Before He Was a Washington Institution, I Knew Vernon Jordan as a Civil Rights Pioneer

In 1959, I was a high school senior in Atlanta. Despite the fact that the University of Georgia had not admitted one Black student in its 170-year history, my African American classmate Hamilton Holmes and I had decided to apply. When the school denied us admission, the Georgia lawyer representing me us was Donald Hollowell. Vernon Jordan, fresh out of Howard Law School, was his clerk.

It was Vernon, Donald and the other lawyers on our team — the late, great Constance Baker Motley and Horace Ward — who argued our case. And 60 years ago this past January, Judge William Bootle, after hearing their arguments, ordered that UGA welcome Hamilton and me as its first Black students. Through their advocacy, our legal the team forced the state of Georgia to honor the 1954 Brown v. Board decision outlawing segregation, and prepared me for what I like to call my journalistic journey to the horizons, helping me to launch what would become a long reporting career.

Many years later, Vernon Jordan, who passed away on Monday at age 85, would become known as a Washington institution—a powerful lawyer-fixer who was famously close to the Clintons. But it is his long and rich history advocating for civil rights that many of us will remember him for, especially those of us who witnessed his work firsthand.

It was young Vernon who spent days traveling the 150 miles round trip from Atlanta to UGA’s campus in Athens, pursuing what the legal profession called “discovery” — or what Vernon referred to in his memoir as “not unlike looking for a needle in a haystack.” The legal team spent three weeks sifting through thousands of applications looking for a white female student with the same academic profile as mine, someone who also wanted to study journalism. And it was Vernon who found what he described as “our smoking gun”: the application of a well-to-do white student from Marietta who had applied a whole year after I had and had been accepted—even though one excuse university officials had given for denying me was that I had applied too late.

After Judge Bootle’s ruling, Hamilton and I prepared for our arrival at UGA. Vernon knew of the potential dangers, but he was undaunted by the prospect. On January 9, 1961, he led me through a mob of screaming white students. He said nothing and kept looking straight ahead toward our destination — the registrar’s office. Having done what we needed to do there, we departed for the walk across campus to the journalism building to finish my enrollment. Both Vernon and I are tall — he, well over 6 feet and I, at 5 foot 8 — and I remember my mother, who was with us, shouting, “Hey, you two, slow down. I’m not as tall as you two.”

Halfway through the registration process that day, Bootle granted the university a stay on some ground I never quite understood. Vernon reached out to Hollowell and Motley in Atlanta; they had already gone to a higher judge to appeal. Hamilton and I left campus with Vernon and went to a Black family’s place nearby to wait things out. Not long after we arrived, Vernon’s phone rang. When he hung up, he calmly said it was time to go and finish our registration. And we did. (By the way, the building housing the registrar’s office now is named the Holmes-Hunter Academic Building.)

Years later, Vernon would reflect in his memoir on what he learned from that experience: “that sustained social agitation, moral suasion, and political action can create an environment in which people in power can feel compelled to do the right thing.”

Sometimes Vernon treated me like a younger sister. I remember one time during the trial when we were taking a break. I had said I wasn’t hungry, but when Vernon’s food came, I reached over to grab a piece of his sandwich. He was none too kind in telling me to get my own. I was too young at the time to appreciate who this man was, how he had gotten to where he was and where he would go on his own journey to the horizons. But his life’s story is one that should inspire young people, especially those who are growing up in segregated communities with little or no support from society at large.

Vernon himself grew up in a segregated housing project in Atlanta and worked alongside his mother in her catering business, often waiting on people who didn’t look like them. His mother created armor for him from his earliest days, teaching him that “it was important to have a plan in life or others would control your destiny,” in his words. Wearing that armor, Vernon would go on to lead multiple civil rights organizations, including the National Urban League, a role in which he survived a brutal assassination attempt.

Vernon’s mother instilled in him the mantra of “we are standing on the shoulders of giants” — an idea that has resonated with young men and women of color populating corporate boards, law firms and Wall Street. (In fact, the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. once called Vernon the Rosa Parks of Wall Street.) Vernon was raised in the A.M.E. Church (as I was), where he learned the power of faith. And it is that faith that keeps my sorrow in check over his earthly loss, because I have heard him preach enough from various pulpits on various occasions about the great camp meeting in the Promised Land. Long live, my latest ancestor. Long live.