06/06/2026
An all-white jury in Indiana let the man who tried to kill Vernon Jordan walk free. Joseph Paul Franklin walked out of that courtroom in 1982, then confessed fourteen years later that he planned the whole ambush after hearing Jordan's name on the radio. By then Jordan was advising the President of the United States.
The confession cost nothing because the acquittal already had.
In the summer of 1955, a twenty-year-old college student sat in the private library of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta, reading a book. The young man's name was Vernon Jordan, and the book belonged to Robert F. Maddox, a retired banker, a former mayor, and a former president of the American Banking Association.
Jordan was Maddox's chauffeur that summer. His mother, Mary Belle, ran a catering business that served the most powerful white households in the city, and she had arranged the job for her son while Maddox's regular driver was away.
Maddox was in his eighties by then, a creature of habit. He would come downstairs each afternoon, pick up his hat, select one of his walking canes, and settle into the back seat of a blue four-door Cadillac.
Jordan drove him from the back of the house, past the rose garden, and into whatever corner of Atlanta the old man wanted to visit that day. When Maddox took his post-luncheon naps, Jordan slipped into the library.
He read from the banker's own shelves, book after book, through long southern afternoons while the house was quiet.
One evening, Maddox discovered what his chauffeur had been doing. He walked out to his family, still in his underwear, carrying a bottle of Southern Comfort, and announced three words that would outlive everything else about him.
"Vernon can read!"
That was the full report. A man who had run the largest bank in the state and served as mayor of the city had just learned that the young Black man driving his Cadillac was literate, and the discovery was so stunning to him that he delivered it to his relatives like breaking news.
Vernon Eulion Jordan Jr. was born on August 15, 1935, in Atlanta, Georgia. His father was a postal worker for the U.S. Army, his mother the caterer whose connections ran through every prominent white household in the city.
The family lived in University Homes, one of the first public housing projects in America built specifically for Black families. It was a community of ambition packed inside walls built by segregation.
Jordan would later say, "You knew there was colored water and there was white water, and you knew you sat upstairs in the theater. It was a way of life, and you understood that, but it never meant you accepted it."
He graduated with honors from David T. Howard High School in 1953.
He was a smart boy with a good jump shot and a voice that could fill a room, and when he applied for a summer sales position at the Continental Insurance Company after his sophomore year of college, the recruiter on campus had been so impressed that he offered Jordan a spot in the company's Atlanta office.
Jordan put on his best suit and walked downtown to the Fulton National Bank Building. The moment the receptionist saw his face, the offer disappeared.
That is how he ended up driving Robert Maddox's Cadillac. And that is how a former mayor of Atlanta ended up telling his family, like a man reporting a miracle, that Vernon could read.
Jordan had enrolled at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, the only Black student in a class of four hundred.
His parents had wanted him somewhere closer, somewhere the world might be gentler to their second son.
He described their worry in his own words. They "could never quite adjust to the idea of their boy even being in Greencastle, Indiana, the only Negro in a class of 400 students, and they felt their boy, their baby, their prize, would be happier and have less frustrations if he went to a predominantly Negro institution."
But one night in the Jordan household changed his father's mind forever.
Vernon had brought home a white classmate from North Carolina, a friend who was staying with the family in their home in Atlanta. In the middle of the night, Vernon Sr. got out of bed, walked into his son's room, and turned on the light.
He stood there looking at his boy sleeping under the same roof as a white friend. Then he turned the light off, went back to his wife, and spoke through tears.
"You know," he told Mary Belle, "this democracy thing is really here."
After DePauw, Jordan attended Howard University Law School, earning his J.D. in 1960.
He returned to Atlanta and joined the law office of Donald Hollowell, a civil rights attorney who was building a case that would crack open the entire state of Georgia.
The case was against the University of Georgia, and the charge was simple. The university would not admit Black students, and the law said it had to.
On January 9, 1961, a federal judge ruled in their favor and ordered the admission of two Black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes. Vernon Jordan, twenty-five years old and six months out of law school, was the young lawyer who would walk Charlayne Hunter onto that campus.
There was no security detail. No es**rt from the university.
Jordan, Hunter, her mother, and Holmes's father walked together through a crowd of white demonstrators who were screaming and shouting things no student should hear at the door of a school. Jordan and Hunter were both tall, and they were walking fast, and at one point Hunter's mother called out from behind them, "Don't walk so fast, my legs are not as long as yours!"
It was a small moment of sanity inside something that could have broken them.
Jordan would recall later that there were no thoughts of fear that morning. "There was just this sense of duty," he said, "this is what I went to law school to do, and I'm now here, doing it."
Back in Atlanta, Robert Maddox was watching the news. His nurse recognized the tall young lawyer on the screen and told the old banker who he was looking at.
Maddox reportedly said, "I always knew he was up to no good."
The boy who could read was cracking open a state.
