June Jordan_Her Life and Letters by Valerie Kinloch

Author:Valerie Kinloch [Kinloch, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780275982416
Amazon: 0275982416
Goodreads: 188054
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 2006-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

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The Voice of the Children

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June Jordan sits on a horse-drawn produce cart near 7th Avenue and 152nd Street in Harlem, New York, date unknown. Courtesy of Valerie Orridge.

parents, teachers, and leaders who claim an investment in the rights of children as well. One can connect the poet’s children’s and young-adult writings to the prevalent socioeconomic conditions of underfunded schools in “urban”

communities and of schooling for children of color during the 1960s and 1970s. In her essay “Problems of Language in a Democratic State,” Jordan recalls her initial entrance into the teaching profession. She writes: Back in the 60s, popular wisdom had it that the only American boys and girls who could neither read nor write were Black. This was a function of the poverty of culture or vice versa: I forgot which. But anyway, Black children had something wrong with them. They couldn’t talk right. They couldn’t see straight. They never heard a word you said to them. . . . And another thing, their parents were no good or they were alcoholics or illiterate or, anyhow, uninterested, inept, and rotten role models.41

Black children such as Kimako ( Kimako’s Story); little Fannie Lou Hamer ( Fannie Lou Hamer); Rudy, Tyrone, and Linda ( New Life: New Room); or Jerome and Kenny ( Dry Victories) represent the voices of countless children living in black communities. They also represent the shared realities of communities and families that honor experiential forms of learning such as exploring one’s own neighborhood, interacting with neighbors, and speaking Black English.

They also depict forms of black culture, black aesthetics, and modes of survival that are often unaccounted for or undocumented in popular narratives of success, literacy, and belonging. In her children’s books, Jordan sought to create a forum of lively discourse that would forever combat racist notions of black life and childhood. This point represented the poet’s personal and political devotion to social change.

As a teacher and then as a writer of children’s and young-adult literature, Jordan noticed the rich varieties of language and literacy activities that were

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June Jordan

brought into classrooms by these same young people: “Their language, their style, their sense of humor, their ideas of smart, their music, their need for a valid history and a valid literature—history and literature that included their faces and their voices.”42 Simultaneously, Jordan paid attention to the need for black children, and all children of color, to have “serious teachers who would tell them, ‘C’mon, I see you. Let me give you a hand,’—all of this was pretty well ridiculed and rejected, or denied to them.”43 Her writing, teaching, philosophy of life, and love for children led her in the direction of collaborative social activism with people committed to political and educational change.

Such people included poets and writers Sara Miles, Jan Levi Heller, E.

Ethelbert Miller, Marilyn Hacker, Adrienne Rich, Alexis DeVeaux, Jodi Braxton, Ruth Forman; musician Adrienne Torf; political commentator Matthew Rothschild; and numerous students in the Poetry for the People Collective at the University of California, Berkeley.

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