His emails typically ended the same way:

Resolute,

Samuel Jordan

It was more than just a sign-off. It was how the North Carolina native lived a life defined by advocacy — for public transit in Baltimore, for D.C. statehood, for civil rights and a host of other progressive causes. The professional activist wasn’t afraid to be the loudest voice in the room. He knew his job required resolve. That was the point.

“He didn’t take on low-hanging fruit,” said Melvin Allen, Jordan’s friend of about six decades. “He took on battles that required him to fight a system and to fight an entire structure, not just an individual or a couple of individuals.”

There was perhaps no fiercer advocate for the Baltimore Red Line — the proposed east-west light rail. Involved from the beginning, Jordan sat on a community advisory committee that consulted with the state in planning development around proposed stations during the project’s first iteration.

But that was just a fraction of the advocacy work Jordan took on in his nearly eight decades. Jordan was on the front lines of civil rights and peace activism, working alongside the Black Panthers and spending a year in jail for anti-Vietnam War protests. He traveled extensively, serving as a United Nations delegate at a global conference against racism in post-apartheid South Africa and forming bonds with Kurdish freedom fighters in Turkey.

He still had a lot of fight left in him. When he was hospitalized this year, he told Allen he planned to finally explore legal action against a California police department whose officer illegally entered his home and shot him in the late 1960s. If not for his declining health, loved ones said, he would have continued to pick up new causes.

Jordan, the executive director of the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition and the Innovative Housing Institute, died Aug. 1 after a long battle with leukemia. He was 79.

He was born May 19, 1946, to Annie Pearl Smith and Samuel Reginald Jordan Sr. He spent his early years near Goldsboro, North Carolina, and moved to Washington in 1957. He was always a strong student who enrolled in 1963 at Georgetown University, where he filibustered in support of the yet-to-be-passed Civil Rights Act, said his daughter, Angela Eisa Davis.

He moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to finish his undergraduate degree at Franklin & Marshall College. He met Allen, who attended a neighboring college, and the two quickly learned they had overlapping interests — namely, starting Black student unions at their schools, advocating for progressive causes and debating right-wing groups.

The pair also shared intellectual curiosity, and Allen described his friend as one of the “brightest people that I’ve known.” He remembered Jordan once writing an honors paper about William Blake, the English poet and painter who was among the earliest and most prominent abolitionists in European history.

Jordan was always inquisitive and had such varied interests that he could strike up a conversation with just about anyone, Allen said. He wanted to learn, whether it was politics, history, culinary arts — the topic didn’t matter so much as the opportunity to engage with others and expand his knowledge.

After college, Jordan stayed in Pennsylvania and founded a liberation group, Black Arise. He advised Swarthmore student activists through their takeover of an administrative building. He would meet and marry a Swarthmore student. The couple welcomed a daughter, Davis, one of his four biological children.

The pair moved to California, where Jordan enrolled at the University of California San Diego. In 1969, he had the traumatic run-in with police. Police trespassed without a warrant into the home he and his wife shared, and Jordan defended himself using his own gun, Davis said. Police shot him in the shoulder, while his wife grabbed an officer’s arm and forced him to empty his revolver’s chamber into a wall of their house.

Jordan later returned to Washington and completed his law degree at Georgetown. His international travels began shortly thereafter, and he had stints in Cuba, Mexico and Denmark. He spent the remainder of his life largely in the D.C.-Baltimore metro area.

In D.C., Jordan chaired the Statehood Party and ran for City Council, and he served as a spokesperson for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the political activist and journalist who was convicted of the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer. His activism résumé also includes a period directing Amnesty International’s death penalty abolition program, serving as vice chairman of the United Medical Center Foundation and unionizing the faculty at the University of the District of Columbia for the National Education Association.

Separately, he taught constitutional and criminal law at the University of the District of Columbia and ran a contracting and roofing company, his daughter said.

It was only over the past decade that Jordan became prominent in Baltimore politics. When the Red Line was canceled in 2015, Jordan didn’t wait long to take action. He started canvassing for signatures and filed a Title VI civil rights complaint against then-Gov. Larry Hogan, which led to an investigation during the years of former President Barack Obama but was dropped during Donald Trump’s first term.

Jordan saw access to public transit as an issue of racial equity and systemic justice, Allen said. He believed you couldn’t address racial disparities in employment and education without giving people a means to get to work and to school, he said.

It was during this time that Jordan met Glenn Smith, a fellow community activist, and the pair founded the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition.

“He was very poignant in speaking against systemic racism in housing as well as transportation,” Smith said. “He was unfettered when it came to speaking the truth. That was one of the things I admired about him. He had no qualms about speaking truth to power.”

Jordan’s work was realized in 2023 with the passage of the Transit Equity Act, though officials have not determined a timeline for construction of the Red Line. Still, the line “will be built thanks to his unwavering commitment to the residents of Baltimore,” Davis wrote in his family obituary.

Most recently, Jordan was the director of the Innovative Housing Institute, a nonprofit that connected people in need with housing resources.

He was a stringent boss, said Morgan Rouse, a program manager at IHI who has stepped into Jordan’s director role temporarily. He was a forward thinker who never stopped planning how the organization could grow and improve, Rouse said, but also a kind and rooted soul. He was attentive to his staff’s needs as people and always found time to interact with clients directly.

“He cared about us, and he trusted us,” Rouse said. “I’m a better woman having worked for him.”

Jordan addressed everyone as part of the “BTEC Nation.” Those who joined “felt like family,” Smith said — the feeling “permeated the organization.”

It was that social prowess that allowed Jordan to be an effective organizer and advocate, Allen said. He made friends with politicians and engaged in complicated discussions with policymakers.

But “he was not a person who got a kick out of hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, although he dealt with them,” Allen said. “He was a down-to-earth, grassroots person.”

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