Vernon E. Jordan Jr.
Former Civil Rights Leader
with Annette Gordon Reed
Co-authors of “Vernon Can Read! A Memoir”
From the “Explorations in Black Leadership” series
October 9, 2002

Vernon Jordan: Beginning with the Montgomery boycott the Civil Rights movement became a people’s movement. Historically it had been led by the talented ten and rightfully so just sort of educated in the NAACP and the Urban League. The Montgomery bus boycott and the Student movement brought about a democratization of the Civil Rights movement and that was a very good thing. At the height of it there was NAACP, Urban League, SCLC, SNCC and CORE. That was sort of it. Am I right Julian? And each had a different tactic. The students were out there on the edge and what brought the talented tenth what that it was our children that were in jail. That was a corelessing thing. CORE had it’s own thing and the NAACP was brought to it hard. I can remember in Albany Georgia, when I was state director for the NAACP I got a call from Mr. Wilkins. He said SCLC and SNCC are getting all the publicity in the New York Times but you always get a quote in but that’s not enough. We got to get in the headlines. I said what do you propose we do about it Mr. Wilkins and he said I propose that you go to jail.  I said Mr. Wilkins, I don’t mind going to jail, the problem is if I go to jail I’ll just be another guy. If you want to make the front page of the New York Times then you come down here and you go to jail. Then you be on the front page. Well he did not do that. But he did do it in Mississippi with Medgar Evers. That was competitiveness and it all came out in the Albany movement. But it was healthy because you can have division and unity at the same time. They all came together though they did not always agree on tactics and process. Julian was in SNCC I was in NAACP. Julian was a demonstrator as a student and I was a lawyer and so we came at it at different points but the ultimate goal was the same and it was a great achievement. And then had another kind of democratization of the civil rights movement and that is if you looked at every community it was always run by the talented tenth until two programs came. They were urban renewal and the poverty program. The poverty program had this thing about maximum feasible participation that three stews business community, community leaders and there was one other but you had to have indigenous leadership. In Atlanta the Atlanta Negro Voters League was headed by Col. A.T. Waldon who was a democrat and John Wesley Dobbs who was head of the Masons he was a Republican and they put out the voting lists before the election and that’s how the black vote went. But once the indigenous say this they said we want a piece of this from Peoplestown and other place they put out their own lists and that was a very good thing. It got resisted, but they finally got together because you had to make it open. If you think about the march on Washington there was only one woman that was leader and that was Dorothy Hite. And I say in my book that Ruby Hurley was good enough to run the NAACP, but that would not have happened.

Annette Gordon-Reed: Who was Ruby Hurley? Tell them who Ruby Hurley was?

Jordan: Ruby Hurley was my boss at the NAACP. She was the first NAACP staff person in the South. She went to Birmingham until George Wallace ran them out and then she came to Atlanta. She was this marvelous marvelous woman for whom I worked. We learned a lot from her and she was very smart, very loyal to the establishment, but could have run it but she was a woman. Even the Civil Rights movement had to go through this democratization process because Dorothy Hight was the only one there. Interestingly she has outlived all of them. She knitted her way through the process.

Gordon Reed: Was there ever any incline that one day there might be a change in the status of women? Was that ever addressed? Was that on the Horizon?

Jordan: No. It was not. We all did it together. SNCC was more integrated with woman than any other organization because they were younger because they were students. But the issue was black people defining their rights. It was not an issue.

Gordon Reed: So you have this system this movement going there is a tremendous amount of optimism. You are changing things through direct action with SNCC and also during voting.

Was there ever a time that you said you would be willing to go to jail? Do you think that you were involved in the more conservative organization the NAACP because you were a lawyer or is that a matter of temperament.

