Success Quote by Vernon Jordan

"Terrorism is not new to black people" lands like a cold correction, the kind that refuses to let the listener keep the moral high ground unchallenged. Vernon Jordan isn’t offering a history lesson for its own sake; he’s disputing who gets to claim shock. The line is deliberately stripped of qualifiers because the point isn’t nuance, it’s recognition: for Black Americans, organized violence and intimidation have been recurring features of civic life, not an aberration that begins when the nightly news decides it has.

The intent is twofold. First, it yanks “terrorism” out of the narrow post-1960s, often foreign-coded box and forces it to include domestic realities: lynching as spectacle, bombings of churches and homes, police violence, the everyday threat used to enforce segregation. Second, it exposes a hierarchy of empathy. When mainstream America treats terror as newly discovered, it quietly implies that prior Black suffering was either normal, localized, or somehow not “national” enough to count.

The subtext is political, not abstract: if you want solidarity after a crisis, you need honesty about whose crises were ignored. Jordan, a businessman and civil-rights power broker, understood the language of institutions. By using the word “terrorism,” he’s leveraging a term that triggers state response, moral outrage, and media focus, then asking why those mechanisms so often arrived late for Black communities.

It works because it’s a rebuke that doubles as an invitation: expand the story of American victimhood, or admit you’ve been curating it.