June Jordan
| June Jordan | |
|---|---|
June Jordan
|
|
| Born |
July 9, 1936 Harlem, New York, United States |
| Died | June 14, 2002 (aged 65) Berkeley, California, United States |
| Occupation | writer |
| Nationality | United States |
| Alma mater | Barnard College |
| Period | 1969–2002 |
| Genre | African-American literature, LGBT literature |
| Subject | Civil rights, Feminism, Bisexual/LGBT rights movement |
| Spouse | Michael Meyer (married 1955, divorced 1965) |
| Children | Christopher David Meyer |
| Website | |
| www |
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June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean-American poet, essayist, and activist.
Jordan was born the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan, in Harlem, New York. Her father worked as a postal worker for the USPS and her mother as a part-time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. While life in the Jordan household was often turbulent, Jordan credits her father with passing on to her a 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, which she dedicated to her father. In this short memoir she explores her complicated relationship with a man who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but would also beat her for the slightest misstep and called her "damn black devil child". In her 1986 essay For My American Family Jordan explores the many conflicts to be dealt with in the experience of being raised by black immigrant parents with visions of the future for their offspring that far exceeded the urban ghettos of the present. In Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan recalls her father telling her "There was a war on against colored people, I had to become a soldier". While grateful to America for allowing him to escape poverty and seek a better life for his family, her father was conscious of the struggles his daughter would face and encouraged her to fight.
After attending Brooklyn's Midwood High School for a year, Jordan enrolled in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England. Throughout her education Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe" by attending predominantly white schools, but 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. Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book 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."
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