June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

  Jordan’s work with Teachers & Writers Collaborative led to her first university teaching appointment, and as with the poet’s previous teaching experience, Herb Kohl was behind the initiation. In the fall of 1967, she was hired to teach English and college composition to freshman students at City College of the City University of New York, located at 138th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem. On the faculty in the college’s English department were the poets and writers, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Adrienne Rich, Mina Shaughnessy, and Barbara Christian. This was a fruitful time for Jordan, her colleagues, and her students, for City College was experiencing major disputes and upheavals, particularly around the Open Admissions Policy.22 Supporters of the Open Admissions Policy at City College argued for a university welcoming of all people prepared to learn on a collegiate level. They believed that an open university would enhance efforts to create a more humane and free society. However, critics of the policy insisted that the university be guided by standards, which are measurements of excellence and higher learning. In 1970, in the omnipresence of the Vietnam War and six years after the 1964 Harlem Riot and five years after Malcolm X’s assassination and two years after Martin Luther King’s assassination and after rallies and protests on the campus for changes in admissions’ policies and student representation, City College finally became an Open Admissions University. According to Jordan and her students, City College was finally, “A Free University at Harlem’s I.S. 201.”23

  In 1969, Jordan published “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” a position paper that first appeared in Esquire Magazine. In it, she decries poverty and exploitation, and praises the students who committed themselves to work against hatred and violence in order to acquire a quality education.

  She argues,

  Poverty is a bloodbath. Exploitation of human life, for material gain, is unfor-givable-letting-blood-flow for the sake of other currencies. Perforce, the natural element of Black children has been the American bloodbath. We know American violence, power, and success. Is the university prepared to teach us something new?24

  Jordan’s question was answered when the students insisted that City College adopt “new college admission policies”25 and when the school’s administration approved the Open Admissions Policy. For Jordan’s colleagues, specifically the ones teaching freshman composition and college-level literature, the policy allowed more academic freedom in the curriculum, reading materials, and instructional approaches. According to poet and former City College instructor, Adrienne Rich,

  These were classes, not simply in writing, not simply in literature, certainly not just in the correction of sentence fragments or the redemptive power of the semi-colon; though we did, and do, work on all these. . . .At City College all Basic

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  Writing teachers have been free to choose the books they would assign. . . . There has never been a set curriculum or reading list. We have poached off each others’ booklists, methods, essay topics, grammar-teaching exercises, and anything else that we hoped would “work” for us.26

  City College, from its faculty and student bodies to its academic curriculum, became radicalized in its approach to teaching, learning, and educational access. People from various ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, from all age and socioeconomic groups, and from differing learning levels, were invited to enter and study in the college’s classrooms. Jordan was able to witness and document this occasion:

  There has been no choosing until now. Until the university, there is no choice.

  Education is compulsory. Education has paralleled the history of our Black lives; it has been characterized by the punishment of nonconformity, abridgement, withered enthusiasm, distortion, and self-denying censorship. Education has paralleled the life of prospering white America; it has been characterized by reverence for efficiency, cultivation of competence unattended by concern for aim.

  . . . Students everywhere must insist on new college admission policies that will guide and accelerate necessary, radical change, at all levels of education.27

  Jordan was not only teaching and fighting for students’ rights in New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s; she was also writing. Her literary career, marked by a 1969 Rockefeller Grant in Creative Writing, was already under way, and her work was being widely read and critically reviewed in literary commmunities. In 1969, Thomas Y. Crowell Company published Jordan’s first poetic collection, Who Look at Me, originally a project that the poet Langston Hughes worked on until his unfortunate death on May 22, 1967. After his death, Jordan asked permission from the publishing company to work on Who Look at Me, and two years later she completed the project. In an undated New York Times piece (obviously published around the time of Hughes’ death), titled “What Happens to a Dream? This One Lives,” journalist David Vidal mentions Jordan’s attendance at Hughes’ funeral: “Others attending included June Jordan, the poet, who said she considered herself a

  ‘daughter’ of Mr. Hughes because she had drawn a book from work he was doing when he died.”28 Historian, scholar, and prize-winning author Milton Meltzer encouraged Jordan’s work on, and completion of, Who Look at Me.

