[Breitbart] On this day in 1996, Civil Rights icon Barbara Jordan died just weeks before Congress and then-President Bill Clinton were set to advance her reforms to illegal and legal immigration focused on protecting poor and working class Americans from waves of job-killing and wage-crushing mass immigration.Jordan, a Democrat, became a fixture of the Civil Rights movement after becoming the first black American state Senator in the nation since 1883 and the first black American woman elected to the Texas State Senate. Later, in 1972, Jordan became the first black American woman to preside over a legislative body in the U.S. when she was elected president pro tempore of the Texas State Senate.
That same year, Jordan was elected to Congress. Her election marked the first time a black American woman would represent the state of Texas in Washington, D.C.
“For Martin Luther King, Jr. … he was fighting for jobs and fair pay for African Americans and that’s what Barbara Jordan was doing,” NumbersUSA President Roy Beck told Breitbart News.
Following President George H.W. Bush’s Immigration Act of 1990, which blew open the door for today’s mass immigration levels, Jordan chaired the United States Commission on Immigration Reform.
“We think about 1965 having restarted mass immigration, but it was the 1990s that just shut the door on upward mobility for all Americans in the underclass,” Beck said. “It was just an abandonment of the underclass.”