After graduating from law school in 1960, he became a lawyer for Donald Hollowell, who had a busy civil rights practice in Atlanta. Mr. Jordan worked closely on the case, which downgraded the University of Georgia and grew up near Charlayne Hunter (later journalist and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault), one of two young black plaintiffs who were admitted after winning in court. On the day she first went to school, Mr. Jordan declined as she escorted her to campus, surrounded by a hostile crowd.
After the case in Georgia, he served as field director of the NAACP in Georgia. The task required him to travel regularly through the Southeast to oversee civil rights matters, both large and small. He said he tried to model himself after a friend, the former director of the Mississippi office, Medgar Evers, who was later killed.
In short, he became director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council and in 1970 he was appointed executive director of the United Negro College Fund. A year later, his friend Whitney Young, the head of the Urban League, drowned on a trip to Lagos, Nigeria, and Mr. Jordan was recruited to fill the unexpected vacancy.
The National Urban League, the embodiment of the black settlement, has Mr. Jordan was brought to New York and exposed to a wider world. The organization utilized a wide variety of prominent citizens, both white and black, and was closely associated with American business life. During his tenure, the group released a widely read annual report entitled ‘The State of Black America’.
While holding the post, during a trip to Fort Wayne, Ind., In May 1980, he was in the company of a local member of the Urban League Council, Martha Coleman, a white woman, when a group of white teenagers were in a car they passed and teased. When Coleman later dropped him off at his hotel, he was shot in the back by a man using a shotgun. Mr. Jordan nearly died at the operating table, underwent six surgeries and remained in the hospital for 89 days.
Joseph Paul Franklin, a recognized racist, is charged with the crime but acquitted during the trial, although he would later boast that he was the gunman. He was later convicted of other crimes, including the shooting death of two black joggers who ran with white women and were executed in Missouri in 2013.