On July 14, 1917, a letter that Jordan wrote criticizing President Woodrow Wilson's segregationist policies and condemning the administration for the East St. Louis Riot was published in the Raleigh Independent.

He was appointed pastor of Wesley Chapel A.M.E. Church in Blakely, Georgia by Bishop Thomas Marcus Decatur Ward in 1875.

At the state convention in 1894, Professor Jordan gave a 10-minute speech that aided in defeating white supremacist Thomas E. Watson as a candidate for Governor of Georgia.

On December 31, 1895, he married Carrie Thomas Jordan, a pioneer Jeanes Supervisor in Durham, North Carolina and principal in Atlanta.

Their appeal was an effort to defeat the "Bell Bill," a piece of legislation that would have closed one-half to two-thirds of black public schools in the state.

He contributed his articles to such publications as The Voice of the Negro, The Colored American Magazine, Indianapolis Freeman, Baltimore Afro-American, A.M.E. Church Review, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, New Journal and Guide, Raleigh Independent and countless others.

On July 14, 1917, the Independent, then owned by black leader Charles N. Hunter, published a letter from Jordan to President Woodrow Wilson, speaking out against his segregationist policies and condemning the administration for the East St. Louis Riot.

Jordan, who accused Wilson of ignoring the plight of blacks and showing "more disregard of the feelings and rights of Negro Americans since James Buchanan," believed that African-Americans should not be asked to give their lives in World War I, when they were subject to race massacres and mass violence at home.

Whites dismissed the letter as "foolish, yet treasonable, dangerous and full of dynamite," according to the book Charles N. Hunter and Race Relations in North Carolina.

North Carolina Governor Thomas Bickett sent Jordan's letter to the FBI, and chastised Hunter for publishing it in "grand style."

Nearly 50 years would pass before the accommodationist attitudes of North Carolina's black elite were replaced by more radicalized factions in step with the views of Jordan and social activists such as newspaper publisher Louis Austin.

Since 1914 Jordan had served simultaneously as an administrator at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College and as a professor at the National Religious Training School and Chautauqua for the Colored Race.

On October 18, 2021, Durham, North Carolina Mayor Steve Schewel declared Dock and Carrie Jordan Day in the city.