JUNE JORDAN: June Jordan, who died on June 14th aged 65, defied all pigeonholes. Poet, essayist, journalist, dramatist, academic, cultural and political activist - she was all these things, by turn and simultaneously, but above all, she was an inspirational teacher, through words and actions, and a supremely principled person.
Among African-American writers, she was undoubtedly one of the most widely published, the author of well over two dozen books of non-fiction, poetry, fiction, drama and children's writing. She emerged onto the political and literary scene in the late 1960s, when the movements demanding attention were for civil rights and women's liberation, and anti-war.
She engaged with all of these and more, for her battles were for freedom, whether that involved planning a new architecture for Harlem with her mentor Buckminster Fuller, or speaking out on the Palestinian cause. She spoke out against, or did something about, oppression wherever it was to be found.
It was as a political essayist that she stood head and shoulders above most of her contemporaries. Her collection Civil Wars (1981) was the first such work to be published by a black woman, dealing with battles both external and internal. In subsequent volumes, including On Call (1985) and Technical Difficulties (1992), she wrote about South Africa, Nicaragua and Lebanon, as well as myriad aspects of race and class in the US. She championed the use of black English in the education system 30 years before the emergence of the debate about "Ebonics" (a term she hated).
She was born on July 9th, 1936, to West Indian parents, Mildred and Granville Jordan, in Harlem, and the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn when she was five. While her parents were grateful to America for enabling them to escape poverty in Jamaica, as she describes in her 1986 essay For My American Family, there were many contradictions to be dealt with in the experience of being raised by black immigrants with ambitions for their offspring that far exceeded the urban ghetto.
Her 1971 novel, His Own Where, gives some insight into the tensions of her home situation. Her relationship with her father, a postal clerk, was turbulent - he did not hide his disappointment that she was not a boy - but he passed on to her a love of literature, from the Bible to Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and at the age of seven she began writing poetry.
Her mother was a woman in the classic self-sacrificing mould, who eventually committed suicide. Fifteen years later, in a moving essay dating from 1981, Many Rivers To Cross, June Jordan wrote: "I thought about the idea of my mother as a good woman and I rejected that, because I don't see why it's a good thing when you give up, or when you co-operate with those who hate you or when you polish and iron and mend and endlessly mollify for the sake of the people who love the way that you kill yourself day by day silently . . . I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, 'It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak' . . . I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again."
Through her education, June Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe", attending predominantly white schools, Millwood High School and Northfield School in Massachusetts. In 1953, she enrolled at Barnard College, interrupting her studies to marry a fellow student, who happened to be white. They had a son, Christopher, but the marriage did not survive, and in 1966 they divorced.
The years when she was struggling to make ends meet as a single mother were also her formative years as a writer. Her first book of poetry, Who Look At Me, was produced in 1969, and was followed by a steady stream of publications in different genres, including Things That I Do In The Dark (1970), Passion (1980), Living Room (1985), Lyrical Campaigns (1989), Poetry For The People: A Blueprint For The Revolution (1995), Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998), and a memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (2000).
Her versatility was allied to her belief that being free meant the freedom to be unpredictable, whether about her own sexuality or about the causes she espoused. She could as easily pen a regular column for the Progressive magazine as collaborate with John Adams and Peter Sellars on an opera, I Was Looking At the Ceiling And Then I Saw The Sky, in 1995.
In a respected academic career she taught at over seven universities, including Sarah Lawrence College, Connecticut College and Yale University, and she was most recently African-American studies professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her life was about challenging oppression, and her characteristic talent was the ability to lay bare through her writing "the intimate face of universal struggle". Alice Walker has said of her: "June Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet." For Toni Morrison, the sum of June Jordan's career was: "Forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fuelled by flawless art."
June Jordan: born 1936; died, June 2002