Vernon Jordan: IU Neal-Marshall speaker considers ‘two bookends’ in his upbringing

By Steve Hinnefeld, Published April 18, 2008

Vernon Jordan has lived a life marked by success at the highest levels. He has been a civil rights leader, a corporate attorney and director of an investment bank, a friend and adviser to President Bill Clinton.

But when Jordan spoke to an Indiana University audience recently, he focused on two men who exemplified the forces that might have restricted his life, as he grew up in the segregated South in the 1940s and 1950s.

On one side was Robert F. Maddox, a wealthy white banker and a member of Atlanta’s monied aristocracy, for whom Jordan worked as a chauffeur while in college. On the other, Jim Griggs, a Georgia sharecropper who was Jordan’s maternal grandfather.

Vernon Jordan presented the annual Neal-Marshall Lecture in Public Policy on March 27.
Photo by Donya Maleto
Vernon Jordan presented the annual Neal-Marshall Lecture in Public Policy on March 27.

“Two bookends,” Jordan called them. “One white, rich and mean; one black, poor and ignorant.” He spoke at IU’s Whittenberger Auditorium on March 27, giving the annual Neal-Marshall Lecture in Public Policy, sponsored by the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Neal-Marshall Alumni Club.

Jim Griggs couldn’t imagine a world in which success was an option for black Americans, he said. When Jordan was 12, he asked his 70-year-old grandfather about his life aspirations. The old man’s answer: to use an indoor bathroom once before he died.

“He was so blinded by racism and segregation. He couldn’t imagine the life his grandson would live,” Jordan said.

Jordan worked for Maddox in 1955, while on summer break from DePauw University in Greencastle. He said Maddox was shocked that his chauffer could read -- and that he chose to use his free time devouring books in the rich man’s library. When he learned Jordan was in college, Maddox asked if he planned to be a preacher or a teacher, assuming no other careers were open to an educated black man.

Maddox knew deep down that the South was changing and segregation was crumbling. “I’m glad I won’t be here to see it,” he said. But he was: Maddox was on TV six years later as Jordan, then a young lawyer, escorted Charlayne Hunter onto the newly integrated campus of the University of Georgia.

Jordan paid tribute to the people for whom the Neal-Marshall lecture is named: Marcellus Neal and Frances Marshall, the first male and female African-American graduates of Indiana University. “They did their best, to the best of their ability, and that is all that is required of us,” he said.

He said he was “stunned by this historic moment” when the Democratic Party will choose either a woman or an African-American man as its candidate for president. A friend and supporter of Hillary Clinton, he said he respects those who support Barack Obama.

“I promise you that it is good for America, and it is good for democracy,” he said.

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