Happy Birthday, June Jordan

Born July 9, 1936, New York, NY | Died June 14, 2002, Berkeley, CA

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates poet, essayist, teacher and activist June Jordan on the eighty-ninth anniversary of her birth. Of Jordan’s work, Toni Morrison wrote:

In political journalism that cuts like razors in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death's mouth ... [Jordan] has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept ... I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.

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June Jordan, n.d.; photographer unknown

American delusions of individuality now disfigure our national landscape with multitudes of disconnected pained human beings who pull down the shades on prolonged and needless agony. But if we would speak the unspeakable, if we would name and say the source of our sorrow and scars, we would find a tender and a powerful company of others struggling as we do […]. We would undertake collective political action founded on admitted similarities and grateful connections among us, otherwise needful citizens who now regard each other as burdensome or frightening or irrelevant. This would mean a great national coming out—a coming out of our cars, a coming out of a deadpan passage through the streets of America, a coming out of the suburbs, a coming out of our perverted enthusiasm for whatever keeps us apart: home computers, answering machines, VCRs, and then the proverbial two weeks in a faraway cabin in the woods.”

Portrait of Jordan by Jill Posener used on the cover of Some of Us Did Not Die, the posthumously published collection of new and selected essays (Perseus Books, 2002).

“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth—whatever the truth may be—that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”

Jordan is the author of thirty books, among them volumes of poetry such as haruko/love poems and collected essays such as Some of Us Did Not Die and Affirmative Acts: Political Essays. In her first collection of essays, Civil Wars (1981), Jordan wrote, “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.”

First published work of nonfiction:

• Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America, Simon & Schuster, 1981.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• We’re On: A June Jordan Reader, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller, Alice James Books, 2017.

• Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from The Progressive, edited by Stacy Russo, with a foreword by Angela Davis, Litwin Books, 2014.

• Some of Us Did Not Die, New and Selected Essays of June Jordan, Perseus Books, 2002.

Essays by June Jordan reprinted listed in Notables in The Best American Essays (BAE):

• “My Mess, and Ours, The Progressive, 1995 (BAE 1996).

• “Innocent of What?” The Progressive, 1994 (BAE 1995).

See also:

Visit the June Jordan website, where there is a page devoted to audio recordings of Jordan’s lectures, talks, conversations.

Visit the archive of June Jordan’s papers at Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library .

Watch A Place of Rage, a documentary by Pratibha Parmar, featuring Angela Davis, June Jordan, and Alice Walker, 1991.

Watch readings and interviews at PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania.

Listen to June Jordan reading her poems at the postarchive, 2019.

Listen to June Jordan reading “A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters,” Academy of American Poets, 1992.

Listen to June Jordan reading her poems with comment in the Recording Laboratory, Library of Congress, 1974.

“On the Occasion of Juneteenth,” Best American Essays newsletter, 2024.

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