June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

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  for herself. For this lover, emerging poet, activist, and intellectual, love for the people in her life, and those yet to enter it, was not, and would never be, the problem, which is, in many ways, a highly contentious point. Jordan’s childhood in her West Indian parents’ home, in her surrounding Brooklyn neighborhood, and in the educational spaces that did not quite resemble her family’s cultural history is directly connected to her adult life of activism and political writing.

  From her father’s strictness to her forced presence in predominantly white educational institutions, to her ten-year interracial marriage and her mother’s silencing and alleged suicide, Jordan realized that it, life, is “a bully. It’s not about fair.”54

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  T W O

  Who Look at Me

  In the 1960s and 1970s, Jordan’s familial relationships in New York City had just as much to do with her understanding of intimate struggles as they had to do with her growing acceptance of the complications and politics of love, as indicated by her interracial marriage to Michael Meyer. Life for the poet was never easy nor absent of challenges, a message that she delivers in the opening pages of Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America.

  Here, Jordan declares, “I learned, in short, that fighting is a whole lot less dis-agreeable than turning tail or knuckling under. It feels better. . . . I lost a lot of fights as a kid in Bedford-Stuyvesant. But nobody fought me twice.”1 The poet, telling of her love of words and her hatred of fights, admits, “But if, as a Black girl-child in America, I could not evade the necessity to fight, then, maybe, I could choose my weaponry at least.”2 Throughout her life, she attempted to do just that: select the “weaponry” and employ the techniques needed to successfully engage in battle. Meanwhile, she stood in direct opposition to other people even as she opened herself up to experiencing the unlimited love of her 1950s interracial marriage.

  In 1963, Jordan and Meyer separated. Just a short two years later in 1965, their marriage ended in divorce. As a single mother in New York City, Jordan assumed full parental responsibility for her growing seven-year-old son, Christopher, since Meyer “didn’t do a . . . thing for him. June did it all.”3 This full-time responsibility was, in fact, short lived because in order for Jordan to survive as a single, working mother and artist, she needed the assistance of

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  friends and family to help care for Christopher. Mildred was often “taking care of him . . . and actually helping while June was going back and forth in the city trying to . . . [get] literary contacts.”4 As Jordan sought to form a new identity without her ex-husband, she began work at various jobs: an assistant to the producer of the film, The Cool World; a freelance reporter and journalist; a participant on freedom rides; and a volunteer for organizations that formed as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. During this time, she completed her first poetry collection, Who Look at Me (1969), and her first novel, His Own Where (1971).5 Such personal and professional events proved that Jordan’s life was never really easy. Her life signified battles with familial and intimate love as well as ongoing struggles over the civil rights, liberties, and freedoms of disenfranchised people, including herself, her son, and her parents. The 1960s and 70s can attest to the beginning of Jordan’s battles over and for various rights.

  In the 1960s Jordan reported on the struggle for civil rights in Southern states, particularly in Mississippi, for various newspapers including the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. The poet visited black communities that were heavily afflicted by violence, segregation, and racism; she was committed to her work with black Southerners fighting these conditions and striving to gain and ensure their civil rights. Jordan eventually joined the freedom rides and became a protégé of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Party and Field Secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

  Then Jordan witnessed firsthand the violence of the 1964 Harlem Riot.

  Shortly thereafter, she worked on the architectural redesign of Harlem with engineer, inventor, poet, and mathematician, W. R. Buckminster Fuller.

  Committed to human rights, Jordan insisted that one must always resist injustice of any kind, by any name, and against any person; she was not afraid to do battle. In the introduction to Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America, Jordan powerfully declares,

  In 1964, I believed I was fighting hard in the middle of an enormous argument about America and anybody’s right to be here, specific and nondissoluble. I perceived myself to be surrounded and outnumbered by enemies. I accepted media notions of my “minority” status in a “naturally” white America.6

  Was it when Jordan saw the rising flames in Harlem that she accepted her minority status? Was it upon becoming a single parent that her status as a minority officially became her “minority status”? Or was it a combination of events such as her eventual divorce, Harlem on fire, Mississippi burning, and the events surrounding her mother’s death that convinced the poet, however temporarily, that she was outnumbered by her enemies, known and unknown, most of whom were not black? In her 1968 book, Who Look at Me, Jordan writes a powerful poem about being viewed as “Other.” Her words, guiding the discussion of this chapter, are as relevant today as when they were first penned:

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  Who would paint a people

  black or white?

  *

  For my own I have held

  where nothing showed me how

  where finally I left alone

  to trace another destination

  *

  A white stare splits the air

  by blindness on the subway

  in department stores

  The Elevator

  (that unswerving ride

  where man ignores the brother

  by his side) . . .

