How One Veteran Changed History
From its earliest days, Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) has understood that civil rights aren’t optional — they’re essential.
That conviction was tested almost immediately after PVA’s founding. In 1947, during PVA’s first board meeting, the organization planned a celebratory banquet at the Hotel John Marshall in Richmond, Va. Unfortunately, the hotel’s management let PVA know that some veterans would be turned away, not because they used wheelchairs, but because they were Black.
At the time, Virginia’s constitution protected racial segregation. In other words, discrimination was legal there. But PVA’s leaders refused to accept it. They declared that paralysis knew no bias and neither did PVA. By any means necessary, every member would dine together in that ballroom.
Days later, two Black paralyzed veterans took their seats beside their fellow delegates at the Hotel John Marshall. It was a small victory by some measures, but it marked the beginning of PVA’s long fight for justice. For one of those men, Joseph A. Jordan Jr., it may have been the spark that reshaped his life.
Jordan saw, in that moment, a renewed call to service, not as a soldier, but as an advocate.
Born in Norfolk, Va., in 1924, Jordan grew up in the Jim Crow South, where segregation dictated nearly every aspect of daily life. From an early age, he learned which doors were closed, which schools were underfunded and which opportunities were denied. The message was constant and corrosive. Yet within his family, church and community, Jordan found strength, pride and a belief that something better was possible.
After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943. Like many Black men of his generation, Jordan sought opportunity and hoped service, sacrifice and patriotism might finally earn equality at home. The military, however, was deeply segregated. Yet, while stationed in Europe, Jordan experienced a startling contrast — societies that treated him with more dignity than he had ever known back home in the United States.
That promise of a broader world was crushed in 1945, when Jordan’s Jeep veered off the road and into a minefield in northern France, leaving him paralyzed due to a spinal cord injury (SCI). His military career was over and his life forever altered.
Jordan belonged to the first generation of paralyzed veterans to survive such injuries. Back then, there was no roadmap for recovery, which meant living with paralysis came with immense hardships.
Following the war, the nation spoke of unity and shared sacrifice, but Black veterans returned to a country still ruled by racial division. They had fought fascism abroad only to confront racism at home. Their military service offered no protection against discrimination.
Jordan was admitted to a newly constructed veterans hospital in Richmond, but even there, segregation prevailed. He was sent to rehabilitate in a facility named after a Confederate physician turned Jim Crow advocate, which was a bitter reminder that equality remained out of reach.
The promises of the then-named Veterans Administration and the GI Bill were similarly compromised. Though designed to support
all veterans, a Black veteran often faced delays, denials and discriminatory treatment by local agencies, banks and universities. Still, Jordan refused to be defined by injustice or by his paralysis.
He rebuilt himself through education. He enrolled at Virginia Union University, earning a sociology degree, then moved north to attend Brooklyn Law School. He continued his studies at New York University, focusing on labor law. Education became both his refuge and his weapon.
By 1954, Jordan had moved to Norfolk, Va., to open a law practice. He immersed himself in civil rights litigation, challenging segregation and disenfranchisement at every turn. His most consequential work came in the fight against Virginia’s poll tax, which was a deliberate barrier designed to silence poor and Black voters.
Representing local activist Evelyn Thomas Butts, Jordan challenged the tax in court. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Jordan joined forces with Thurgood Marshall (yes, that Thurgood Marshall). On March 24, 1966, the court ruled that Virginia’s poll tax violated the 14th Amendment. It was a landmark victory that dismantled a powerful tool of voter suppression.
Jordan’s leadership soon carried him into public office. In 1968, he was elected to the Norfolk City Council, becoming the first Black councilmember since 1889. He later served as vice mayor and, in 1977, was appointed a judge on Virginia’s General District Court. From the bench, he was known for fairness, integrity and a belief that the law should uplift people, not diminish them.
Yet Jordan’s career wasn’t without controversy. In 1979, the Virginia Supreme Court publicly censured him for judicial misconduct relating to violations of defendants’ constitutional rights to due process. Jordan acknowledged that his errors “may have been unintentional,” but he reaffirmed his commitment to what he called “the common sense of justice,” according to an Aug. 29, 1979, Washington Post article. Accountability, for him, was not the end of service; it was part of it.
Jordan retired in 1986 and died in 1991 at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Hampton, Va. His legacy endures in the Martin Luther King Jr., monument he envisioned, in a public library renamed in his honor and in the countless lives shaped by his work.
From that first confrontation at the Hotel John Marshall to decades of principled service, Jordan’s life traces an arc of courage, accountability and growth. He transformed racial adversity into purpose and injuries of war into wisdom.
His story proves a truth that still guides us today: You’re not defined by what happens to you. You’re defined by what you do with it.
As always, please share your thoughts with me at al@pvamag.com.
