[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 4 (Monday, January 29, 1996)]
[Pages 85-86]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Funeral Service for Barbara Jordan in Houston, Texas

January 20, 1996

    Thank you. Pastor Cofield; Bennie and Rosemary and John; and Aunt 
and Uncle, Mamie and Wilmer Lee; Mr. Mayor, my good friend Governor 
Richards; all the distinguished Texans who are here; and friends of 
Barbara Jordan around the country; Members of Congress; members of the 
Texas State government; the former Members of Congress who served with 
Barbara who came down with me today; to members of the Cabinet; my 
fellow Americans.
    The last time I saw Barbara Jordan was late last fall when Liz 
Carpenter talked me into going to the University of Texas to give a 
speech on race relations on the day of the Million Man March. I was 
nervous enough as it was. [Laughter] And I walked out into that vast 
arena, and there were 17,000 people there. But I could only see one, 
Barbara Jordan, smiling at me. And there I was about to give a speech to 
her about race and the Constitution. [Laughter] I think it was the 
nearest experience on this Earth to the pastor's giving a sermon with 
God in the audience. [Laughter]
    Through the sheer force of the truth she spoke, the poetry of her 
words, and the power of her voice, Barbara always stirred our national 
conscience. She did it as a legislator, a Member of Congress, a teacher, 
a citizen.
    Perhaps more than anything else in the last few years, for those of 
us who had the privilege of being around her, she did it in the 
incredible grace and good humor and dignity with which she bore her 
physical misfortunes. No matter what, there was always the dignity. When 
Barbara Jordan talked, we listened.
    We listened in 1974 when she said of the preamble to our 
Constitution, ``We the people. It is a very eloquent beginning, but when 
the document was completed on the 17th of September in 1787, I was not 
included in that `we the people'.''
    We listened in 1976 when President Carter asked her to be the first 
black woman to deliver a keynote address at the Democratic Convention. 
When she asked and answered one of those great questions with which we 
still struggle, she said, ``Are we to be one people bound together by 
common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided 
nation?'' ``A spirit of harmony will survive in America,'' she said, 
``only if each of us remember that we share a common destiny.''
    We listened in 1992 when she honored me by again giving a keynote 
address at the convention. ``The American dream is slipping away from 
too many people,'' she said. She said it would only be changed if we 
developed an environment characterized by a devotion to the public 
interest, to public servants, to tolerance, and to love.
    After I became President, I asked her to chair the United States 
Commission on Immigration Reform. And she made us listen again when she 
reminded all sides on that delicate and difficult issue that we must 
remain both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.
    Barbara Jordan's life was a monument to the three great threads that 
run constantly throughout the fabric of American history: our love of 
liberty, our belief in progress, our search for common ground. Wherever 
she could and whenever she stood to speak, she jolted the Nation's 
attention with her artful and articulate defense of the Constitution, 
the American dream, and the common heritage and destiny we share, 
whether we like it or not.
    Barbara Jordan loved her family, her loved ones, her friends, her 
allies, her teachers. She loved Texas and how she loved our beloved 
country. She reveled in its never-ending struggle to live up to our 
highest ideals.
    She once said this: ``All we are trying to do is to make this 
Government of the United States honest. We only ask that when we stand 
up and talk about one Nation under God with liberty and justice for all, 
we want to be able to look up at the flag, put our right hands over our 
hearts, repeat those words, and know that they are true.'' Well,

[[Page 86]]

if Barbara wasn't in the Constitution when it was first written, she 
made sure that once she got in, she stayed in it all the way.
    She also did all she could as a lawmaker and as a teacher to give 
future generations of Americans for all time to come equal standing 
under that Constitution. That's what she was doing when God called her 
home, working with the students at the University of Texas Lyndon 
Johnson School of Public Affairs.
    In 1994, in one of the most enjoyable moments of my Presidency, I 
was proud to give to Barbara Jordan the Nation's highest award to a 
civilian, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I noticed her wearing it 
today. And it touched me so to know that she is now going to a place 
where her rewards will be greater.
    As Ann Richards said, if we're all going to tell the truth today, 
Barbara Jordan made every one of us stand a little straighter, speak a 
little clearer, and be a little stronger. She took to heart what her 
Grandpa Patten told her when she was a little girl. ``You just trot your 
own horse, and don't get into the same rut as everyone else.'' 
[Laughter] Well, she sure trotted her own horse, and she made her own 
path wide and deep.
    Let me close with these lines from a poem I love by Stephen Spender. 
I understand Barbara loved it, too, and liked to read it aloud. I can't 
read it as well as she would have, but you'll see it could have been 
written about her. ``I think continually of those who are truly great, 
who from the womb remembered the soul's history, who wore at their 
hearts the fire's center. Borne of the sun, they traveled a short while 
toward the sun, and left the vivid air signed in their honor.''
    Barbara's magnificent voice is silenced. But she left the vivid air 
signed in her honor. Barbara, we the people will miss you. We thank you, 
and Godspeed.

Note: The President spoke at 10:36 a.m. in the Good Hope Missionary 
Baptist Church. In his remarks, he referred to Rev. D.Z. Cofield, 
pastor, Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church; Barbara Jordan's sisters 
Bennie Crisswell and Rosemary McGowan, and her brother-in-law, John 
McGowan; Mayor Bob Lanier of Houston, TX; former Gov. Ann Richards of 
Texas; and Liz Carpenter, distinguished alumna of the University of 
Texas.