  *

  Is that how we look to you

  a partial nothing clearly real?7

  Indeed, Jordan crossed many rivers and won many battles in the period leading up to and following the Harlem Riot of 1964. Before that time, she regularly entertained “Huck,” a friend from her student days at Barnard College,8

  who engaged Jordan on many topics, especially architecture. Jordan soon began to explore the world of the Donnell Library, located at 20 West 53rd Street in Manhattan, reading books dedicated to the topic of architecture and paying attention to the architectural design of the buildings, rooms, and arti-facts. At the same time, Huck convinced Jordan to “write scenarios, and thereby, combine poetry and architecture in a medium accessible to most people.”9 Jordan agreed, and from 1963 to 1964 in New York City, she became the assistant to Frederick Wiseman, “a white man” and the producer for the film, The Cool World. Directed by “a white woman,”10 Shirley Clarke, the film is an adaptation of the book of the same title, and stars local black Harlem teenagers confronting racism, hatred, black-white conflicts, and identity formation in America. Jordan was taken by the idea behind the film and the book it was based on, and began working on “a frame for the reality of The Cool World. ”11

  Included in her “frame” are interviews, statements, and personal reflections from cast members on life in Harlem and in America for black males. Jordan successfully completed and titled the frame, and subsequently the first chapter in Civil Wars, “Testimony,” just as the film opened in 1964. Soon thereafter, she left Wiseman’s film group to dedicate more time to freelancing.

  Jordan freelanced for the Herald Tribune and became even more involved in the politics of Harlem. She met and interacted with black civil rights leader Malco
lm X, whose Temple Number Seven was located in the heart of Harlem,12

  author Louis Lomax, activist James Farmer who was the National Director of

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  the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE),13 and a slew of news reporters, writers, editors, and political figures. Around this time, tension in Harlem was coming to a head. The 1964 Riot, provoked by a white police officer’s fatal shooting of James Powell, a fifteen-year-old unarmed black male, spanned the course of two nights before spilling into Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant community where the poet grew up. Jordan and her friend Dorothy Moscou were there in Harlem.14 Jordan stood, ran away, and then returned to, before eventually leaving, Harlem’s 132nd Street and 7th Avenue. This was the area where police officers with guns and anxious fingers filled the sidewalks and streets, and also where Powell was being eulogized by masses of black people gathered to pay respects to this fallen child. Gunfire could be heard in the midst of gathered family and friends who tearfully bid farewell to Powell; Jordan was there as a witness to these events.

  On the streets, a group of teenage males continuously shouted, “WE WANT

  MALCOLM,” as Jordan reports in her book, Civil Wars. 15 These youngsters were unwilling to back down from face-to-face confrontations with police officers; even more, they were unwilling to silently endure the unlawful and continual violence perpetuated by those who were sworn to protect them. Their refusal to back down and the refusal of other black people to go home, leave the area, or stop doing what they were doing cycled into rounds of gunfire, grenade throwing, verbal and physical abuse, and many injured, innocent bystanders.

  Jordan retreated to the headquarters of the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE) with Bostic Van Felton, her friend and a cast member from The Cool World. Together, Jordan and Van Felton assisted the director of CORE, James Farmer, and the CORE staff with various duties, from tallying up the number of the injured admitted to hospitals to determining the number of black people who had been jailed and charged with criminal activities and/or resisted arrest. This work, along with the rioting and protesting on New York City streets, went on into the early morning hours and lasted for two days.

  The Harlem Riot of 1964 was not the first instance of civil unrest to knock on the city’s door. In March 1935, a sixteen-year-old black male, accused of department store shoplifting, was accosted by store employees and beaten by police officers. Fueled by this incident, and by rumors that a black woman who had tried to stop the beating was violently attacked by police officers, angry Harlem residents protested by marching against police violence. In August 1943, another Harlem-born rebellion occurred after a white police officer shot a uniformed black serviceman. In addition to residents protesting the murder, they also organized against price gouging by white-owned businesses in Harlem, mainly along the popular West 125th Street. These rebellions were not isolated to the community of Harlem, though, for such police induced riots occurred in Southern and Northern cities across America: Chicago, 1919; Oxford, Mississippi, 1962; Watts, 1965; Miami, 1980; and Detroit, 1943 and 1967. After the 1943 riots in Detroit, Thurgood Marshall, who was Assistant to Special Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of

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  Colored People (NAACP) and who was later nominated by John F. Kennedy to the Second Court of Appeals, produced a report that condemned major cities like Detroit for ignoring the brutal treatment of black Americans. Then, in 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, popularly known as the Kerner Commission, confirmed what black people had already known for many years: the existence of a large social divide and institutionalized unfairness toward black people in major American cities.

