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.
"[7] 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.
[1] 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.
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.
June Jordan emerged as a poet and political activist when black female authors were beginning to be heard.
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.
However, their article, published in the April 1965 issue of Esquire, would have its original title "Skyrise for Harlem" changed to "Instant Slum Clearance", and would never be developed.
Reflecting on how she began with the concept of the program, Jordan said: I did not wake up one morning ablaze with a coherent vision of Poetry for the People!
The natural intermingling of my ideas and my observations as an educator, a poet, and the African-American daughter of poorly documented immigrants did not lead me to any limiting ideological perspectives or resolve.
She continued to influence young writers with her own published poetry, such as her collections, Dry Victories (1972), New Life (1975), and Kimako's Story (1981).
She presented it to them for the first time in a professional setting where they ordinarily expected work in English to be structured by "white standards."
"[26] In addition to her writing for young writers and children, Jordan dealt with complex issues in the political arena.
"[25] Passionate about feminist and Black issues, Jordan "spent her life stitching together the personal and political so the seams didn't show.
"[25] Her poetry, essays, plays, journalism, and children's literature integrated these issues with her own experience, offering commentary that was both insightful and instructive.
Writing in narrative form, she discusses the possibilities and difficulties of coalition and self-identification based on race, class, and gender identity.
Although not widely recognized when first published in 1982, this essay has become central to women's and gender studies, sociology, and anthropology in the United States.
"[29] Vacationing in the Bahamas, Jordan finds that the shared oppression under race, class, and gender is not a sufficient basis for solidarity.
(41)Focusing on her trip's reflections with examples of her role as a teacher advising students, Jordan details how her expectations are constantly surprising.
Such compassion was at odds with Jordan's experience in her neighborhood of being terrorized by ethnic Irish teenagers hurling racial epithets.
The first is the common identity, which is the one that has been imposed on us[30] by a long history of societal standards, controlling images, pressure, a variety of stereotypes, and stratification.
In it she describes how her early marriage to a white student while at Barnard College immersed her in the racial turmoil of America in the 1950s, and set her on the path of social activism.
[33][34] The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history,[35] and the wall’s unveiling was timed to take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award in 1991.
Author Toni Morrison commented: 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 ...
[40]Poet Adrienne Rich noted: Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival—of the body, and mind, and the heart.
[40] Thulani Davis wrote: In a borough that has landmarks for the writers Thomas Wolfe, W. H. Auden, and Henry Miller, to name just three, there ought to be a street in Bed-Stuy called June Jordan Place, and maybe a plaque reading, 'A Poet and Soldier for Humanity Was Born Here.