June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.
Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture.
Jordan was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in 2019.
Early life
Jordan was born in 1936 in Harlem, New York, as the only child of Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Maude Fisher, immigrants from Jamaica and Panama. Her father was a postal worker for the USPS and her mother was a part-time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. Jordan credits her father with passing on his love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven.
Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood. She explores her complicated relationship with her father, who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but who would also beat her for the slightest misstep and call her "damn black devil child." In her 1986 essay "For My American Family", Jordan explores the many conflicts in growing up as the child of Jamaican immigrant parents, whose visions of their daughter's future far exceeded the urban ghettos of her present. Jordan's mother died by suicide. Jordan recalls her father telling her: "There was a war against colored people, I had to become a soldier."
Jordan's education began in the New York City public school system, "beginning her studies at P.S. 26 elementary school." Jordan attended Brooklyn's Midwood High School for a year, beginning at age 12, before enrolling in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England. Both Midwood and Northfield had primarily white student bodies. Throughout her education, Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe" by attending predominantly white schools; however, she was also able to construct and develop her identity as a black American and a writer. In 1953, Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College in New York City.
Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book of essays Civil Wars, writing:
No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America.
Due to this disconnect with the predominantly male, white curriculum, Jordan left Barnard without graduating. June Jordan emerged as a poet and political activist when black female authors were beginning to be heard.
Personal life
At Barnard College, when she was 19, Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955. She subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where she pursued graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard, where she remained until 1957. In 1958, Jordan gave birth to the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965, and Jordan raised her son alone.
After the Harlem Riots of 1964, Jordan found that she was, in her words, "filled with hatred for everything and everyone white." She wrote:
From that time on, Jordan wrote with love. She also identified as bisexual in her writing, which she refused to deny, even when this status was stigmatized.
Career
Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me (1969), was a collection of poems for children. It was followed by 27 more books in her lifetime, and one (Some of Us Did Not Die: Collected and New Essays) that was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and the 1970 poetry anthology SoulScript, edited by Jordan, has been reissued.
She was also an essayist, columnist for The Progressive, novelist, biographer, and librettist for the musical/opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars. When asked about the writing process for the libretto of the opera, Jordan said: