After graduating from law school in 1960, he became a law clerk for Donald Hollowell, a busy one-man civil rights practice in Atlanta. Mr. Jordan worked closely with the case that split the University of Georgia and approached Charlene Hunter (later journalist and writer Charlene Hunter-Gault), two young black plaintiffs who gained admission after winning the court. On the day she first attended school, Mr. Jordan had photographs escorting her to a campus surrounded by hostile crowds.
After the Georgia case, he served as Georgia Field Director of NAACP. For this work he had to make regular trips to the southeast to oversee civil rights cases, both large and small. He said he tried to model himself after a friend, Medgar Evers, wanted director of the Mississippi office fees, who was later assassinated.
In a nutshell, he became the director of the Southern Regional Council’s water education project and in 1970 was appointed executive director of the United Negro College Fund. A year later his friend Whitney Young, head of the Urban League, drowned on a trip to Lagos, Nigeria and Mr Jordan was recruited to fill an unexpected vacancy.
The National Urban League, the embodiment of the Black establishment, brought Mr. Jordan to New York and exposed him to the wider world. The organization took on a wide range of prominent citizens, both white and black, and was closely associated with corporate America. During his tenure, the group began publishing a widely read annual report entitled “State of Black America.”
While in office, in May 1980, on a trip to Fort Wayne, Ind., She was accompanied by Martha Coleman, a local member of the Urban League Board, a white woman, and a group of white teenagers in a car. Passed them and applauded them. Later, as Mrs. Coleman was about to leave for her hotel, she was shot in the back by a man wielding a hunting rifle. Mr Jordan nearly died at the operating table, underwent six surgeries and was hospitalized for 89 days.
Joseph P. Paul L. Franklin, an ardent racist, was charged, but was acquitted at the trial, although he will later be proud to be a gunman. He was later convicted of other crimes, including fatal shooting of two black joggers running with white women, and was hanged in Missouri in 2013.
