Vernon Jordan described the civil rights movement to me in terms of a hotel stay.

The 1950s and 1960s, he said, were about "defining rights—the right to check-in." The 1970s were about having the means to check-out. To check-out, to be able to afford the bill, he explained, "You needed to have a job and get paid a fair salary."

Early in his career as a civil rights lawyer, Jordan focused on checking- n. He worked to secure such things as voting rights for African Americans and desegregation in education.

But his greatest impact would be felt in the chapter of the civil rights story that gets less attention—checking out. As head of the National Urban League during the decade of the 1970s, Jordan's focus was on achieving economic rights for African Americans.

The civil rights movement is often thought of in terms of its major milestones, such as this year's 65th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. But Jordan had the foresight to understand that it wasn't enough for African Americans to have equal opportunity in the classroom. It was also needed in the job market.

Over the course of an hour, in his office at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld on K Street in Washington, D.C., Jordan, 84, recounted his career as a civil rights lawyer and later advocate pushing corporations to open their doors to African Americans. The lawyer, sometimes called the most-connected person in America, also shared, with a laugh, how you know that you are rainmaker.

Jordan's work in the civil rights movement nearly cost him his life. In 1980, a white supremacist using a deer rifle shot him as he entered a hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The bullet's explosion left a hole in his back that could fit a fist.

Jordan's role in civil rights was significant enough to warrant an assassination attempt. Yet, he noted with amusement, that this comes as news to some. As a close friend and adviser to President Bill Clinton, he received much attention in l'affair Lewinsky, after assisting the former intern with finding a lawyer and getting a job. "Some people believe I was born on January 20, 1993 [the day Clinton took office]," he chuckled.

Jordan, who splits his time between Akin Gump in the nation's capital and Manhattan, serving as senior managing partner at financial advisory firm Lazard, was born into much different surroundings. He grew up in Atlanta, where living through segregation would dictate his career path.

As a teen he helped his mother in her catering business, which included serving dinner at meetings of The Lawyer's Club of Atlanta. Jordan liked what he saw in the fellowship and camaraderie and decided he wanted to be part of something like that. But he also listened to the speeches "and I know I didn't like what I heard when they were talking," he said. "There was nothing that they were saying that had anything to do with my community or me. It was all in the interest of the continued segregated society."

It was here that Jordan made the decision to pursue a career as a lawyer. The journey began at DePauw University in Indiana, where he was the only African American in his class.

From the Hoosier State, Jordan made his way to Howard University School of Law in Washington. After joking that the historically black school was a boon to his dating life, he recalled the nation's leading civil rights lawyers coming to prepare for Supreme Court oral arguments. "To see Bob Carter [general counsel of the NAACP] making his argument, and to see all of these distinguished counsel prepping him, by asking tough questions, was really inspiring."

Jordan graduated in 1960 and went to work as a law clerk, for a one-man firm, earning $35 a week. Needing to augment his salary, he worked for his mother at night, sometimes serving dinner to lawyers whom he had seen in the courthouse earlier in the day.

The would-be lawyer worked on the team that secured a federal court order mandating that the University of Georgia admit its first two African American students. An iconic picture from the civil rights movement shows the 6-foot-4-inch Jordan escorting his client, Charlayne Hunter, through an angry mob of segregationists as he took her to register for classes.

Jordan would fail the Georgia bar exam. He told me he believes he never had a chance. Georgia's attorney general, displeased that Jordan was serving subpoenas on state officials in the University of Georgia case, told him that he needed to be taught a lesson. "You shouldn't have to worry about passing the bar," the state's top lawyer said to him, "because it's not going to happen." Concerned that he was a marked man, he took the exam in Arkansas and waived into Georgia.

Jordan next turned his attention to organizations that worked to achieve rights for African Americans, holding positions at the NAACP, Southern Regional Council and United Negro College Fund, where he served as president.

In 1971 Jordan took over as president and CEO of the National Urban League. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve. In his first speech at the Urban League's annual Equal Opportunity Day Dinner he told the 60 CEOs on the dais and 2,000 in attendance that "it's not enough for you to come to this dinner. We want to come to your board rooms.'"

His speech resonated. Not long after, invitations to serve on corporate boards came in. Jordan would go on to serve on about 20, including Xerox, American Express, Bankers Trust and J.C. Penny.

But the man of many boards knew that African Americans were generally unaffected by the fact that a few African Americans were becoming corporate directors. His objective was to have an impact on the white corporate directors. He said: "Having a black presence in the boardroom was, quite simply, an education for them. Many of those men had never in their lives come into any serious contact with black people, other than the ones who cleaned their houses."

Jordan also observed that there was no way to finish the civil rights movement without changing the assumption of what qualifies as "merit" to get a job. It could no longer be "those experiences possessed by a narrow class of white men, which automatically threw almost everyone outside the magic circle into the category of the presumptively unqualified."

Jordan left the Urban League after a decade at the helm and joined Akin Gump. How did law firms compare to corporations in integration? "The companies were ahead of the law firms." The reason, he told me, was because "they don't have shareholders, and they're not in the public. There was not much pressure on law firms. They didn't have annual meetings."

Jordan didn't spare his own firm criticism for its integration efforts. For several years he made an annual trip to Dallas to speak to the firm's summer associates. But then he stopped when the firm hired more African Americans for the summer program. What happened? "They found some black associates," he said.

Jordan didn't pretend that his job at Akin Gump was about anything other than to make it rain. "There were a lot of smart lawyers here, who knew the law, but they didn't have anybody to tell it to," he observed. "I knew the GC here and I knew the GC there."

He recounted a time from his early days at Akin Gump. He had gone to the firm's law library to look something up. Firm founder Robert Strauss got wind of it and summoned him to his office. Jordan, with a hearty laugh, recalled the reminder that Strauss told him: "We didn't bring you here to go to the library."

With a career spent at the highest heights of the civil rights, legal, financial, corporate and political arenas, Jordan is often referred to as one of the most connected people in America. How does he respond to that? "I don't," he told me. "There are some things you just leave alone." But, he acknowledged, "I pretty much get my phone calls returned."

It was at The Lawyer's Club of Atlanta that Jordan made the decision to pursue a career as a lawyer. But his time there as a teenager wasn't to be his last. In 1974 he was invited to speak to the club's members.

He told the gathering that, having served many of these dinners himself, he'd made an observation: "The view from the podium is much better than the view from the kitchen."

Randy Maniloff is a lawyer at White and Williams in Philadelphia and an adjunct professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law.