After graduating from law school in 1960, he became secretary of law for Donald Hollowell, who had a civil rights practice in Atlanta. Jordan worked closely on the case that canceled the University of Georgia segregation and approached Charlayne Hunter (later journalist and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault), one of the two young black plaintiffs who were admitted after winning in court. On the day she went to school for the first time, Mr. Jordan was photographed accompanying her to campus, surrounded by a hostile crowd.
After the Georgia case, he served as NAACP’s field director in Georgia. The job required him to travel regularly throughout the Southeast to oversee civil rights cases, both large and small. He said he tried to follow the model of a friend, the praised director of the Mississippi office, Medgar Evers, who was later murdered.
He soon became director of the Southern Regional Council’s Electoral Education Project and was appointed executive director of the United Negro College Fund in 1970. A year later, his friend Whitney Young, head of the Urban League, drowned on a trip. Lagos, Nigeria and Mr. Jordan were recruited to fill the unexpected vacancy.
The National Urban League, the embodiment of the black establishment, brought Jordan to New York and exposed him to a wider world. The organization attracted a wide range of prominent citizens, both white and black, and was closely associated with corporate America. During his tenure, the group began publishing a widely read annual report entitled “The State of Black America”.
While in that position, on a trip to Fort Wayne, Indiana, in May 1980, he was in the company of a local Urban League board member, Martha Coleman, a white woman, when a group of white teenagers in a car passed by. for them and insulted them. Later, when Mrs. Coleman was dropping him off at his hotel, he was shot in the back by a man wielding a hunting rifle. Mr. Jordan almost died on the operating table, underwent six surgeries and was hospitalized for 89 days.
Joseph Paul Franklin, an avowed racist, was charged with the crime but acquitted at the trial, although he later boasted that he was the sniper. He was later convicted of other crimes, including fatally shooting two black runners who ran with white women, and executed in Missouri in 2013.