Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Jordan

Jordan’s confidence isn’t the sunny kind; it’s a hard-won wager made in public, with history sitting in the front row. Coming from a Black woman who rose through Texas politics to become a national voice in the post-civil rights era, “I have confidence” functions less as optimism than as civic pressure. She’s asserting belief not because unity is inevitable, but because democracy depends on leaders insisting it’s possible - and then demanding the work that makes it true.

The key phrase is “this kind of national community.” It’s deliberately specific, quietly corrective. Jordan isn’t praising the community America already has; she’s pointing toward a different model of belonging, one that can survive pluralism without turning difference into a pretext for exclusion. The vagueness is strategic: it invites a broad audience into the tent while smuggling in a moral standard. If you agree you want “community,” you’re also agreeing to the obligations that community requires - shared rules, shared dignity, shared accountability.

Context matters because Jordan’s rhetorical power often emerged in moments when the country was testing whether its institutions meant what they said: Watergate, voting rights battles, immigration debates, the backlash politics of the 1970s and 1980s. Her tone carries the authority of someone who knows the system can fail and still chooses to speak as if it can be redeemed. The confidence is an argument: America is not held together by nostalgia, but by a collective decision to build a “we” that isn’t counterfeit.