June Jordan was an African-American feminist poet, writer, teacher and activist who died recently after a long battle with breast cancer. She meant a lot of things to a lot of people. For my generation of black feminist activists and writers, she was a courageous role model. June Jordan not only gave me a greater sense of my identity as a black woman in a world dominated by white men, she also gave me, more importantly, a sense of connection with, and obligation to, a world much larger than my own. She was an internationalist and a humanitarian and fought for a definition of feminism that reflected a large and inclusive vision.
Through her writings and her political work over three decades, Jordan reminded me that I was not a part of a minority. She helped me to see myself as connected to struggles for social justice around the world in places where people speak different languages, practice different religions and claim different histories. "As a black woman, as a black feminist," she wrote in 1978, "I exist, simultaneously as a part of the powerless and as a part of the majority peoples of the world." This was her gift.
June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 to Panamanian and Jamaican parents. She had a difficult childhood marred by abuse and the suicide of her mother. She later met Malcolm X and Fannie Lou Hamer, two giants of the 1960s' black-freedom struggle, and became deeply involved in politics. Even though Jordan picketed and marched, her weapon of choice was words. It is appropriate that her memoir is entitled, "Soldier: A Poet's Childhood." June Jordan battled with one enemy or another her entire life.
She was most successful when armed with her pen. She was the author of 26 books of poetry and essays and wrote a regular column for The Progressive magazine. The topics of Jordan's writings ranged from self-love to state violence. Jordan was not well known outside of left-leaning political and literary circles, but within those circles she became larger than life. She was a constant presence and a consistent voice on behalf of the dispossessed. In the 1970s, she opposed racism in the United States, war in Vietnam and colonialism in Africa. She wrote on behalf of welfare-rights activists and Attica's prison rebels.
Throughout the 1980s and '90s, even after being diagnosed with cancer, she was a ubiquitous presence at rallies, marches and conferences for a variety of progressive causes. She never gave a canned speech. She never just told people what they wanted to hear. She went to anti-war rallies and talked about homophobia. She went to Women's History Month events and talked about the need to free Mumia Abu Jamal. She protested against police brutality in the black community and talked about the Palestinian struggle.
It was the Palestinian struggle for self-government and dignity that captured June Jordan's passion in the later years of her life. In 1996 she traveled to Lebanon where she wrote about the devastating militarism that had scarred the region. Jordan described the Palestinian struggle as "the moral litmus test" of her life. "I can't think of another subject in the world today or in our United States that people approach with more trepidation and fear than that," she explained in an interview in 2000. With death tolls rising daily in the Middle East and the Bush administration's commitment to appease Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at any cost, the memory of June Jordan reminds us of the importance of speaking truth to power.
Her friend Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of "A Color Purple," described her as "courageous," "rebellious" and "compassionate ... an inhabitant of the entire universe." In the words, lessons and inspiration she continues to provide, June Jordan remains an inhabitant of the universe and a source of hope for the future.
Barbara Ransby is an associate professor of African-American studies and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the executive director of the Center for Public Intellectuals. Her biography of civil-rights activist Ella Baker will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2003. This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.