The work of the Black Arts Movement specifically influenced the direction June Jordan would take with her art and politics. During this movement, Jordan to come of age as a writer who completed editorial assignments for various New York-based magazines, witnessed the 1964 Harlem rebellion, embraced many of the principles of the Black Power Movement, and increased her commitment to Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and her political agenda for the state of Mississippi. It would be false to assume, however, that Jordan fully accepted Amiri Baraka, or any other leader of the Black Arts Movement, as her mentor or model. She had developed a voice of her own, one that would be tested many times over. Also, her work began to appear more frequently around the same time that other Black Nationalist writers began to articulate “a black aesthetic.” Jordan’s presence in New York City during the Civil Rights Movement—when people were collectively campaigning for rights, violently and nonviolently, and when the Voting Rights Bill of 1965 was passed—is
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fundamental to her commitment to sustaining national conversations about civil rights, political opportunities, quality education, and affordable housing for black people. She was committed to improving the living conditions for black people in America, which shows itself in Jordan’s analysis of human rights as based on the philosophical teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, and Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement.
Jordan critiqued the work of both leaders in ways that complicated her relationship with the Black Arts Movement and its politics and activist agenda; she questioned its leadership through her published writing and social activism.
During the Civil Rights Era, Jordan did not readily align herself with the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr., nor did she quickly embrace King’s belief in nonviolence, benevolent love, integration, and the “Beloved Community.” She believed that acts of violence perpetuated against black communities in America required immediate action not met by turning the other cheek. In fact, Jordan’s rejection of “turning the other cheek” is illustrated by her reaction, during the late 1960s, to a white Marine who insisted that she, a black woman on a freedom ride, give up her lunch counter seat to a male officer of the law.
In response, and to the dismay of other freedom riders who considered themselves nonviolent, Jordan aggressively elbowed the man. Jordan’s act demonstrates her unwillingness to confront violence with love or to tolerate white contempt. Jordan’s willfulness points to her rejection of nonviolent pleas and demonstrations, as well as her resistance to fully accepting the philosophical teachings of King. She wanted to see immediate results from her political actions.
In her 1997 essay “Update on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Best of My Heart,” Jordan admits her ambivalence toward the leader by noting how she did not always embrace his political disposition. She writes, “In the sixties I could not understand his reaching beyond race to stand on principle. I could not understand, or support, his own example of ‘nonviolence.’ There was so much I didn’t know!”5 Jordan offers an explanation of King’s use of “the Beloved Community”—that “everybody is sacred. Nobody is excluded from that deliberate embrace”—as well as King’s commitment to nonviolence—
“‘nonviolent’ did not mean cowardly.”6 Jordan’s eventual embrace of King’s philosophy, grounded in love and nonviolence, did not occur until after King was assassinated in 1968. Her commitment to those goals further increased during the 1980s, as is reflected in the poet’s statement about King’s devotion to equality: By enlarging his concern for Blackfolks to a concern for universal equality, Dr.
King heightened the likelihood of equality in all of our lives. The more people you could hinge to the principle of equality, the more people you could rally together in that fight—on the basis of common self-interest.7
Jordan’s lessons on universal equality, community, and love had a lot to do with her resistance to King’s political philosophies. In some of her published writings, Jordan refers to many of King’s philosophical principles and activist
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work such as his participation in the December 1961 demonstrations over desegregation and voting rights for black residents in Albany, Georgia; his participation in the April 1963 civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama;8
and King’s support of the new proposed Civil Rights Act in August 1963.9
In “The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God,” Jordan articulates King’s belief in freedom, the sanctity of human life, and the importance of nonviolent resistance in fighting for rights. She also writes about desegregation, voting rights, and the Vietnam war. The essay always returns to Jordan’s reflection on the life and legacy of King. For example, she passionately remembers the radio coverage of the Civil Rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. She grounds her reflections on the coverage by saying that King “was not a god,” and continues by indicating how she was seriously beginning to consider the liberation of black people according to the principles articulated by King as a possibility. Jordan writes:
And when, one afternoon, that fast talking, panic-stricken newscaster in Birmingham reported the lunging killer police dogs and the atrocious hose water and I could hear my people screaming while the newscaster shouted out the story of my people, there, in Birmingham, who would not quit the streets,—
when he described how none of that horror of nightsticks or torrential water pressure or mad dogs on the attack could stop the children of Birmingham from coming out again and again to suffer whatever they must for freedom, I remember the positively stunned sensation that engulfed me.10
She experiences this sensation—based on the realities of groups of people demonstrating for rights—as a sign of victory. These signs, for Jordan, were met by the “magical calm voice leading us, unarmed, into the violence of White America.”11 That voice belonged to Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a voice of reason and the voice of a body that had been “clubbed and stabbed and shoved and shot at and jailed and spat upon.”12 Yet Jordan was disturbed by King’s declaration, “If any blood will flow in the streets of Birmingham let it be our blood and not the blood of our white brothers.”13 Jordan was never to embrace fully Martin Luther King, Jr.’s doctrine of nonviolence; she always wanted to fight back.
