Joseph A. Jordan Jr.

Last updated

Joseph A. Jordan Jr. (1924 - 14 June 1991) was an African American lawyer and civil rights activist. He worked as a lawyer and judge and was part of the lawsuit heard before the Supreme Court of the United States that ended poll taxes.

Contents

Early life and education

Jordan was raised in Norfolk, Virginia. [1] He went to the Booker T. Washington High School and went on to the Virginia Union University. [1] In 1943, he went into the United States Army and fought overseas with the 846 Gas Company and the 67th Infantry during World War II. [1] In September 1945, he was injured when his jeep slid off of the highway into a mine field. [1] The accident caused him to become paralyzed from the waist down so Jordan used a wheelchair. [1] [2] Jordan went on to earn a degree in sociology. [1] He earned his law degree from Brooklyn Law School. [3] Later, he studied labor law at New York University. [3]

Career

In 1954, he set up a law practice in Norfolk. [3] In 1955, when the state of Virginia planned to create a referendum to allow segregation, Jordan filed an injunction to block the vote. [4] When Jordan and another civil rights activist, Evelyn Thomas Butts, were restrained from picketing a supermarket for not hiring black people in high level jobs, Jordan fought the restraining order, but lost. [5] [6] Jordan was involved in several anti-segregation cases in 1961, 1962 and 1964 in Virginia. [7] [8] [9] In November 1963, Butts hired him to sue the state for requiring a poll tax to vote. [10] The case was dismissed by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1964. [10] [5] In May 1964, Jordan and Butts filed another suit which accused the state of violating four amendments of the Constitution with the poll tax. [5] Butts' case against the poll tax was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States and was bundled with another case, Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966. [11]

When the case went before the Supreme Court, Jordan argued that the poll tax laws had successfully barred black people not only from voting, but from holding office. [12] Jordan said, "Almost like a magic wand after the passage of this law, these poll tax laws, not a single Negro has sat in the Virginia General Assembly, and not a single Negro has held a single elected state office in the state of Virginia." [12] The decision was made by the Supreme Court in two months and they decided that the poll tax or voting fee did violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. [12]

Political career

In 1968, Jordan was elected to the Norfolk City Council and became the first black person to hold the seat since 1889. [3] [13] In 1971, Jordan was the only black member of the city council. [14] In 1972, he became the vice-mayor of Norfolk. [15] In 1974, Jordan resigned as vice-mayor in protest, "saying the city is being run by the Norfolk Redevelopment Authority rather than City Council." [16]

Jordan was appointed to the General District Court on July 1, 1977. [3] [17] He was one of only a few African American state judges at the time. [17] He retired from this position in 1986. [3]

Death

Jordan died at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Hampton on June 14, 1991. [3] A public library in Norfolk is named after Jordan. [12] A foundation in his name, the Joe Jordan Foundation, raised funds in his name to build the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Norfolk. [18] The memorial was dedicated in 2000 and had been proposed in the 1970s by Jordan. [19]

Related Research Articles

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in Brown paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. Such legally enforced segregation in the south lasted into the 1960s.

Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all people. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each "race" were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by "race", which was already the case throughout the states of the former Confederacy. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate".

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case involved Mildred Loving, a woman of color, and white man Richard Loving. In 1958, they were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund</span> Organization in New York, United States

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is a leading United States civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Lindsay Almond</span> American judge

James Lindsay Almond Jr. was an American lawyer, state and federal judge and Democratic party politician. His political offices included as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia's 6th congressional district (1946-1948), 26th Attorney General of Virginia (1948-1957) and the 58th Governor of Virginia (1958-1962). As a member of the Byrd Organization, Almond initially supported massive resistance to the integration of public schools following the United States Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education, but when Virginia and federal courts ruled segregation unconstitutional, Almond worked with the legislature to end massive resistance.

Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia and his son Harry Jr.'s brother-in-law, James M. Thomson, who represented Alexandria in the Virginia General Assembly, to get the state's white politicians to pass laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, particularly after Brown v. Board of Education.

Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), was a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that Virginia's poll tax was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eleven southern states established poll taxes as part of their disenfranchisement of most blacks and many poor whites. The Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1964) prohibited poll taxes in federal elections; five states continued to require poll taxes for voters in state elections. By this ruling, the Supreme Court banned the use of poll taxes in state elections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Segregation academy</span> Segregationist private schools in the US

Segregation academies are private schools in the Southern United States that were founded in the mid-20th century by white parents to avoid having their children attend desegregated public schools. They were founded between 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and 1976, when the court ruled similarly about private schools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era</span> Post-civil war voter suppression efforts in the United States

Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era in the United States, especially in the Southern United States, was based on a series of laws, new constitutions, and practices in the South that were deliberately used to prevent black citizens from registering to vote and voting. These measures were enacted by the former Confederate states at the turn of the 20th century. Efforts were also made in Maryland, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. Their actions were designed to thwart the objective of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, which prohibited states from depriving voters of their voting rights on the basis of race. The laws were frequently written in ways to be ostensibly non-racial on paper, but were implemented in ways that selectively suppressed black voters apart from other voters.

George Neves Leighton was an American judge who served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He was known for taking cases related to housing, voting, and jury service, especially if these cases were directly impacted by injustice, particularly racism.

The Virginia State Board of Elections (SBE) was created in 1946 as a nonpolitical agency responsible for ensuring uniformity, fairness, accuracy and purity in all elections in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The SBE promotes the proper administration of election laws, campaign finance disclosure compliance, and voter registration processes in the state by promulgating rules, regulations, issuing instructions, and providing information to local electoral boards and general registrars. In addition, the SBE maintains a centralized database of statewide voter registration and election related data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Curtiss Underwood</span> American judge

John Curtiss Underwood was an attorney, abolitionist politician and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Virginia and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poll taxes in the United States</span> Banned taxes formerly required before voting; used to disenfranchise racial minorities and the poor

A poll tax is a tax of a fixed sum on every liable individual, without reference to income or resources. Although often associated with states of the former Confederate States of America, poll taxes were also in place in some northern and western states, including California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wisconsin. Poll taxes had been a major source of government funding among the colonies which formed the United States. Poll taxes made up from one-third to one-half of the tax revenue of colonial Massachusetts. Various privileges of citizenship, including voter registration or issuance of driving licenses and resident hunting and fishing licenses, were conditioned on payment of poll taxes to encourage the collection of this tax revenue. Property taxes assumed a larger share of tax revenues as land values rose when population increases encouraged settlement of the American West. Some western states found no need for poll tax requirements; but poll taxes and payment incentives remained in eastern states. Poll taxes became a tool of disenfranchisement in the South during Jim Crow, following the end of Reconstruction. This persisted until court action, following the ratification of the 24th Amendment in 1964, ended the practice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States</span> Laws against interracial marriage

In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were passed by most states to prohibit interracial marriage, and in some cases also prohibit interracial sexual relations. Some such laws predate the establishment of the United States, some dating to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Nine states never enacted such laws; 25 states had repealed their laws by 1967, when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional in the remaining 16 states. The term miscegenation was first used in 1863, during the American Civil War, by journalists to discredit the abolitionist movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of interracial marriage after the abolition of slavery.

This is a timeline of the civil rights movement in the United States, a nonviolent mid-20th century freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for people of color. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally institutionalized racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evelyn Thomas Butts</span> American activist and politician

Evelyn Thomas Butts was an African American civil rights activist and politician in Virginia. She is best known for challenging the poll tax and took her case before the United States Supreme Court. Butts was part of the civil rights movement and later became an influential figure in Norfolk politics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emanuel D. Molyneaux Hewlett</span> American lawyer and civil rights activist

Emanuel D. Molyneaux Hewlett was an American attorney, judge, and civil rights activist. He was among the first African Americans to be admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court, in 1883, and among the first to argue cases before the Supreme Court. He served as a Justice of the Peace in Washington, DC, from 1890 to 1906.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women's poll tax repeal movement</span> Movement to abolish US poll taxes

The women's poll tax repeal movement was a movement in the United States, predominantly led by women, that attempted to secure the abolition of poll taxes as a prerequisite for voting in the Southern states. The movement began shortly after the ratification in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted suffrage to women. Before obtaining the right to vote, women were not obliged to pay the tax, but shortly after the Nineteenth Amendment became law, Southern states began examining how poll tax statutes could be applied to women. For example, North and South Carolina exempted women from payment of the tax, while Georgia did not require women to pay it unless they registered to vote. In other Southern states, the tax was due cumulatively for each year someone had been eligible to vote.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Styles Hutchins</span> American attorney and politician