  According to Jordan “Gratitude is owing to Milton Meltzer; in response to a book idea conceived by him, and thanks to his encouragement and respect, I undertook the creation of Who Look at Me. The pictures for the book were cho-sen from a collection assembled by him.”29

  The book that “she had drawn” became Who Look at Me, which, according to Jordan, “was the text of a poem I wrote when I was in Atlanta for Dr. King’s funeral.”30 In this magnificent and poetically rich text, Jordan uses poetry to depict the strength and beauty of black and interracial lives, experiences, and identities by telling the stories of twenty-seven colorful paintings that portray

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  aspects of black life. Jordan opens with “Who would paint a people black or white.”31 She then moves into a rhythmic response to oppression; the con-temptuous stares of white people; the beautiful removal of a white mask by a young boy; and the search for fatherhood, motherhood, and family by including the paintings of highly skilled artists, such as Romare Bearden, Ben Shahn, Thomas Eakins, Charles Alston, Hughie Lee-Smith, Andrew Wyeth, and others. The paintings display a variety of black people: slaves, sailors, artists, revolutionaries, civil rights protesters, and young children. The juxtaposition of paintings with highly sophisticated and original poetry presents a fine opportunity for the book’s readers to question the complexities of humanity, the nature of differences, and the unfairness of stereotypes. Such an interrogation, for Jordan, was necessary. In closing, she writes:

  I trust you will remember how we tried to love

  above the pocket deadly need to please

  and how so many of us died there

  on our knees.

  Who see the roof and corners of my pride

  to be (as you are) free?

  WHO LOOK AT ME?32

  Around the same time that Jordan was completing Who Look at Me and teaching at City College, she began traveling to Mississippi as part of her freelance assignment for the New York Times. Her first visit to Mississippi was in the summer of 1969. As documented in her 1970 New York Times newspaper story,

  “Mississippi ‘Black Home,’” Jordan wanted “to shake some warm black hands and glimpse some live black people who are determined to stay, and to direct their own survival in that place.”33 She met a lot of black people who were committed to Mississippi. Jordan’s commitment to the sacrifices of the people in Mississippi should be remembered for the lasting effects they had on her as she ventured into local and international movements for the rights of people throughout the world; her later writings on Nicaragua and Lebanon attest to this point.34

  For her freelancing assignment on “M
ississippi ‘Black Home,’” Jordan spent her first week in Jackson, Mississippi with Dr. Aaron Shirley, husband, father, pediatrician, and cochair of the Mississippi United Front, “a coalition originally formed to defend Head Start programs against the opposition of the Governor.”35 His wife, Mrs. Ollye Shirley, was a coordinator of social services for the Hinds County Head Start program. Charlie White was a junior-high-school science teacher who owned and rented affordably priced apartments in the town, and his fiancée, Frankie Walton, was a university professor by training—she had studied at Tougaloo College and the University of California, Los

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  Angeles, and taught at Wellesley College. Mel Leventhal, originally from Brooklyn, New York, was a white lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund, and an activist in the movement for civil rights. Alice Leventhal, his wife, is the now-famous Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Civil Rights activist, widely known as Alice Walker. During her travels in Jackson, Mississippi, Jordan was confronted by black people’s ongoing struggle to receive equal protection and rights in a historically unjust land—from their demands for fair employment practices and equal pay, to civil and political rights. Seeing the solidarity across socioeconomic lines among Jackson’s black and white activists kept Jordan hopeful that changes were coming, even if by force and perseverance.

  During the second week, Jordan went to Coahoma and Clarksdale County, Mississippi and visited with Dr. Aaron Henry, chairman of Mississippi’s Democratic Party, and owner of a drugstore where freedom fighters often congregated to initiate activities. The communal feel of Dr. Henry’s drugstore fascinated Jordan. Freedom fighters gathered at the store to discuss the changes America must undergo if black people are ever to receive fair treatment, governmental representation, equal opportunities, rights, and privileges.

  Establishing and maintaining “Black Home” in Mississippi was an important conversation of the Mississippi freedom fighters.

  Jordan spent the third week with Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville, Mississippi. Mrs. Hamer was founder of the nonprofit Freedom Farm Cooperative, an organization that was committed to cultivating acres of veg-etables and providing for poor families. It was in Ruleville where fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was taken from his relatives’ home and brutally tortured and murdered by white men who accused him of whistling at a white woman.

  The murder and subsequent trial was national news in 1955. In this same town, years after the Till murder, Jordan met Mrs. Hamer who had testified at the 1964 National Democratic Convention about the physically brutal beating she received from white men in Mississippi because of her voter registration work there. Jordan came to admire and deeply respect Mrs. Hamer and her commitment to black life, survival, and financial independence in Mississippi.

  She eventually became an important leader and female figure in Jordan’s personal, political, and creative life, a leader Jordan would emulate.

  Jordan went to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, during week four. She met Earl Lucas, the young black mayor of Mound Bayou and director of the Systematic Training and Redevelopment (S.T.A.R.) adult-literacy program. She also met Richard Crowe who had returned to Mississippi after working for nine years on the Chicago police force. In Mound Bayou, Crowe unofficially worked in a makeshift police headquarters that was housed in his mother’s barbeque restaurant. At John F. Kennedy High School, Jordan also met Mrs. Minnie L.