Jordan: Well you know there was a joke about me and Julian will remember this. Vernon is not going to jail cause he does not want to get his Brooks Brothers suit wrinkled. It was all about role and function. My notion was that lawyers did not go to jail. Lawyers got people out of jail. And so I was always in the legal context. I also never liked jail. Even as a lawyer that first day when we went to get Julian and Marion out that click of that door made me claustrophobic. I feel an obligation to tell you the truth, I never like it and I think the people that did it liked it. But they did it and they were great and courageous. It was never my thing.

Gordon Reed: So it wasn’t your thing. That’s fair enough. So you leave the voter education project in the 1960’s and you come to New York to be head of the United Negro College Fund. Could you talk a little about what that organization meant at that time because for most people now the only thing I knew about the United Negro College Fund was the slogan “A mind is terrible thing to waste.”

Jordan: That didn’t start until after I got there.

Gordon Reed:  Ok. But that’s all I know about it. I didn’t know the colleges that were involved in it and what it is. But what did that mean to you at that particular time. And what did it mean to the black community.

Jordan: To me it meant that I was getting an opportunity to expand my experience, to broaden my horizon as a leader. I had run a regional organization and I that had been asked by Dr. Frederick Patterson, former president of Tuskegee, and the founder of the United Negro College Fund Steve Wright who had been the president, and they were looking for somebody to come and run the college fund. Mr. John Rockefeller had quit the board; Mr. Andrew Hystel (sp) of Time Inc. had quit the board and David Ogilvy of Ogilvy Mather had quit the board. These are huge important moderate to liberal white businessmen who were on the board. So the college fund was in bad shape and they send for me. I liked that. And I had enough confidence in myself to believe that I could make it work. But I grew up right across the street from Spellman, Moorhouse, Clarck, Morris Brown, Atlanta University so I had a sense of that importance. So I took this job, as sort of the chancellor of the ex-checker 40 black colleges and 40,000 students and my job was to go out and raise the money. When I first got there Mr. Patterson took me see Mr. John Rockefeller at 30 Rock, where my office is now, to see Mr. Rockefeller to ask him if he would come back on the board and he said no. I’m finished with that. So I went back to my office and one of his aids, David Smith came to me and said young man you made a mistake. See you shouldn’t have come with Dr. Patterson cause he’s mad with Dr. Patterson. You come by yourself. So I went by myself.

My story was Mr. Rockefeller I barely knew how to get to Rockefeller Center, I’m a little kid from Atlanta up here I got this big job and I need your help. He said you didn’t hear me the last time I was here. I said No, that’s what I meant. I said Mr. Rockefeller thank you for seeing me, I will do it without you. I left that office we raised $10 million that year the largest amount ever raised. A year later Mr. Rockefeller sent for me. I went in and said Mr. Rockefeller how are you glad to be here Douglas Dillam was sitting there with him.  Whitney Young had been on the board of the Rockefeller foundation and he had died in March. Mr. Rockefeller said last time you were here you left in a huff. I said well not exactly in a huff, you said you weren’t going to do it and I had to do it and I think I did it.  He said you did do it. And now I would like to ask you a question. I said yes sir. I would like to ask you to be a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. I said you know Mr. Rockefeller I have better judgement than you and I am going to say yes. That sense of confidence some people would say arrogance. I think that’s what I got from my mother, from my father. I was confident that I could do what I had to do because I had something that was marketable, 40,000 black students and 40 colleges and it was my introduction to corporate America to dealing with chairman’s and CEO’s of major companies selling Virginia Union, and St. Paul’s and Moorhouse and Xavier and Dillard and it was a marvelous experience.

Gordon Reed: What did you think of them? You said this was your introduction to the corporate world. Cause this is very different. You are coming from the South to the North and you are meeting the Rockefellers and Douglas Dillam and these are big names in that world. What was your impression of them?

