I had the great gift of getting a chance to record a sixty-second public service announcement for the Diversity Coalition of San Luis Obispo County.

It was agony.

This morning, it took me twenty takes, six edits of the manuscript and three hours to finish.

The whole time, I’m sure, my Arroyo Grande High School speech teacher, Miss Sara Steigerwalt, was looking at me narrowly.

Sara was a tiny woman confined to a wheelchair, yet she had the kind of command I never pretended to have once I became a teacher. She terrified me. But I adored her. (She wasn’t feeling well one day and made the mistake of calling me “Jim” instead of her normally imperious “Mr. Gregory.” For that slip, I adore her still.)

Despite the vast differences in our teaching styles, she made me want to be a teacher, too.

But this morning’s experience reminded that she was right. Public speaking is truly difficult, and it demands a mental and emotional toughness that I can find only in fits and starts.  

My immense pain in trying to sound coherent in a modest sixty-second burst reminded me, too, of my favorite public speaker: the late Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, now lost to two generations of Americans, who, through no fault of their own, have no idea who she was.

She first caught America’s attention as a member of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, charged with preparing Articles of Impeachment against Richard Nixon. Her summation, on national television, was electric: My faith in the Constitution, she said, is whole. It is complete. It is total.

She was channeling Moses, so fundamental to Black Christianity. If you listen to her for just a few moments of in the link below, you can hear Moses, too.

Jordan’s politics are irrelevant here. What’s noticeable is the precision of her enunciation, the measured cadence that was characteristic of her speaking, the specificity of her word choice and—most of all—the power of her intellect.

Even my teacher Sara—a Robert Taft Republican—would have admired Barbara Jordan. Her eyes narrowed in Room 403 at Arroyo Grande High School in 1968 when I spoke, but I was, after all, a wastrel, the product of a family of New Deal Democrats and Eisenhower Republicans.

But six years later, had she the chance to hear this, I can almost see Sara’s eyes widening and her carefully landscaped eyebrows, modeled on Joan Crawford’s, rising at the sound of Barbara Jordan’s voice.

Sara would have listened, too, with pleasure, to the silence in the audience.

They’d waited in line for hours in Washington’s suffocating summer heat for the chance at a ticket that would win them a seat in the hearing room. They didn’t know that they would hear Jordan speak, and many of them might not have known who she was. What they heard would stay with them the rest of their lives.