Vernon Jordan was an iconic civil rights leader, a political sage, who counseled presidents of all parties with wisdom and common sense, and a business voice that had a seat at the table with the most powerful leaders in the U.S., if not the world.” —BET founder Bob Johnson
Vernon E. Jordan, the descendant of sharecroppers who rose to become a power broker at the highest echelon of government, has died of undisclosed causes. The attorney, civil rights activist, and presidential confidant was 85 when he expired at his Washington, D.C. home surrounded by his family on March 1.
An Atlanta, Ga. native, circa Aug. 15, 1935, Vernon Eulion Jordan, Jr. endured the challenges of being the only Black in his 400-member graduating class at Indiana’s DePauw University to earn a law degreeat Howard University in 1960. Plunging into civil rights, he personally escorted Charlayne Hunter into the admissions office of the University of Georgia where she became its first African-American enrollee, circa 1961.
Bouncing between private practice and civil rights, he became executive director of the United Negro College Fund (1970), then president of the National Urban League from 1971 to 1981 (where he met a politician named Bill Clinton).
In 1981, Jordan suffered a gunshot wound while in the company of a White woman in Fort Wayne, Ind. by an assailant who disapproved of “race mixing.” While recovering, Jordan was visited by then-president Jimmy Carter.
After his recovery, he was lured away from the Urban League to join the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, the entity he would be associated with for the rest of his life.
He helped then Arkansas Gov. Clinton (and later his wife Hillary) gain entry into the ultra exclusive Bilderberg Conference in 1991. By 1992 he oversaw the President-elect’s transition team, and was mentioned as possibly the first Black Attorney General, a position he declined. Instead he chose the role of ultimate insider, helping the administration weather the scandals of White House counsel Vince Foster’s mysterious death; the inquiry into the Whitewater controversy; and Clinton’s impeachment.
As a board member of multiple corporations he was able to sidestep issues like conflict of interest or ethical constraints, while ignoring allegations that he’d forsaken the quest for equality that launched his career.
Vernon Jordan is survived by his wife Ann, and his daughter from an earlier marriage, Vickee Jordan.
In a joint statement, the Clintons said of their relationship with Jordan: “We worked and played, laughed and cried, won and lost together. We loved him very much and always will.”
