligei1ce agencies, both foreign and domestic. She rvas pariicularly interested in the issue because she had been the target of the U.S. Army's domestic intelligence program in the 1960s. The arm?, maintained more than one hundred thousand files on citizens not connected with the armed forces. Barbara Jordail was one of them. She had not reacted publicly at the time, but when Congress took up the matter she was person- ally interested in making sure the practice had ended. In a newsletter to her constituents she wrote, "I reject the l~ypothesis that our civil liberties may be either strictly observed or blatantly ignored depending upon the whim of government officials.""

Although Jordan had refused to become involved in the internal strug- gles to build a women's political molleinent, or in the competitions benvcen