[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 35 (Friday, February 21, 2025)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E150]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     REMEMBERING DR. HAROLD JORDAN

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                            HON. STEVE COHEN

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, February 21, 2025

  Mr. COHEN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to Dr. Harold 
Jordan, a pioneering medical doctor and psychiatrist in my state of 
Tennessee who passed in December at the age of 87. Dr. Jordan became 
the first Black resident physician at Vanderbilt University Medical 
Center in 1964 and Tennessee's first Black Commissioner of Mental 
Health and Mental Retardation. My father, Dr. Morris Cohen, was the 
Superintendent of the Western State Psychiatric Hospital (now the 
Western Mental Health Institute) in Bolivar, Tennessee, in the mid-
1970s, and worked with Dr. Jordan. After ensuring that every mental 
health facility in the state was accredited, Tennessee named a building 
in his honor: the Harold W. Jordan Habilitation Center in Nashville in 
1979. Dr. Jordan also served for 18 years as the Chairman of the 
Psychiatry Department at Meharry Medical College, from which he 
graduated in 1962. He also served as its acting dean. He won the 
college's President's Award and its Humanism in Clinical Medicine 
Award. Vanderbilt established the Harold Jordan Lecture celebrating 
Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice in his honor. Born in 1937 in 
Newnan, Georgia, he knew by the age of seven that he would follow in 
the footsteps of both his father and grandfather into medicine. He 
graduated from Morehouse College with a degree in biology in 1958. 
After medical school, he married a nursing student named Geraldine, who 
survives him after 62 years of marriage. Family lore says they met 
while hiding after a bomb threat as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was 
preparing to speak at nearby Fisk College. Dr. Jordan and his wife 
raised four children in Nashville and belonged to the Clark Memorial 
United Methodist Church where he sang in the choir. He served as an 
officer in both the Tennessee National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve. 
Dr. Jordan and his wife retired to Los Angeles to be nearer to their 
children. I extend my condolences to Dr. Jordan's family, friends and 
many admirers. He made a profound difference in our state and his 
compassion, patient care and mentoring of future doctors will be long 
remembered.

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