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Currently the most dominant historical genre filling nonfiction best-seller lists is biography, especially saga biographies of American leaders, most of them following a plot line that pits a lone leader against hostile politicians and other evils. Yet underneath the radar screen lie other forms of history that can be far more valuable than some of these updated versions of Parson Weems, the man who invented the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.
I’ve just finished one of those books, Vernon Jordan’s Make It Plain, a collection of his speeches, a majority of them made during his ten-year tenure as head of the national Urban League. People do not normally read collections of speeches, at least that’s what the editor of my last book said when I pitched her the idea of such a book. That is too bad because this book should be on everyone’s must-read list.
Jordan’s book is actually much more than a mere collection of his best speeches because he wisely begins each chapter with a long introduction that helps provide context for each speech. These introductions along with the speeches themselves provide a history of the American experience during some its most critical times–from Nixon to Reagan.
In what I term the American myth, which is our popular understanding of our nation’s history and more often than not the way it is taught in public schools and even colleges and universities, for African Americans the period between the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the election of Barack Obama has become a black hole (pun intended) about which there is little general public knowledge. Even the biographers treat this period in African American history as an after-thought in their biographies of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
Yet Jordan’s book argues that far from being a black hole, the story of African Americans in the last four decades is central to understanding the American experience. As a personal example, I wish I had read Jordan’s book before I wrote my series on the racial roots of the housing crisis because Jordan, as head of the Urban League, had a front row seat.
The main theme running through this slim volume is the critical one of the reversal of the gains made in the 1960s. During Jordan’s critical years at the helm of the Urban League, African Americans saw many of their gains evaporate in years Jordan characterizes as a period of national malaise. By the time Ronald Reagan entered the White House, the Counterrevolution had seized control of the Republican Party and the nation.
Jordan is one of the few who sees the big picture and calls this for what it is–a movement to turn back the New Deal. Before researchers and historians were noting signs of the rollback Jordan saw it–and more important, tried to stop it. It almost cost his life in an assassination attempt may 29, 1979 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jordan makes only a few references to this book, but reading between the lines one can sense what his months in the hospital cost him–and America.
Jordan spares no words on Ronald Reagan terming him the most anti-black President since Woodrow Wilson. His take on Reagan may well be the best three-sentence description I have read:
Not since Franklin Roosevelt has America been led by so gifted a communicator. Not since Lyndon Johnson has America been led by so skillful a politician. And not since Herbert Hoover has it been led by a president willing to sacrifice millions of people on the altar of an outmoded ideology.
A second theme in this volume is that you cannot understand the rise of Barack Obama without understanding this context. It is clear Jordan views Obama as formed by those years of malaise. Fittingly his final chapter is about Obama. While anyone who knows Obama’s history knows of his formative years during the 1970s and 80s, Jordan provides what I consider the most important context for the impact of those years on Obama. You cannot understand Barack Obama without reading this book.
I began reading Jordan’s book after I had written my essay comparing Barack Obama to Bill Clinton. That essay is one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made–and it took Jordan to teach me why. Had I read Jordan’s book before I wrote that essay it never would have had that title or that perspective.
Curiously readers also saw that essay as a loser. It is the most negatively-rated piece I have written in three years. Sometimes it is healthy to listen.
What Jordan makes clear is that the 1970s and 80s shaped Obama’s perspective and to see him as a Clinton is to totally write off the importance of those years for America, for African Americans and for Barack Obama.
Perhaps the greatest and most important speech in this book is “Declaring Our Interdependency.” The context of this speech is the final years of the Carter Administration, the forced resignation of Andrew Young as U.N. Ambassador for daring to open talks with the PLO, the trips to the Middle East by Jesse Jackson and Joseph Lowery where they openly met with Yassir Arafat, and the growing rift between three of the mainstays of the Civil Rights Movement–African Americans, Jews and organized labor.
In this speech the black hole takes on an entirely different meaning for it becomes a modern parallel to the Reconstruction years as African Americans moved two steps back. Jordan cites all the data.
It is clear the glass of racial progress is only half full…The gap between blacks and whites is growing instead of closing. At the end of the sixties the typical black family income was 61 percent of the typical white family income. Today it is down to 57%.
Twenty-five years after Brown, more black children attend racially isolated schools than in 1964.
Jordan also speaks of the housing problem without mentioning the subprime lending that was then largely aimed at people of color.
HUD says blacks are three times more likely than whites to live in housing that has serious deficiencies. And blacks are twice as likely to pay more than they can afford to get decent housing.
Then he moves on to the developing rifts which he presciently worries will develop into an overt split that would fracture that delicate coalition in the 1960s. Here this speech rises from merely another jeremiad about the sorry state of people of color to a greatness that proposes a new vision for America that has become even more relevant today.
I believe we need a declaration of interdependence. For black or white, Christian or Jew, urban or rural, our destinies are interlinked and intertwined. We must strengthen the ties that bind us, not weaken them.
It Jordan who made me understand that it is this notion of interdependence that is the moral compass of the Obama Administration. In short, there is something more revolutionary going on in the Oval Office than the supposed capitulation to Wall Street signaled by the appointments of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama is no Clinton. I got it wrong.
Reading Jordan I now see Obama in a far different light. The Declaration of Interdependence is now guiding the White House policy. Seen this way, Geithner and Summers have to be at the table, but their chairs are not at the head of the table. Obama needs them to be there, but Jordan implies they need to understand they need him more.
As Jordan’s speech points out, guiding a nation using a policy of interdependency will not be an easy task. The final chapter, which is a speech given at Howard University shortly after the election of Barack Obama makes that clear. Near the end of that speech Jordan evokes advice his mother gave him many times:
“Don’t get too big for your britches.” Until she could talk no more, that was her refrain.
Therefore to you America, to the President and the Congress, to the world’s greatest superpower ever, to my country with the mightiest economic, technological and military forces the world has ever seen–to all the candidates, “Don’t get too big for your britches.”
Jordan ends the speech and the book with the James Weldon Johnson poem that has become known as the Black National Anthem:
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
This book, above all the others I have read in the last year leaves me with Jordan’s optimism. This book is the personal testimony of the faith and principles that made Vernon Jordan one of America’s great leaders. There is a refrain in African American churches that spontaneously comes from the audience when a speaker is on a roll, “Testify! Testify!” This book is testifying of the highest order. We need to pay attention to it.
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