Ervin L. Jordan Jr.
Ervin L. Jordan Jr. is an American archivist, historian and educator. He serves as an Associate Professor and Research Archivist at the University of Virginia, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. He has published several books and articles, contributed book chapters in others' works as well as delivering lectures, conducting workshops and curating exhibitions on the American Civil War, Virginia history, and African American history. He has appeared on television several times as a consulting historian in matters of African American history and genealogy and delivered lectures at conferences, universities and public events, some which were televised on C-CPAN. He has been praised for his research in the Civil War and African American history and is one of the leading figures in developing, promoting and disseminating Black American history, culture and literature.
Education
A native of Norfolk, Virginia, and son of Carrie and Ervin Sr., Jordan attended the city's racially segregated public schools. His family's first college graduate, he earned history degrees and graduated with honors from Norfolk State University and Old Dominion University. Since 2015, he has also been an affiliated faculty member of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.Career
In 1979, Jordan began working as an archivist at the University of Virginia. Since then, he has held several different positions including university records manager and curator of technical services. His responsibilities involve outreach, reference, answering research inquiries, processing and organizing manuscript collections, acquisitions recommendations, and special projects work. In 2003, Jordan was named the senior consulting archivist on the University of Virginia's possible collaboration with the University of Botswana.He spent many years on a solo processing project that arranged and organized the papers of his colleague, mentor and historian Armstead L. Robinson. These files and papers encompass "the development of black studies during the 1960s; the 19th century American South; the Civil War and Reconstruction; and life as an African American student and faculty member at Yale, the State University of New York, the University of Rochester, UCLA, and the University of Virginia from the 1960s through the 1990s."
Jordan has written about African American history, especially the Civil War. In a 2017 interview with John Coski of the American Civil War Museum, Jordan explained the legacy and power of monuments and statues:
There are an estimated 13,000 Civil War memorials in the United States. Far too often throughout American history, statues and civic spaces have been ostensibly weaponized as a means of empowerment or oppression. Unquestionably, Confederate monuments reflect the politicized racial attitudes of their communities but in this case somebody's heroes are usually someone else's villains. Many Americans consider them racist because they openly honor secessionist proslavery war heroes--and traitors. None denounces slavery. Given the current pugnacious political climate, we must understand why Confederate monument defenders stridently praise those who defended slavery and secession while a new interracial post-civil rights generation demands their removal as evocative of sanctified traitors, racist slaveholders and white supremacy.
He has contributed to Civil War scholarship; his book Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia explores the roles of African Americans on both sides of the conflict. His focus is Confederate Virginia, as it had more African-Americans right before the Civil War than any other state. His work explains their significance in the Civil War and shaping the American consciousness. It covers both enslaved and free blacks as well as Confederate and Union black soldiers. A study of the war said of Black Confederates: "Jordan's book is unique in the literature on the southern home front... he is the first historian to attempt a comprehensive portrait of slaves and free blacks within a Confederate state... The most provocative parts of Jordan's book deal with those slaves who stayed loyal to the Confederacy." Another work, Racist Symbols and Reparations, includes nearly thirty citations of Jordan's Black Confederates.
Affiliations
Jordan is a member of professional organizations such as the Society of American Archivists, the Organization of American Historians, Phi Alpha Theta, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference and the Virginia Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators. He has served on local and private, state and federal boards and commissions including the State Historical Records Advisory Board, the Jamestown-Yorktown Board of Trustees, the Board of Trustees of the Virginia Museum of Natural History, Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission Advisory Council, the Gettysburg Foundation Board of Directors and the Gettysburg Foundation Historians Council, the Supreme Court of Virginia Historical Commission, the Somerset Place Foundation Board of Directors, the Advisory Committee on African-American Interpretation at Monticello, Senior Advisor to the Norfolk State University Board of Visitors, Old Dominion University's General Review Board, the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission African American Advisory Council, the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation 2019 Commemoration Steering Committee, and, the President's Commission on Slavery and the University. Jordan is a past member of the Advisory Board of the National Civil War Chaplains Research Center and Museum, the University of Virginia Faculty and Staff Advisory Group to the Bicentennial Commission, the Museum of the Confederacy Board of Trustees, and the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society Board of Directors.Jordan is also a founding and current member of the Society of American Archivists' Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable. He is passionate about the importance of diversity in archives and explains in an interview with the SAA Newsletter, Archival Outlook:
...though we like to think of the 21st century as one of ever-increasing globalization and an increasingly culturally diverse society, as an African American I'm concerned by the persistence of racism in the archival workplace. I’ve lectured on this subject at conferences and am a long-standing member of SAA's Archivists & Archives of Color Roundtable. We should not just define diversity. We must practice and embrace it.
In 1996, he was an onscreen historian interviewee for a biographical documentary "Abraham Lincoln: Preserving the Union" for the Arts & Entertainment Television Network Series Biography.
Jordan was an historical advisor and script reviewer for the 2003 motion picture Gods and Generals.
He has also been a guest speaker for panels and events televised by C-SPAN, most of which are about African American history, genealogy and Civil War and slavery topics.
During the 1990s, Jordan taught a University of Virginia history seminar "Afro-Virginians and the Civil War", and African-American history courses at Piedmont Virginia Community College.
In 2018, he was appointed by UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan to join the President's Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation.
Awards
In 1977, Jordan became the second recipient of Norfolk State College's Haywood H. Clay Humane Award “For Distinguished Service" to the Student Government Association.In 1990, he was a fellow and scholar-in-residence, Virginia Center For The Humanities, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy.
In 2008, Jordan received the Black Community Advocate Award from the Black Leadership Institute, the University of Virginia Chapter of the NAACP and the Black Student Alliance.
In 2009, he was among thirty university faculty fellows selected for the Leadership in Academic Matters University of Virginia Seminar Series, Miller Center of Public Affairs, sponsored by the Office of the President at the University of Virginia and organized through the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
In 2015, Jordan was one of two African-American faculty who received recognition from the University of Virginia's Office of African American Affairs for their dedication to education; this distinction included the presentation of a West African Kente stole symbolic of the collective story, legacy, pride and values of persons within the African Diaspora.
In 2019, Jordan was the recipient of a Commonwealth of Virginia Service Recognition Award from the Governor of Virginia for his 40 years of dedicated public service to the Commonwealth and the University of Virginia. Since 1997, he has been appointed and reappointed to several state boards and commissions by eight consecutive Virginia governors.
Publications
- 19th Virginia Infantry, 1987
- Charlottesville and the University of Virginia in the Civil War, 1988
- Black Southerners in Gray, 1994
- Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, 1995
- The African American Odyssey, 1998
- New Perspectives on the Civil War: Myths and Realities of the National Conflict, 1998
- Oxford Companion to American Military History, 1999
- In View of the Great Want of Labor: A Legislative History of African American Conscription in the Confederacy, 1999
- Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference, 2002
- Virginia's Civil War, 2005
- Virginia at War, 1861, 2005
- Virginia at War, 1865, 2012
- The Greatest Virginians: Examining the Commonwealth's History Through Its People, 2008
- Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy, 2008
- The Key to the Door: Experiences of Early African American Students at the University of Virginia, 2017
- The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University, 2019
- The Buried Cause: Unearthing Hidden History in the Lee Monument Cornerstone, 2026