  The war zone in Harlem energized people to do what Jordan herself was beginning to do: “to stand on the picket line, to march in the demonstration, to speak at the rally, to write and read the poems, to remember not to forget any of the minutes of the meetings of my one life among so many lives, at risk.”16 Being center stage at the 1964 Harlem Riot pushed the poet into creative ventures. Nearly two weeks after the riots, Jordan accepted her first collaborative venture with architect W. R. Buckminster Fuller, whom she had initially met through viewing and examining photographs of his architectural work at Manhattan’s Donnell Library. Later, they agreed to co-author an article for Esquire magazine on Harlem’s architectural reconstruction. The reconstruction took into consideration the placement and viability of hospitals, schools, and housing—safe living conditions and affordably priced homes for Harlem residents. It also considered residents’ access to the shoreline, recre-ational sites, and green spaces, such as Harlem’s Morningside and Mount Morris Parks, and to transportation, such as a new bridge that would connect New Jersey to New York with direct access into Harlem. This plan for Harlem’s urban renewal was carefully devised so as to not remove and displace black residents from their very own community. Jordan and Fuller fully acknowledged that other plans for urban renewal and gentrification had been quickly devised without thoughtful consideration of the dangers imposed on residents and long-standing community businesses. According to musician and close friend of Jordan, Adrienne Torf, the collaboration between Fuller and Jordan sought to increase the level of safe and affordable living conditions for Harlem residents. Torf informs me that designs of safe space that promoted communal interactions were major concerns for the poet.17

  Jordan and Fuller worked on the plan and drafted the article, and in December 1964, Esquire accepted the article and published it in April 1965. On receiving payment from the magazine in December 1964, Jordan was able to move her son, Christopher, back into her apartment from his grandparents’

  house just in time for Christmas. Up until this point, Christopher regularly stayed with his grandparents because Jordan could not financially support the two of them, especially since she was no longer with her husband, Meyer, and was struggling financially.18 Mildred, who “was working at night,” made conscious efforts to care for her family, Jordan and Christopher included. Of her payment from Esquire, Jordan writes, “On our way home, we kept stopping to buy food, a Christmas tree, presents for Christopher, presents for friends who would come by, and that Christmas Eve I was a millionaire in love.”19 When

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  the article was published in Esquire, to Jordan’s dismay, Fuller received full credit for it, from its ideas to its proposed plans for Harlem’s redesign. This, however, only motivated Jordan to continue to produce important writings; work in, for, and with the community; and live, love, and advocate for social and political change for people considered disenfranchised and silenced.

  Over the next few years, Jordan, often under her married name of June Meyer, continued to freelance. She wrote various short stories, poems, and critiques for periodicals such as Esquire, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Essence, Urban Review, Black Creation, Evergreen, Partisan Review, Black World, and American Poetry Review. From 1965 to 1966 she worked as a writer and research associate for the Technical Housing Department of Mobilization for Youth in New York City, and in 1967 Jordan began a slightly untraditional teaching career. She taught and worked with young writers at the insistence of Herb Kohl, a founding member of Teachers & Writers Collaborative. This nonprofit organization, established in 1967 in New York City, pairs poets and writers with public-school teachers and students to provide in-school writing sessions and workshops, after-school and weekend poetry programs, and literacy initiatives for youngsters. Jordan joined the initiative and collaborated with educator Terri Bush. Together they held Saturday writing workshops for Puerto Rican and black teenagers in East Harlem and then in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. In much of her writing on her experience with the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Jordan
tells of her commitment to the student-writers: after the workshop, she, along with Bush, took them to

  “Prospect Park, museums, Jones Beach, and to the Chock Full O’Nuts near Columbia which we picketed” for undisclosed reasons.20 Jordan and Bush later compiled The Voice of the Children (1970), a book of the students’ creative writings published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston that I will discuss in greater detail in a later chapter.

  Upon ending her work with the student writers in 1968, Jordan wrote a letter to the director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative that describes how she, Bush, and the dedicated students all survived the larger learning experience of the program. The poet states,

  We have somehow and sometimes survived the systematic degradation of America. And therefore there really are Black children who dream, and who love, and who undertake to master such “white” things as poetry. There really are Black children who are children as well as victims. And one had better be pretty damned careful about what one will “accept” from these children as their own—

  their own honest expression of their dreams, their love, and their always human reality that not even America can conquer.21

  Oh, how beautiful are these words by Jordan, an activist who believed in honesty, human rights, and freedom of expression, particularly for young people.

  These sentiments are still necessary in this present-day state of racism, violence, and police brutality—a state named by many people during the 1960s

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  as Harlem, New York; Detroit, Michigan; or Jackson, Mississippi; and a state later named by June Jordan to be America, USA.