Jordan: My position was that I was not to make judgments. They had something that I wanted. I wanted access and I wanted money. And it was my considered judgment that if I got in and if I got to talk I could get the money and what I learned about money is that raising money is like chasing girlfriends. You have to ask. You just have to ask. If you want a date with somebody you have to ask. If you want money from XYZ corporation you have to ask. I tried to make judgments. What I found is that there are some very conservative corporate executives who were not interested in the civil rights movement but were interested in education. There were some who loved the Booker T. Washington but didn’t like W.B. Dubois. So I didn’t debate it, I just said I want you to make this commitment to the United Negro College Fund. And it was a great challenge and I liked it. It was like talking to the jury. I enjoyed it a lot.

Gordon Reed:  Was it different than the Urban League? It’s not a civil rights organization.

Jordan: Well the difference is that the urban league was about advocacy and there was no greater honor in my life than to be asked to succeed Whitney Young who died in Lagos, Nigeria. I was asked and accepted the job. I didn’t know what the salary was I didn’t know what the benefits were but I said yes. I said yes because I knew that if I said no I would regret it for the rest of my life. You do not at times in your life weigh salary, benefits, perks you say this is what I want to do. It was in the Waldorf Astoria and they put it to me. They said will you take this job and I said yes and then I walked to grand central station and I had to wait on my train I then lived in Hartsdale. As I am sitting at the bar having my drink, Roy Wilkins and Minnie Wilkins walk by.

Gordon Reed: Tell them who Roy Wilkins is?

Jordan: Roy Wilkins was the then director of the NAACP. He was my friend. He had selected me as his successor. He said Vernon I heard that you are the leading candidate for the Urban League job. And I sort of smiled and said is that right. I had just accepted that job.  He said I want to tell you two things. You are an NAACP man. Second thing I want to tell you is that I am not ready to go. When I was state director at the NAACP I would pick up Mr. Wilkins in Atlanta airport and drive him to Macon. Can you imagine two years out of law school and you have Roy Wilkins in your car in the front seat with you for two hours. It was like getting a graduate degree in black people. I would just sit driving, asking questions, probing, probing and probing. So I had the benefit of a huge apprenticeship. When I succeeded Wally Branton who was a lawyer for the little rock nine as head of the voter education project I talked to Wally all the time. I said how did you do this and how did you do that. When Whitney was at the Urban League and I was at the College Fund, I talked to Whitney all the time. And when I got to the college fund I called Steve Wright and I called Bill Trent how did you do this. I did not do it things the way they said it all the time but there is something about the process of consultation that is instructive. I am a huge beneficiary of mentoring. The one thing we did not do enough was to stress the value of mentoring. Leslie Dunbar a white man for whom I whom I worked at the Southern Regional Council.  He said Vernon if you are going to be a real professional, you have to write and you have to publish. He helped me with my first article, which was published in the Nation magazine and he is still a mentor. He was a wonderful mentor and I have been blessed with that. That’s why I spend a lot of time with young people. That’s why I wanted a young, smart, lawyer to help me with my book. You can’t do anything with not smart people. You can’t do anything well. And the experience of working with Annette in this book a lawyer the same age as my daughter. She is trained at Dartmouth, trained at Harvard. The first black woman to make law review. In helping me with my memoir she taught me a lot and in the process I think she learned a little.

Gordon Reed: Why is the book titled “Vernon Can Read” Mr. Jordan?

Jordan: The book title my wife, my four children, and to some extent my 8 grandchildren were all opposed to the title “Vernon Can Read.” They said it did not have intellectual content. That it did not have substance. That it was trite. And they said that until we were number one in the Washington Post best seller list and then they sort of changed their mind and then we got reviewed in all of the good newspapers.

