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Of course, Jordan came to the House in 1973 with certain advantages. Her reputation as the first black woman elected to Congress from the South preceded her. And while there were dozens of look-alike white male freshmen, no one was likely to confuse Barbara Jordan with anyone else. Still, it was another black woman Yvonne Braithwaite Burke of Los Angeles who was singled out as the real star; Burke had been temporary chairman of the 1972 Democratic Convention and her picture, not Jordan’s, dominated the women’s pages. Burke and Jordan were the two fledgling Democrats singled out by the Kennedy Institute at Harvard to attend a special month-long seminar just before they took office (William Cohen of Maine and Alan Steelman of Texas were the Republicans). Not once during that month did the two black women discuss any unique problems they might encounter in an overwhelmingly white male institution.
In the early hours of Feb. 10, 1971, police surrounded a property in High Point, North Carolina, where members of the Black Panther Party lived and worked. In the ensuing shootout, a Panther and a police officer were both wounded.
The incident did not receive much national attention at the time – armed conflict of this type was relatively common during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As a historian who has interviewed participants in the confrontation for a coming book, I see the raid in the context of a then-emerging strategy of urban policing in the U.S., shaped by the racial and political clashes of the 1960s and forged through a growing partnership between local and federal law enforcement. That strategy, of criminalizing Black political activism at a time when white reactionary protesters were accommodated, has defined police responses to Americans’ activism – and political violence – over the past half-century.