Styles Linton Hutchins was an attorney, politician, and activist in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee between 1877 and 1906. Hutchins was among the last African Americans to graduate from the University of South Carolina School of Law in the brief window during Reconstruction when the school was open to Black students and the first Black attorney admitted to practice in Georgia. He practiced law and participated in local politics in Georgia and Tennessee, served a single term (1887-1888) in the Tennessee General Assembly as one of its last Black members before an era of entrenched white supremacy that lasted until 1965, and advocated for the interests of African Americans. He called for reparations and attempted to identify or create a separate homeland for Blacks. He was a member of the defense team in the 1906 appeal on civil rights grounds by Ed Johnson of a conviction of rape, a case which reached the Supreme Court before it was halted by Johnson's murder by lynching in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Paralyzed Vet Gets Degree; Plans Law Career, Matrimony". The Pittsburgh Courier. 1949-07-02. p. 6. Retrieved 2018-02-14– via Newspapers.com.
  2. ↑ "Judge Jordan Censored, Plans Return to Bench". The News Leader. 1979-08-30. p. 15. Retrieved 2018-02-14– via Newspapers.com.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Joseph A. Jordan Jr., Civil Rights Advocate". Daily Press. 1991-06-16. p. 52. Retrieved 2018-02-13– via Newspapers.com.
  4. ↑ "Virginia Faces Test on Plans for Referendum". The Progress-Index. 1955-12-07. p. 1. Retrieved 2018-02-14– via Newspapers.com.
  5. 1 2 3 McAllister, Bill (25 March 1966). "Victor Expects Another Fight" (PDF). The Virginian-Pilot. Retrieved 14 February 2018– via Library of Virginia.
  6. ↑ "Norfolk Judge Halts Pickets at Be-Lo Store". Daily Press. 1960-03-15. p. 9. Retrieved 2018-02-13– via Newspapers.com.
  7. ↑ "Massive Suit Hits Danville Segregation". The Progress-Index. 1962-08-22. p. 14. Retrieved 2018-02-13– via Newspapers.com.
  8. ↑ "Store Hires Two Negro Clerks". Kingsport News. 1961-03-16. p. 14. Retrieved 2018-02-14– via Newspapers.com.
  9. ↑ "Old Dominion News Briefs". The News Leader. 1964-02-07. p. 5. Retrieved 2018-02-14– via Newspapers.com.
  10. 1 2 "Ceremony Marks Poll Tax Repeal". Daily Press. 1996-03-27. p. 13. Retrieved 2018-02-13– via Newspapers.com.
  11. ↑ "Poll Tax". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2018-02-13.
  12. 1 2 3 4 Komp, Catherine (2016-03-17). "Patriotism, Perseverance and the End of the Poll Tax". Community Idea Stations. Retrieved 2018-02-14.
  13. ↑ "400 Marchers Hit Norfolk". The Progress-Index. 1968-05-17. p. 6. Retrieved 2018-02-14– via Newspapers.com.
  14. ↑ "Busing Blamed for Flight of Whites from Norfolk". The Corpus Christi Caller-Times. 1971-12-10. p. 2. Retrieved 2018-02-13– via Newspapers.com.
  15. ↑ Downing, Sarah (2015). On This Day in Norfolk, Virginia History. Arcadia Publishing. p. 83. ISBN   9781626197039.
  16. ↑ "Norfolk Vice Mayor Resigns". The News Leader. 1974-11-06. p. 15. Retrieved 2018-02-14– via Newspapers.com.
  17. 1 2 "Judge Not Unfit, Attorneys Argue". Daily Press. 1979-06-06. p. 8. Retrieved 2018-02-13– via Newspapers.com.
  18. ↑ Parker, Stacy (1 February 2012). "Memorial's story reflects King's vision". Virginian-Pilot. Retrieved 2018-02-14.
  19. ↑ "Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Dedicated". Daily Press. 2000. p. 10. Retrieved 2018-02-14– via Newspapers.com.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.