Over the next two decades, Jordan became one of the most significant civil rights figures in America. He served as Georgia field secretary for the NAACP, leading boycotts in Augusta against merchants who refused to serve Black customers.
In 1963, he moved to the Southern Regional Council, where he directed the Voter Education Project, a campaign that registered Black voters across the South. By 1970, he was executive director of the United Negro College Fund.
A year later, at thirty-six, he was named president of the National Urban League. Under his leadership, the League added seventeen chapters, its budget grew past one hundred million dollars, and its mission expanded into voter registration and corporate accountability.
He sat on the boards of major corporations and pressed those companies to hire Black Americans. Not out of charity, but out of recognition.
Then came Fort Wayne.
On the evening of May 29, 1980, Jordan spoke at a dinner for the Fort Wayne, Indiana, chapter of the Urban League at the Marriott Inn on Coldwater Road. Afterward, he stayed in the Piper's Glen Room, smoking a cigar and talking with about a hundred local members about the struggles of the past and his hopes for what might still come.
Around midnight, he left with Martha Coleman, a local Urban League board member who had been introduced to him earlier that evening. They drove to her home for coffee, talked for a couple of hours, and she drove him back to the Marriott sometime after two in the morning.
Coleman dropped him at the side entrance of the hotel because it was closer to his room. Jordan stepped out of the car, walked behind it, and the world changed.
A man had been lying in the grass on a slope near the parking lot, waiting in the dark with a .30-06 hunting rifle. He had been there for somewhere between twenty minutes and an hour, patient and still and watching.
The bullet struck Jordan in the back.
"I all of a sudden felt myself sailing into the air," Jordan would testify in federal court two years later. "I felt a sharp, sudden pain in my back and I thought I was dreaming, that I would wake up and it would be gone."
He did not wake up from it.
The round left a wound in his back the size of a man's fist, less than an inch from his spine.
Jordan called out to Coleman that he had been hit and asked her to get help. Two men in the parking lot came running toward him, and then the sirens came.
At Parkview Memorial Hospital, a Black surgeon named Dr. Jeffrey Towles led the team that kept Vernon Jordan alive. Jordan would undergo five operations in sixteen days, and Towles's steady hands were the ones that held him together through every one.
President Jimmy Carter flew to Fort Wayne to sit at Jordan's bedside, and Senator Edward Kennedy came too. The story of Carter's visit became the first item ever broadcast on a brand-new cable network called CNN.
For more than a year, the investigation went nowhere.
Then the FBI identified the man in the grass.
His name was Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who had renamed himself after a N**i propagandist and Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had been drifting across the country for three years, taking the lives of Black people, Jewish people, and in*******al couples in a campaign he called his "mission" to start a race war.
He had heard Jordan's name on the radio, learned where the dinner was being held, and driven to Fort Wayne to end him. By the time he lay down in that grass with his rifle, he was already responsible for more than a dozen deaths across the country.
In August 1982, Franklin was tried in federal court in northern Indiana under Judge Allen Sharp. The jury was all white.
They acquitted him.
Franklin was already serving multiple life sentences for other killings by the time he admitted, fourteen years later, that he had indeed put that bullet in Vernon Jordan's back. He told the Indianapolis Star he had planned the ambush after hearing Jordan's name on a Fort Wayne radio station.
On November 20, 2013, Franklin was executed by lethal injection in Bonne Terre, Missouri, for the 1977 killing of Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in suburban St. Louis. He was sixty-three years old, had taken at least twenty-two lives in his campaign of hate, and declined to make a final statement.
Vernon Jordan never gave Franklin the weight of a public grudge. "I seldom think about May 1980," he said in a 2018 interview, though he stayed close to the doctors who saved him for the rest of his life.
After recovering, Jordan left the National Urban League and joined one of the most powerful law firms in Washington. He became a partner at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld.
He joined corporate boards and advised presidents.
He became one of the most influential Black executives in America, known in some circles as the Rosa Parks of Wall Street.
When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, Jordan was at his side. He helped guide the transition, turned down every political appointment offered to him, and chose instead to remain where he always preferred to operate, close to the table but never beholden to the chair.
When someone asked him to describe his journey from segregated Atlanta to the center of American power, Jordan's answer was characteristic. "I would describe it as sort of a continuum of ups and downs," he said, "but always ups and downs going up."
In 2001, he published his memoir. He could have titled it after the march, after the presidency, after the corporate boards or the night in Fort Wayne.
He called it Vernon Can Read!
The boy who sat in the banker's library and opened a book while the old man slept had gone on to read the law, read the map of a changing country, and read the room in every room that mattered. Robert Maddox's three words of disbelief had become the title of a life that answered every one of them.
Vernon Jordan died on March 1, 2021, in Washington, D.C. He was eighty-five years old and had outlived his would-be killer by nearly eight years.
Somewhere in Atlanta, in a house that once belonged to a banker, there is a library with shelves that still stand.
The chauffeur read every one of them.
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NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about the civil rights movement and the assassination attempt on Vernon Jordan, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.
