Vernon Jordan, Washington Power Broker, Civil Rights Leader

February 10, 2002|By In the Loop reported by Christine Badowski, Brenda Butler, Noah Isackson and Patrick T. Reardon.

Jordan, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, was recently in town to promote his memoir, "Vernon Can Read!"

You're known as a private person. What made you decide to write a memoir? I thought I had a story that should be shared and understood. And if that is something that you want to do, you have to give up a little something.

How did the book come about? Some years ago, my daughter Vickee and I were sitting down with our housekeeper, Ms. Gaines, and she talked about a time when she was on a bus and a white man said, "I want your seat." My daughter said, "What did you do?" and Ms. Gaines said, "I moved." My daughter replied that she would have refused under her constitutional rights. And I realized my 11-year-old child had no notion of what it was like to be black in the South in the 1950s. I wanted to write a memoir for my children that would explain it.

One passage describes how an early employer of yours was surprised that you could read and go to college with white people. A generation later, how much racial progress have we made? Extraordinary progress. I'll give you just one example: Maybe a month ago, I spoke to the black alumni of the Harvard Business School and there must have been 300 young people in that room. In 1977, I once tried to convene a meeting with black Harvard Business School alumni and we could have held it in a phone booth. . . . Today, I see black people doing things that were totally inaccessible when I was a kid.

With Clinton no longer in office, are you less busy these days? I'm less busy politically, but I'm a full-time CEO, and counsel at my law firm, and that keeps me pretty busy.

Will there be a sequel to your memoir? I only do one thing at a time.