June Jordan
June Jordan (1936-2002) was a multifaceted Caribbean American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher, and activist renowned for her contributions to literature and social justice. Born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrant parents, she began writing poetry at a young age and pursued her education at institutions like Barnard College. Jordan's work often reflects her experiences navigating the complexities of race, gender, and sexuality in a predominantly white society. Throughout her life, she authored approximately thirty books, including poetry collections, essays, and plays, and was particularly known for her poignant explorations of the African American experience.
Jordan's notable works include her first major poetry collection, *Things That I Do in the Dark*, and her influential essays in *Civil Wars*. She was deeply engaged in activism, collaborating on urban planning initiatives and highlighting the voices of marginalized communities. Her teaching career spanned several prestigious institutions, culminating in a position at the University of California, Berkeley. Jordan's legacy endures, as she is celebrated for articulating the struggles and aspirations of modern African American women, using her craft to confront both societal injustices and personal challenges. Her poetry is characterized by its raw emotion, compassion, and a commitment to social change.
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Subject Terms
June Jordan
Writer and activist
- Born: July 9, 1936
- Birthplace: Harlem, New York
- Died: June 14, 2002
- Place of death: Berkeley, California
Jordan was a prolific writer and committed activist for African Americans—especially for African American women. She used her position as writer, poet, and teacher to claim respect and equality for African Americans in a white-dominated culture. She was closely allied with the Civil Rights movement and other black women writers from 1960 to 1990.
Early Life
June Millicent Jordan was born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York. She was the only child of Granville Ivanhoe and Mildren Jordan, immigrants from Jamaica. In her memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2000), Jordan describes her father’s love of literature and his sense of struggle with a predominantly white culture. Granville, a postal worker, passed on both these traits to his daughter. However, he also was a harsh disciplinarian and often beat Jordan for trivial offences. Jordan’s mother, a very religious woman, was a part-time nurse who played a nurturing role in the black community.
The family moved from Manhattan to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn when Jordan was five years old. At seven, she began writing poetry and developed a desire to be a poet. Her parents sent her to the all-white Millwood High School before moving her to an all-girls prep school in Gill, Massachusetts, the Northfield School for Girls. After graduating in 1953, Jordan enrolled at Barnard College to study English. She lamented later that she never was presented with any black authors to study.
While at Barnard, Jordan met Michael Meyer, a white student at Columbia University in New York. They married in 1955 and proceeded to the University of Chicago for Michael’s postgraduate work. Jordan enrolled there for a year before returning to Barnard. In 1958, their only child, Christopher, was born. Later, in 1965, the couple divorced. After the divorce, Jordan identified herself as bisexual and never remarried.
As a young wife and mother with ties to white and black culture, Jordan was in a conflicted position. She was fascinated by the ideas of city planner Buckminster Fuller, with whom she collaborated on a plan for the regeneration of Harlem after its 1964 riots.
In 1967, Jordan gained a position at City College of New York, beginning a memorable teaching career. Her first book of poetry, Who Look at Me, written for children in African American dialect, was published in 1969. It signaled the start of her career as a poet and promoter of poetry.
Life’s Work
Jordan went on to write some thirty books, a mix of poetry, essays, novels, and drama. One collection of essays, Civil Wars (1981), explores her views on the necessity of violence in the protest movement and includes seminal essays on her parents and her relationship with her son.
However, Jordan was first and foremost a poet. Her first major collection of verse, Things That I Do in the Dark (1977), contained writings from 1954 to 1977. It was edited byToni Morrison and established Jordan’s reputation. Its poems show her finding her voice as a black woman, confronting both a negating society and feelings of defeat and victimization. The collection also includes poems that celebrate the mother-son relationship and many of the poems from her first adult poetry volume, Some Changes (1971), which particularly showed her concern for children.
Two of Jordan’s main concerns were demonstrated in her editing of anthologies of African American poetry and children’s poetry. She also was involved in the production of the playIn the Spirit of Sojourner Truth in 1979 at the New York Public Theater and wrote a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, whom she had met on two trips to Mississippi in 1969 and 1971 during the Civil Rights movement. Her continued interest in urban planning was evident in her novel His Own Where (1971).
Jordan moved on from City College to Yale, Sarah Lawrence College, and then Connecticut College. In 1977, she shared the Reid Lectureship with Alice Walker at Barnard College. From 1978 to 1979, she served as director of the Poetry Centre at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She also taught at the university.
In 1989, Jordan was appointed a full professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where she remained until her death from breast cancer in 2002. While at Berkeley, she was affiliated with the departments of English, women’s studies, and African American studies. After her death, her poetry was collected under the title Directed by Desire (2007).
Significance
During Jordan’s life, she received a number of honors and awards, from a Rockefeller Grant for creative writing in 1969 to a 1984 award from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lectureship Award from the University of California at Berkeley. However, her legacy is in finding a poetic voice for modern African American women who struggle against not only the injustices of a white male-dominated society but also cultural limitations based on gender, marital status, sexuality, and race. Those limitations can be transmitted internally by parents as much as by external social forces. Jordan’s poetic voice is often raw and strident, shocking, but it is also deeply compassionate.
Bibliography
Bambara, Toni Cade. “Chosen Weapons.” Ms. 10 (April, 1981). A thoughtful review of Jordan’s collection of essays Civil Wars.
Deveaux, Alexis. “Creating Soul Food: June Jordan.” Essence 11 (April, 1981): 82, 138-150. An early but relevant essay on Jordan’s earlier work.
Jordan, June. Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2000. Jordan’s memoir examines her fraught relationships with her father and mother and the origins of her militancy.
Kinloch, Valerie. June Jordan: Her Life and Letters. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2006. Designed for high school students, this literary biography studies some of Jordan’s lesser-known works in addition to the major ones.
Kinloch, Valerie, and Margaret Grobowicz. Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections in the Work of June Jordan. Idaho Falls, Idaho: Lexington Books, 2006. One of the first attempts to critically consider the whole corpus of Jordan’s work.