June Jordan Quotes

• But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Friendship

• Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people’s formulations of what’s important.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People

• There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Worry

• I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn’t know the poems would travel. I didn’t go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wrote

• The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Poetry

• The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Language

• So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Poetry

• My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn’t be fair.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Learn

• My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Father

• One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reasons

• It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Educate

• In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Truth

• Language is political. That’s why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that’s why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Language

• CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Core

• Bis*xuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?

  June Jordan

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Woman

• I think I have come to a place where I’m able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Comfortable

• We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

  June Jordan

  Topics in America

• To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Truth

• I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

  June Jordan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feminist

June Jordan (24)

Birth:	9th July, 1936
Death:	14th June, 2002
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Activist, Biographer, Playwright, Poet, Teacher, Writer

About

June Millicent Jordan was a Caribbean-American poet and activist. At Barnard Jordan met Columbia University student, Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955. Jordan subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where he would pursue graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard where she remained until 1957.

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Today's Anniversary - 30th January

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