Early life, family, and education
Barbara Charline Jordan was born in the Fifth Ward neighborhood of Houston, Texas. Jordan's childhood was centered on church life at the Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church. Her mother was Arlyne Patten Jordan, a teacher in the church and a maid. Her father was Benjamin Jordan, a Baptist preacher and a warehouse worker. Jordan would recite poetry at the church and would sing gospel music with her sisters. In 1949, Jordan's father joined the Greater Pleasant Hill Baptist Church as the full-time pastor.
Through her mother, Jordan was the great-granddaughter of Edward Patton, who was one of the last African American members of the Texas House of Representatives prior to disenfranchisement of Black Texans under Jim Crow. Barbara Jordan was the youngest of three children. Her older siblings were Rose Mary Jordan McGowan and Bennie Creswell Jordan (1933–2000).
Jordan attended Roberson Elementary School. She graduated from Phillis Wheatley High School in 1952 with honors. At Wheatley, Jordan's oratorical abilities were developed through the support of her teachers and curriculum. Major influences included her English teacher Mrs. D. B. Reid, elocutionist Ashton J. Oliver, and speech and drama teacher Robert T. Holland. Jordan credited a speech she heard in her high school years by Edith S. Sampson with inspiring her to become an attorney.
Educated in Houston's public schools before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Jordan grew up in an era of continued racial segregation, but Houston civil rights activists in the NAACP won important victories that also shaped her early life, including a successful local campaign to equalize salaries for Black and white teachers in 1943. Smith v. Allwright, a 1944 Supreme Court case that overturned the white primary, began in Houston. In 1946, Houstonian Heman Sweatt challenged segregation in higher education by applying to law school at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). The state of Texas denied his admission on account of race and instead created a separate law school for Black students at Houston's Texas Southern University. In 1950, the Supreme Court ruling in Sweatt v. Painter required the law school in Austin to integrate, but the first Black undergraduates would not enroll at UT until 1956, four years after Jordan's high school graduation.
In the meantime, significant growth was occurring at Texas Southern University (TSU), where Jordan enrolled in 1952 and majored in political science and history. At TSU, Jordan pledged Delta Gamma chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She also became a national champion debater, learning from her coach, Thomas Freeman, defeating opponents from Yale and Brown, and tying a team from Harvard University. She graduated magna cum laude in 1956.
College experiences as a teenager made Jordan more acutely aware of Jim Crow's injustices. The commute from her Fifth Ward home to the Third Ward campus required a long ride on segregated buses, as she later recalled: "There was a little plaque on the bus near the back that said, 'colored' and when I'd get on, I'd have to go all the way back to that little plaque and I was passing empty seats all the time." On trips to debate competitions across the south, Jordan and fellow TSU students often stayed in Black-owned hotels or the homes of Black families because they were barred from segregated accommodations. Such experiences contributed to her decision to pursue her dream of becoming an attorney outside of Texas.
She attended Boston University School of Law, graduating in 1959.