  Fisher, who was the town librarian, clerk, and tax collector, and Willie Gates, the high school principal. Gates believed that the educational progress of the

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  town’s children was dramatically slow. Of her experiences during week four, Jordan writes:

  The poverty of Mound Bayou is such that the Mound Bayou Community Hospital, with only 150 local people among its employees, qualifies as a primary source of revenue and jobs. In descending significance, the others are the public-school system, S.T.A.R. and two seasonal cotton gins.36

  Week five, Jordan’s final week, was spent in the city where her explorations began: Jackson, Mississippi. Here, she met Ed Cole, Director of Economic Development, in the town of Fayette, and Charles Evers, the mayor of Fayette who was popularly known throughout the city of Jackson, his second home, and who was the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Jordan recognized the strength of black people in Mississippi, and appreciated how they did not forget those people who died actively fighting for rights and those innocent people who were killed simply because of their dark skin. “Black Home” was slowly happening in the city of Jackson and across the entire state of Mississippi, and according to Jordan, “Perhaps it is true that the more white violence threatens the existence of black life, the stronger will grow black love—self-determination toward survival.”37

  At the end of her five weeks in Mississippi, Jordan returned to New York City with the experience of facing and interrogating some of her fears as related to her black female, mother, poet, and activist existences in a “racist”

  world. Poetically, Jordan ends her New York Times article with the following: I think all the way back to the labor of slave toil that made this earth a farmland sweet with food. I remember the gardens and the flowers, even in Jackson. There is no fence; the yards lie open to the sunlight and the passer-by. The dead have been remembered. The children grow in love. It is Black Home.38

  Jordan’s month-long visit to Mississippi in 1969 was not her last venture to the state. Before her return to Mississippi in the early 1970s, Fuller nominated the poet for the Prix de Rome award in Environmental Design. At Fuller’s insistence, Jordan accepted the award for her novel, His Own Where (1971), and spent a large portion of 1970–1971 in Rome studying the structures of cities, examining human interactions in public spaces, and writing projects on urban design. While in Rome, she reflected on her experiences in Mississippi and on her encounters with Dr. Aaron Henry and Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. Her reflections resulted in her early return to New York City from Rome, as well as the completion of an unpublished manual for land reform in Mississippi and her unpublished second novel, Okay Now. Jordan was disappointed that her manuscripts, particularly the land reform manual, were not accepted for mainstream publication. The poet’s disappointment temporarily subsided upon realizing that her first novel, His Own Where—selected as one of the “Most Outstanding Books” (1971) by the New York Times and nominated for the National Book Award (1972)—was receiving high praise from supporters as

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  well as unfavorable criticism from angry black parents. The novel’s popularity was, in fact, a result of its employment of Black English.

  In the essay, “Black English as a Linguistic System: A Statement about Our Rights” (2004), I summarize Jordan’s novel:

  In 1971, June Jordan’s award-winning young-adult novel, His Own Where, was written entirely in Black English, a first in this country! In this love story of political protest, Jordan sophisticatedly establishes connections between language and space, or Black English and the urban redesign of Harlem, through the central characters, sixteen-year-old Buddy Rivers and fourteen-year-old Angela Figeroa. Throughout the plot and narrative of this story is weaved a most significant message: Black English is a vital language, a necessary communicative form, that allows its users to confront and/or make sense of a world full of abandonment, violence, social inequality, and asymmetrical power dynamics that insist, “You be really different from the rest, the resting other ones.”39

  In one way, Jordan’s insistence to an audience of young adults, especially young black readers, to “be different from the rest, the resting other ones”40

  signifies her desire for them to embrace the beauty of their identities—t
heir black skin, linguistically rich languages, communities and cultures, and all other forms of black life that historically have been under fire for decades upon decades. In another way, Jordan’s insistence stems from her reflexive ability to examine the spaces of her very own childhood in Harlem and in Bedford-Stuyvesant with West Indian parents who attempted to make her into their own where instead of nurturing her to become her own where.

  Both interpretations of Jordan’s novel point to the same conclusion: in order for positive change to replace inferior living conditions in America, and in Harlem, in particular, people of color must always work, write, and collaborate against a dominant and one-sided political system that attempts to disempower them and diminish their rich cultures. His Own Where is one of many attempts by Jordan to eradicate this system and its codes by allowing the voices of young black people who speak Black English to be heard and respected, and by encouraging them to create a new world, “living spaces,” of love and safety in place of the current world of abandonment and neglect. Adrienne Torf indicates that His Own Where is a text that not only questions the employment of Black English and black cultural practices, but also one that “questions space and spatial designs of where one could and could not walk and where cars could and could not park.” Torf continues by highlighting how Jordan, through the publication of His Own Where, and through professional collaborations with Fuller during the 1960s and composer Peter Sellers in the 1990s,

  “always called for the creation of people’s power and determination to change things. Her commitment to young people and their voices is proof of this.”41

  Jordan made the declaration to protect the voices of young people because she understood the power of language; this understanding allowed her to connect personal experience with political analysis. Examples of this connection can be found in the death of Jordan’s mother with the police murders of young

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