ABOUT US | SUBSCRIBE | LINKS | E-MAIL EDITOR | HOME
|
|
ABOUT US | SUBSCRIBE | LINKS | E-MAIL EDITOR | HOME |
| Ragged Edge EXTRA! |
Barbara Jordan: Hiding in Plain Sight While Working for 'The Common Good'
Women's History Month, 2002 -- Barbara Jordan, who died in 1996, was an African-American woman whose life consisted of a string of firsts. She was also an expert, in the tradition of President Roosevelt, at hiding the true nature of her disability. Barbara Jordan became the first African-American woman in the Texas state senate in the late 1960s. She was also the first Southern person of her race and gender to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (in 1974), and the first to deliver a keynote address to a Democratic national convention (in 1976.) She burst on the national scene as a strong, moral voice of leadership in the Watergate investigations. In the '70s, 700 political opinion leaders placed Jordan at the top of the list of women they'd like to see become president. After retiring from politics, she taught law and government at the University of Texas in Austin for 16 years, assisted by the longtime same-sex companion she never publicly acknowledged. Herein lies the disability part of her story: For years she had multiple sclerosis that she would not openly acknowledge. Her doctors only went public with that information after she almost drown in her home pool during physical therapy in 1994. She ended up dying in 1996 of a viral pneumonia that was a complication of the leukemia she also developed and denied up to the very end. Well before she retired from the House, she was walking with a cane and using a personal assistant to be able to fully function. There were rumors of her disability, of course. In such political settings there are always rumors. At the time, though, when MS was forcing her to use her first adaptive equipment, she maintained it was due to just "a bum knee." She spoke at two different Democratic convention while using adaptive equipment. I did not realize at those times that I, too, was gradually becoming more disabled. There was no connection at the time for me to anything as odd-sounding as a "disabled community." Yet I was filled with a vague pride that this woman with a walking stick and then in a wheelchair was speaking so eloquently about the need for "The Common Good." About halfway through that first time, as I listened to her words of gold, I found myself wanting to know why she was using that cane. By the end of the speech, I was consumed by the need to know her disability. I found no information to help me anywhere. Imagine if she had gone public with her MS then -- or even by her speech at the next convention? Would I have accepted my own disability better and faster, when the time finally came? Maybe. Maybe. Her friends have said that she did not want to be defined by her disability or her sexual orientation. In her first convention speech, she said, "I try to respect the humanity of everybody -- no matter who they are or how they think or feel. Their position on anything is not relevant to the way I can relate to them as a human being. THAT we have in common. . . . " While helping to open the Nixon impeachment hearings, she talked eloquently about her experience as an African-American. "I have finally been included in 'We, THE PEOPLE,'" she said, referring to our Constitution. Barbara Jordan advanced the cause of her race and gender every time she did something else no one like her had done before. Imagine if she had more openly done the same for people with disabilities at any time while she was still alive. Even after leaving Washington, D.C., she served on a variety of important government panels and boards. Jordan received 25 honorary doctorate degrees. She could have thrown her disabled lot in with us during that time with a relative degree of safety. Talk about advancing "The Common Good" even further.... Oh that she, at any time, had truly included us.Rus Cooper-Dowda is a minister and freelance writer in St. Petersburg, Fla.
|
ABOUT US | SUBSCRIBE | LINKS | E-MAIL EDITOR | HOME
© Copyright 2002 Ragged Edge Magazine
This Website produced by Cliffwood Organic Works