Later in the same essay, Jordan tells of her awakening—the beginning of her understanding, if not full embrace—to the principles of King only after his assassination: “And so, when the news came, April 4, 1968, that Dr[.] King was dead, I thought, I felt, along with millions and millions of other Black Americans, that so was love and so was all good will and so was the soul of these United States.”14 On King’s assassination, Jordan expressed her feelings of anger and her desire for universal peace. She promised to remember King’s life work and to work with others to foster King’s vision of the “Beloved Community.”
Perhaps because of the sense of urgency he exuded, Jordan was moved somewhat more by the forceful, immediate strategies of Malcolm X. She admired his magnificent oratorical skills and his heated speeches on the need
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for social action, his love of black people, his insistence on black pride, and his belief in black cultural consciousness. Jordan met with Malcolm X and other black political leaders, writers, journalists, and activists to discuss the conditions of black life in America; these important encounters further strengthened Jordan’s desire to work for social, political, educational, and economic changes in the black community. Initially, she was solely concerned with the denial of civil rights for black people, but in some cases, this concern later metamor-phosed into a concern for the rights of all people treated unjustly in America and elsewhere.
In many ways, Malcolm X’
s later political philosophies supported Jordan’s thinking about the need to extend civil rights efforts for black people from a local to an international context. After his pilgrimage to Mecca, visits to the Congo, and eventual separation from the Nation of Islam and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X began to preach his philosophy of Black Nationalism and freedom. According to writer James H. Cone in his 1992 essay
“Malcolm X and Black Nationalism,” Malcolm X “wanted to join the civil rights movement in order to expand it into a human rights movement, thereby internationalizing the black freedom struggle.”15 Malcolm X’s growing interest in a larger, more international civil rights movement connects well to Jordan’s increasing dedication to expanding the fight for rights to include the realities of people of color throughout the world.16
Prior to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., Jordan found herself caught between the philosophical teachings of both leaders.
While she disagreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. on issues of nonviolence, she did consider him a hero. In the 1999 published interview “Poetry is a Political Act” with Julie Quiroz, former Associate Director of the Coalition for Immigrant Rights in Northern California, Jordan discusses her attitude toward nonviolence and freedom fights in relation to social and political activism.
During this time, Jordan was caring for her son, Christopher, in a New York City housing project when she met freedom fighter and activist Evie Rich and Rich’s husband, Marvin Rich, who at the time was the National Director of CORE. Jordan admits:
CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not. But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966. The purpose of my first freedom ride was to try to desegregate the bus route from New York to Maryland. I said I’d go, but I didn’t say I’d be nonviolent.17
According to Jordan, her first freedom ride came almost a year after the assassination of Malcolm X (February 21, 1965), and it was met with a tempered level of anger that, for Jordan, did not have to be calmed in nonviolent ways.
She continues the interview by indicating how she officially decided to be “in,”
but on her own terms, terms that did not exclude the possibility of violent action. Jordan determined early on that responding to violence with nonviolence was a philosophy she could not completely commit to.18
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Jordan’s decision to be “in” speaks to how her experiences during the 1960s and 1970s, highly influenced by the activism and legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, helped her to visualize a different kind of America in which everyone would receive equal rights without the threat of violence and hate. Their work also impacted the political direction Jordan followed during the 1980s. In many published interviews and writings, Jordan has admitted that the closing of the 1960s was an intense time for her: she cared for her son, with the assistance of family members and friends, became a Black Nationalist, participated in the Black Power Movement and criticized it for its gender bias and its politics-before-art beliefs, became involved with CORE, and talked with Malcolm X after his departure from the Nation of Islam. She also reported on the grassroots freedom movements of black people in Mississippi, gained increased awareness of the Women’s Movement, cofacilitated poetry workshops for youth in Brooklyn and Harlem through Teachers & Writers Collaborative, accepted a teaching position at City College, and participated in the college’s Open Admissions battle.
