Vernon Jordan

Vernon Eulion Jordan Jr. was born on the fifteenth of August 1935 at Atlanta, son of a postal worker and of Mary Belle Jordan, a caterer to the city's white society, and raised in University Homes — among the first federal housing built for Black Americans. DePauw University graduated him in 1957, the only Black student in his class; Howard University gave him his law degree in 1960; and in Donald Hollowell's Atlanta office he clerked on the case that opened the University of Georgia. In January 1961 it was Jordan who walked Charlayne Hunter through the mob to the admissions office.

He served as Georgia field director of the NAACP, then directed the Voter Education Project through the mid-to-late sixties — by 1968 the South counted nearly two million new Black voters under its campaigns. In 1970 he took the executive directorship of the United Negro College Fund, and in 1971 he was named president of the National Urban League, which he led through 1981 — a decade of holding the movement's economic front through the retrenchment years.

On the twenty-ninth of May 1980, outside his motel at Fort Wayne, Indiana, the white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin shot him in the back with a hunting rifle after an Urban League dinner. Five operations and some ninety days at Parkview Memorial Hospital brought him back; Franklin was acquitted in 1982 by an all-white jury, and confessed to the shooting in 1996. In 1982 Jordan joined the Washington law firm Akin Gump, and a different power took shape — counsel sought, doors opened, in rooms where no one who looked like him had sat.

He chaired Bill Clinton's transition in 1992 and was widely described as the president's closest friend and counselor — holding no office and needing none. From 2000 he was a senior managing director of Lazard, and his memoir Vernon Can Read!, written with Annette Gordon-Reed, set the story down in 2001. He died at Washington on the first of March 2021, at eighty-five. Honored be Vernon Jordan, who walked a student through the mob and a people into the room.