In 1955 I was a student at De Paul University and the Continental Insurance Company came and interviewed on my campus and offered me a summer internship in Atlanta. I came home from school, went to the Fourth National Bank building, walked into the office, and said proudly, "My name is Vernon Jordan. I am a sophomore at DePaul University and I am your summer intern." The white lady receptionist looked up at me and said "No ____." She picked up the phone and called an executive in charge of some interns and said there is a colored boy out here, we were colored then, who says he is a summer intern can you believe it. Guy came out and took me into his office, asked me to have a seat and said they did not tell us. They did not tell you what I said. They did not tell us that you were colored. And we cannot have you in this office cause you are colored. This is 1955. So I said well what are you going to do about it? You come back tomorrow. So I came back the next day and he said well we found you an office at J.L. Wolf company down on Albino avenue down in the colored section of town and said I will come down, pick you up and we will go around selling income protection insurance to black employers employing five or more people.

I didn’t like this job. So I told my mother I needed another job and so my mother got me a job as a chauffeur for Mr. Robert F. Maddox. Mr. Maddox sat on the platform in 1895 when Mr. Booker T. Washington gave that famous Atlanta exposition address. “We can be as separate as the fingers on a hand yet one in mutual progress” He was mayor of Atlanta in 1910. He was president of First National Bank. He was president of the American Bankers Association. He was President of the Garden Clubs of America. He was the epitome Southern Bourbon Aristocracy of America. He was both rich and mean.

Every morning I would pick up Lissy the cook every morning in a 1940 La Salle. It was a great car, stick shift in the middle. I would drive Lissy to Woodmere which is on the corner of West Paces Ferry Road and Woodmere Drive in Atlanta, Buckhead. She would make three breakfasts. The first one was for Mr. Maddox, which she served him in the room. One for me, which she served me in the butler’s pantry, and one for Troy the yardman which he ate on the back porch. Even in menial circumstances they were layers and gradations. Mr. Maddox wherever he chose would come downstairs and select a cane from a barrel of canes and a hat from a table of hats in his Palm Beach suit that I had pressed the afternoon before. He would get in the back of this great big Cadillac and I would close the door dressed in my black chauffeurs uniform and a cap. I would drive him around the premises and stop at the rose garden where Troy the yardman would then appear with a rose for the lapel of his Palm Beach suit. It was always a different color rose. We would then drive turn left on West Paces Ferry, Right on Habbysham left on Peachtree Battle right on Peachtree Street. The big street in Atlanta. I would take him to First National Bank where he would stay 10 minutes 2 minutes 20 minutes you never knew when he was coming down. I would then take him and a couple of other old bankers to the Cab City Club were they would have Whiskey sours or Mint Julep and a jelly consommé for lunch. We get back to his mansion at 12:15 or 12:30 never after 1 o clock. So I had nothing to do from 1 o clock until 6:15pm. When I served dinner. Over the loud protestations of Miss. Lissy the cook, I went into Mr. Maddox’s huge beautiful library and read all afternoon. One day Mr. Maddox unable to sleep started walking around the house in his underwear with a bottle of southern comfort in one hand and a glass. Southern Comfort is whiskey. He walked into the library and I was in there reading. I guess I was supposed to stand up but it never dawned to me to stand up for a man in his underwear with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He said what are you doing in my library Vernon. I said reading Mr. Maddox. He said I have never had a nigger work for me who could read. I said I am colleged Mr. Maddox I can read. He said you go to those colored schools over there. I said no sir.  I go to De Paul University in Greencastle, Indiana. White children go to that school. White girls go to that school. Are you going to be a teacher or a preacher? Because for white people in his class if you were colored and going to college for them the only options you had was to be a teacher or preacher. Nothing wrong with being a teacher or preacher but I said no sir Mr. Maddox I am going to be a lawyer. He said niggers aren’t supposed to be lawyers. I said I am going to be a lawyer Mr. Maddox.

At dinner that night the son and daughter and spouses were there and Mr. Maddox.  I am now changed tie to bow tie, black jacket to white jacket and towel over my arm and serving Lissy’s very delicious Vichyssoise. Mr. Maddox says to his family seated I have an announcement to make yes papa, Vernon Can Read! And that is the title of my book and it is the right title and I am proud of my title.