Skip to main content

No Special Day or Month Needed …

By Marek Waterstone

 …to remember the remarkable Barbara C. Jordan (February 21, 1936 – January 17, 1996).
While walking the aisles of the O’Quinn Law Library the other day, a surprising jewel was found squeezed in among the heavier volumes. It was the thin book titled Barbara C. Jordan: Selected Speeches.
The book Preface was written by the late Ann Richards, 45th Governor of Texas (1991 to 1995). Reading the speeches, one could hear the deep, forceful voice of the orator Barbara Jordan. Once you heard that voice articulating the truth with passion you could not forget the experience.
So many beautiful, inspiring words to choose from in this little book, it is difficult to choose one quote as an example. Here’s a quote as timely and meaningful today as it was when delivered.

"Our strength is rooted in our diversity. History bears witness to that statement. But that diversity is rife with strain, tension, and doubt. A perfect union has not been formed. … America’s mission was and still is to take its diversity and mold it into a cohesive and coherent whole that would espouse virtues and values essential to the maintenance of civil order. There is nothing easy about that mission. But it is not mission impossible." From -- E Pluribus Unum: Myth or Reality? One from Many; Delivered at Northwestern University, 1993.

 Howard University Press (November 1999); ISBN 9780882581996
The book was edited by Sandra Parham, then Archivist for the Jordan papers in the Manuscript Collection, Department of Special Collections located in the Robert James Terry Library at Texas Southern University, our neighbor just down the road from the University of Houston. 
For more information about the remarkable, amazing Barbara C. Jordan, also see Barbara Jordan: American Hero by Mary Beth Rogers, (Bantam, 2000) ISBN 9780553380668 where you can also enjoy reader's comments on this publication.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le
1 comment
Read more

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

By
Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.
Post a Comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires
Post a Comment
Read more