Magnetic Love: Nathaniel Jordan worked tirelessly until his death to distribute naloxone to Black Ohioans

To truly meet people where they’re at, Nathaniel Jordan II once told me, “You come with love. You come with an open heart. And you come with a mind of helping. And that spirit that you generate, it illuminates from you. It’s almost like a magnet.”

It can’t just be talk, he said, you must act with love.

Jordan loved the world he passed through, for sure, and his actions showed it. When he died on June 12, he left an important Franklin County public health legacy trailing in his wake like a comet’s tail.

The first time I met Jordan in person, I found a dapper, fine-suited 60-something with a hat and cane seated in a corner of the Lincoln Cafe on Long Street. As we talked for two hours, it became clear that he either knew everyone who walked in or made them feel like he did.

Jordan could walk into a cafe, a boardroom or out on the streets and be innately comfortable. These qualities and the skills – carried with him from the business world – helped him establish an important naloxone distribution and education network serving the Black community in Franklin County.

After Jordan retired in 2002 from AT&T, he could have moved to Florida and played golf, sat by a pool all day, moseyed about. But that life might have bored him.

Instead, he applied his business acumen, coupled with a healthy dose of hustle and moxie, toward grassroots efforts designed to address public health issues such as infant mortality, substance use disorder and overdoses.

As executive director of Kappa Alpha Psi Foundation (the charitable wing of the historically Black fraternity), Jordan spearheaded an effort to address overdoses, especially among Black people. As overdoses were dropping among white Ohioans, they were rising in the Black community. In 2019, the Columbus Kappa Foundation partnered with Harm Reduction Ohio to become a Project DAWN affiliate. The group worked with churches and community organizations, posted up on street corners, and knocked on doors. One time while passing out naloxone at Mount Vernon Towers, someone overdosed, and Jordan and company were right there with naloxone.

On a 2022 episode of All Sides with Ann Fisher (I was a part of the panel), Jordan said that his organization can connect with people better because they are grassroots, part of the community. He noted that he had lost seven cousins to overdose. He said that lay distributors were doing a yeoman’s job, but that they could use more naloxone, more resources. And throughout his post-retirement career, he personified the idea that the only way to be sure the work got done was to shoulder in and do the work.

Recent data analyses by Harm Reduction Ohio indicates that overall overdose rates are dropping. While overdose deaths may be at a nine-year low, death rates are still higher for Black Ohioans than white Ohioans. In 2023, the rates were 37.7 (per 100k) for white Ohioans and 66.4 (per 100k) for Black Ohioans. Data from the office of the Franklin County Coroner shows that in 2023 the death rate was higher for Black people than for white people.

The picture, though, is bigger. And Jordan reminded me of this almost every time we met. The higher rates of overdose among Black people are a consequence of many things. He pointed to the negative effects of the social determinants of health, such as inadequate access to housing and healthcare. Racism, as the Health Policy Institute of Ohio has noted, “is a primary driver of poor outcomes” experienced by Black Ohioans.

In many ways, Jordan was enmeshed with this public health crisis and fought to address it.

“I’ve been fighting for my life since I was born,” he once told me. He said he was born weighing 2 lbs. 9 ounces on March 6, 1956. Delivered, he said, by one of the only Black OBGYN’s in Columbus at the time.

Jordan survived traumatic transformations to his community and to his city. The thriving community he grew up in was displaced by the construction of I-71. It split his family, some landing in the Bottoms, others Hilltop. “It was a thriving community with commerce, with banks, with restaurants, with access, with the whole ball of wax,” Jordan said. “But when they put 71 through, it shut us off.”

Jordan graduated from Mifflin High School, where he also played quarterback on the football team. Following graduation, he attended Bowling Green State University. When he was a college freshman, driving around town with some friends while home on break, police pulled them over. 

They hadn’t been doing anything wrong, Jordan said. He asked the officer why they had been pulled over and was told he had been swerving. And then he was on the hood. And then they were all being searched. 

That was around 1974, and Jordan said that for the rest of his life his stress level would rise when he saw a police car. That sort of trauma affects your health. “Your immune system is anticipating something to go wrong,” he said.

Jordan first shared this story with me during a phone call the morning of the Derrick Chauvin verdict in April 2021. Earlier in the morning, a rare spring snowfall had blanketed central Ohio. Out my office window, I could see patches of snow on the ground and the daffodils. “The snow has come to cleanse,” Jordan said

At virtually the same moment that Chauvin’s verdict was read, Columbus police shot and killed  16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. 

“You know,” Jordan continued, “it’s never too late to love.”

Nathaniel Jordan, son of a preacher, telling the truth.