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Posts tagged as “University of Texas at Austin”

BHM: Good Black News Celebrates Barbara Jordan – Groundbreaking Congressmember, Lawyer, Professor and Orator

BHM: Good Black News Celebrates Barbara Jordan – Groundbreaking Congressmember, Lawyer, Professor and Orator

By goodblacknews on February 2, 2021

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Barbara Jordan was born in 1936 in Houston, Texas to a teacher mother and Baptist preacher father. Jordan grew up to become the first African-American woman voted into the Texas Senate (1966-1972) and the first Black woman from the South elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (1972-1979).

Jordan is best known for her superlative oratory skills, in particular the U.S. Judiciary Committee speech she gave in Congress almost 46 years ago to the day supporting the impeachment of Richard Nixon, as well as the Keynote address she gave at the 1976 Democratic National Convention (the first Black woman to do so in the Convention’s 144-year history).

Jordan also was the first and (so far) only Black woman to serve as Governor (albeit for one day on June 10, 1972) of any state in America. While in Congress, Jordan supported the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, legislation that required banks to lend and make services available to underserved poor and minority communities.

She also supported the renewal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and expansion of it to cover “language minorities”; this expansion offered protection to Spanish-speaking Latinos in her home state of Texas even when opposed by the Texas Governor and Secretary of State. Jordan also authored an act that ended federal authorization of price fixing by manufacturers.

After retiring from politics in 1979, Jordan worked as a professor of Ethics at the University of Texas at Austin. Around this time, Jordan was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and eventually had to get around via wheelchair, but that did not stop her from being an active scholar and public servant.

From 1994 until her death in 1996, Jordan chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which recommended limits on immigration while also acknowledging how immigration had strengthened and continued to strengthen America.

President Bill Clinton wanted to nominate Jordan to the U.S. Supreme Court, but her health issues (which soon also included leukemia) prevented him from nominating her.

I started reading up on Barbara Jordan a few years ago because I’d always heard about her “firsts” but didn’t really didn’t have a sense of who she was or what made her formidable.

Then I listened to and watched her speeches. My. Heavens. If you haven’t heard it before, you MUST HEAR HER VOICE.

Confederate Statues Come Down at University Of Texas at Austin

By goodblacknews on August 21, 2017
A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is removed from the University of Texas campus early Monday morning in Austin. (Eric Gay/AP)

by Doreen McCallister and via npr.org

The president of the University of Texas at Austin has ordered the immediate removal of statues of Robert E. Lee and three other Confederate-era figures — Albert Sidney Johnston, John Reagan and James Stephen Hogg — from a main area of campus.
President Greg Fenves announced the statues’ fate Sunday night, and the removals should be complete by mid-morning Monday. A university spokesman says the area has been blocked off. Lee and Johnston were Confederate generals, Reagan was a Confederate postmaster and Hogg was the first native-born governor of Texas and the son of a Confederate general.
In a letter to the university community, Fenves connected the events with the decision to remove the statues now: “[T]he horrific displays of hatred at the University of Virginia and in Charlottesville shocked and saddened the nation. These events make it clear, now more than ever, that Confederate monuments have become symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.” …”The University of Texas at Austin has a duty to preserve and study history. But our duty also compels us to acknowledge that those parts of our history that run counter to the university’s core values, the values of our state and the enduring values of our nation do not belong on pedestals in the heart of the Forty Acres.”
“We do not choose our history, but we choose what we honor and celebrate on our campus.”The statues of Lee, Johnston and Reagan will be added to the collection at the university’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History for “scholarly study,” Fenves wrote. The Hogg statue will be considered for relocation elsewhere on campus. In 2015, the university removed a statue of Confederacy President Jefferson Davis.
On Saturday, Duke University announced that it had removed a statue of Gen. Lee that was in the entry to the large chapel on its campus.
To read full article, go to: Confederate Statues Come Down At The University Of Texas : The Two-Way : NPR

Darren Walker to be Named President of the Ford Foundation

By goodblacknews on July 27, 2013

Darren Walker (pictured above)  was born in a charity hospital in Lafayette, La., and grew up in the 1960s in a single-parent household in rural Texas, where his mother worked as a nurse’s aide and he was enrolled in one of the first Head Start programs. He went on to the University of Texas at Austin with help from a Pell grant scholarship, awarded to low-income students based on financial need. He put in a few years at a prestigious Manhattan law firm and a Wall Street investment bank. Then he moved into the nonprofit world, first in Harlem, where, among other things, he worked on the project to build the first full-service supermarket there in a generation.
On Thursday, Mr. Walker, 53, will take the next step in a career that has taken him from Harlem to world-famous foundations five and a half miles away in Midtown Manhattan. He is to be named president of the Ford Foundation, the nation’s second-largest philanthropic organization. He will succeed Luis Ubiñas, who announced in March that he would step down. For Mr. Walker, the new job is a promotion. He has been a vice president at Ford since 2010, when Mr. Ubiñas hired him away from the Rockefeller Foundation, where Mr. Walker had worked for several years, also as a vice president.