The effects of the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
continued to affect the political direction of human rights movements throughout the world. With their assassinations, Jordan began to wonder about the struggle for black people’s liberation in relation to international civil rights struggles. Around this time, her poetry and political essays increased in intensity and became even more full of rage. Jordan’s presence in the literary, political, and educational scenes of the 1960s continued to demand her attention years later because of long-standing, institutionalized systems that perpetuated unequal treatment for poor and working-class people of color.
In particular, she approached the 1980s fighting against everything she knew to be wrong and loving everything she believed was right. For example, Jordan fell in love with a powerful black man whom she thought was committed to the struggle for black liberation until “he lied” to her by telling Jordan, after a long day of working with black parents in Englewood, New Jersey on ways to desegregate the school system, that what he wanted all day was to be with her sexually, a comment that for Jordan minimized his activist efforts.19
According to Jordan, this man was no longer a lover whom she wanted nor a hero of the people she could trust: “He was my introduction to the idea that you have sex, love, or both, on the one hand, and you have politics or principles on the other.”20 Jordan, however, wanted both at all times—to fight and to love the fights, honestly and collectively—a point highlighted in her discussion of black love and sexuality in Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998).
Jordan enjoyed collaborating with people whose focus was on community-building, love, and the inclusion of multiple voices in public discourses on equality. In her 1997 published keynote address delivered at the National Black Lesbian and Gay Conference, Jordan recalls her introduction to many black political leaders and spokespersons during and immediately following the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. In particular, she writes of
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how she fell in love with a woman who relocated to Harlem, New York from Hazlehurst, Mississippi “about ten years after my hero episode”21 and just before Jordan went to Mississippi to complete a freelance assignment for the New York Times. They were both in love with the political and ideological constructions of Blackness as well as with “Black People,” “Black Power,” and
“Black Fights;” they bravely accepted a most defining slogan of the arts movement: “Black is Beautiful.” Jordan indicates that she and this woman fell in love with one another and remained partners “for several, unforgettable years.”22 This relationship, among others, encouraged Jordan to explore the absence of sex and sexuality in political efforts. It also forced her to question the lack of attention given to “Black and gay and lesbian and bisexual” rights, especially since there were many people who believed as she did: that “there was no conflict between the political and the personal chambers of my political and personal heart.”23 Jordan was angry that the movements of the 1960s advocated freedom and identity at the sheer neglect of sexual identities and gay rights. Years later, she and socially conscious writers such as Audre Lorde, articulated the importance of including the movement for gay rights in progressive efforts for civil rights. Jordan’s insistence for a more universal rights movement that represented various people and their differing experiences showed itself in her numerous publications. Through her writing, she hoped to accomplish and conquer a balance among politics, art, identity constructs, and love.
Her writing during this era included political poetry (“The New Pietà: For the Mothers and Children of Detroit,” 1965; “What Would I Do White?” 1966;
“Who Look at Me, Dedicated to My Son, Christopher,” 1968; “From the Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones: Poem # One,” 1976); children’s books ( Dry Victories, 1972; Fannie Lou Hamer, 1972); essays (in Esquire, the New York Times, and Partisan Review); and reports (“Mississippi Black Home,” 1970).
Jordan was determined to create art and share her political views with others as if her life depended on it, even in the face of harsh criticism from mainstream publishing companies that often refused to publish her work. On this latter point, Jordan’s longtime friend and professional collaborator, musician Adrienne Torf, articulated reasons why publishing companies often refused to print
Jordan’s writing. In an October 2005 interview, Torf commented that Jordan was always making connections among art, music, and politics that most people do not see, a point that reiterates Jordan’s focus on identity politics and that made her “difficult for the literary world to market, for June would not pigeonhole; she refused to be pigeonholed.” Torf continues: June’s reputation with agents and publishers went up and down because her writings were about herself and of her life. She would not and could not limit how, what, or why she wrote. Limiting her writings meant that she was limiting herself—her life and beliefs—and such limiting would mean death for June.24
Rejection from publishing companies did not halt Jordan’s political and poetically involved activities: she employed poetry, essay, drama, children’s fiction,
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journalism, libretto, and performance to ask difficult questions about the role of women in political movements and the importance of raising children in their own communities. She also wrote about sexual freedom and the range of sexual choices that humans might embrace. Whatever she wrote about, marched against, or actively lived for, Jordan was not easily deterred from fighting against racism and classism—her resistance to her father’s supposed violence attests to this fact. No one, including leaders of civil rights movements, could persuade her to do anything other than what she felt necessary.
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