Leadership Quote by Barbara Jordan

Jordan’s line slices through the tribal slogans of its moment with the moral authority of someone who knew exactly why those slogans existed. “Do not call for black power or green power” isn’t a dismissal of identity-based struggle so much as a warning about its political ceiling: movements can win attention through solidarity, but they govern through legitimacy. By pivoting to “brain power,” she recasts power as competence, preparation, and institutional mastery - the unglamorous stuff that turns protest into policy.

The phrasing is doing tactical work. Jordan pairs “black” and “green” to flatten two different kinds of factionalism: race-based mobilization and money-driven influence (or, depending on the audience, environmental or ethnic “color” politics). Either way, she frames both as shortcuts - ways of claiming power by label rather than by capacity. “Brain power” is a rebuke to demagoguery from any side: don’t outsource your agency to a banner; build the skill to out-argue, out-organize, out-legislate.

Context matters. Jordan rose during the post-civil-rights era, when Black political participation was expanding but also being policed by backlash narratives about “radicalism.” As a constitutionalist with movement credibility, she threads the needle: she affirms the need for power, then insists on the form that can survive scrutiny in a hostile system. The subtext is hard-nosed: the game is rigged, so you can’t afford to be sloppy. Intelligence becomes not a meritocratic fantasy, but a survival strategy - a demand that marginalized citizens claim the full machinery of democracy, not just its megaphone.