Lgbt Rights Activists

"I also want to read, and make, poems that remind me "why it must come," why what June Jordan calls the logic of "the infinite connectedness of human life" demands equality in community. This poetry is worth our most sacred and profane passion, because it embodies our desire, what we might create, in the difficult world around the poem."

"She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality. She wrote from her experience in a woman's body and a dark skin, though never solely "as" or "for." Sharply critical of nationalism, separatism, chauvinism of all kinds as tendencies toward narrowness and isolation, she was too aware of democracy's failures to embrace false integrations. Her poetic sensibility was kindred to Blake's scrutiny of innocence and experience; to Whitman's vision of sexual and social breadth; to Gwendolyn Brooks's and Romare Bearden's portrayals of ordinary black people's lives; to James Baldwin's expression of the bitter contradictions within the republic...She knew many poetries, ancient and modern; her sonnets, for example, are both silken and surprising. But in her preface to the collection Passion, she matched herself consciously most incisive essays from the last two decades with the tradition of "New World poetry," non-European, deriving in North America from Whitman, and including "Pablo Neruda, Agostinho Neto, Gabriela Mistral, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker and Edward Brathwaite.""

"June Jordan’s poetry embraces a half-century in which she dwelt as poet, intellectual, and activist: also as teacher, observer, and recorder. In a sense unusual among twentieth-century poets of the United States, she believed in and lived the urgency of the word — along with action — to resist abuses of power and violations of dignity in — and beyond — her country."

"In the words of June Jordan, “We always have choices. And capitulation is only one of them.”"

"A few years ago, there was the first collection ever published of political essays written by a Black woman-June Jordan. Think about that. It's amazing there are so few."

"In political journalism that cuts like razors, in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death’s mouth … she has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept. … I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art."

"In this era of counter-revolution and its deadly effects, we can be discouraged into silence or reduced to caring only about our immediate, personal world. Or we can, as I heard poet June Jordan say at a conference in Arizona, fight back against "those pistol-packing gatekeepers of a house that never belonged to them in the first place." That sounds better! And let's remember: there would be no counter-attack today if we hadn't made some significant changes yesterday."

"We are hungry for heroes. To paraphrase June Jordan, we are the women whom we want to become."

"As we move toward empowerment, we face the other inseparable question, what are we empowering ourselves for? In other words, how do we use this power we are reaching for? We can't separate those two. June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it, irresistible. That's what I want to do with all of my writing."

"Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?"

"Aren't we blessed that June Jordan is one of the ancestors who we can call on and hear her voice to keep us centered in this current stormy weather? What can we hear from her in this moment? I think that love is a requirement of principled struggle, both self-love and love of others, that we must all do what we can, that it is better to do something rather than nothing, that we have to trust others as well as ourselves. I often repeat the adage that "hope is a discipline." We must practice it daily. June's work teaches us this truth."

"June Jordan, who has been a touchstone of mine, really, since I first read her work in college, which was many, many years ago. So I really can't believe that I'm here today, and I'm really grateful to be here with all of you to celebrate her legacy and her life. June Jordan loved Black people, and so do I. She was an educator, and so am I. She was an activist; so am I. She was an internationalist, and so am I. She was a brilliant writer, and I am not-at all...She insisted that by organizing, we have the power to overcome oppression. I too believe this to be true."

"I have realized that I was in danger of losing my relationship to black vernacular speech because I too rarely use it in the predominantly white settings that I am most often in, both professionally and socially. And so I have begun to work at integrating into a variety of settings the particular Southern black vernacular speech I grew up hearing and speaking. It has been hardest to integrate black vernacular in writing, particularly for academic journals. When I first began to incorporate black vernacular in critical essays, editors would send the work back to me in standard English. Using the vernacular means that translation into standard English may be needed if one wishes to reach a more inclusive audience. In the classroom setting. I encourage students to use their first language and translate it so they do not feel that seeking higher education will necessarily estrange them from that language and culture they know most intimately. Not surprisingly, when students in my Black Women Writers class began to speak using diverse language and speech, white students often complained. This seemed to be particularly the case with black vernacular. It was particularly disturbing to the white students because they could hear the words that were said but could not comprehend their meaning. Pedagogically, I encouraged them to think of the moment of not understanding what someone says as a space to learn. Such a space provides not only the opportunity to listen without "mastery," without owning or possessing speech through interpretation, but also the experience of hearing non-English words. These lessons seem particularly crucial in a multicultural society that remains white supremacist, that uses standard English as a weapon to silence and censor. June Jordan reminds us of this in On Call."

"I learned a lot from the black arts movement. I loved reading black feminist thinkers on my own (outside of academia)—Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, June Jordan, bell hooks, etc."

"At the library I would go the shelves alphabetically. I was drawn to anyone with a female name, with a Latino or Spanish name. There were very, very few. But as a teenager I discovered African American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first. Then Phillis Wheatley. I really identified with this slave woman writing poetry to assert and affirm her humanity. Suddenly my eyes were open to history. There was a whole explosion of African-American women poets-Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan. I have a poem in my head that's going to take me years to write down. Its working title is "On Thanking Black Muses." I owe them, because poetry really changed my life, saved it."

"June Jordan, who has died aged 65, after suffering from breast cancer for several years, defied all pigeonholes. Poet, essayist, journalist, dramatist, academic, cultural and political activist — she was all these things, by turn and simultaneously, but above all, she was an inspirational teacher, through words and actions, and a supremely principled person. …Her life was about challenging oppression, and her characteristic talent was the ability to lay bare through her writing "the intimate face of universal struggle". … For Toni Morrison, the sum of June Jordan's career was: "Forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art." All that aside, she was a joy to know."

"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, big white lies, and the mainly successful blackout of Black life."

"In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal."

"We are among those who have been violated into violence."

"Efficiency, competence: Black students know the deadly, neutral definition of these words. There seldom has been a more efficient system for profiteering, through human debasement, than the plantations, of a while ago. Today, the whole world sits, as quietly scared as it can sit, afraid that, tomorrow, America may direct its efficiency and competence toward another forest for defoliation, or clean-cut laser-beam extermination."

"We, we know the individuality that isolates the man from other men, the either/or, the lonely-one that leads the flesh to clothing, jewelry, and land, the solitude of sight that separates the people from the people, flesh from flesh, that jams material between the spirit and the spirit. We have suffered witness to these pitiful, and murdering, masquerade extensions of the self.Instead, we choose a real, a living enlargement of our only life. We choose community."

"Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?"

"Most of the women of the world-Black and First World and white who work because we must-most of the women of the world persist far from the heart of the usual Women's Studies syllabus. Similarly, the typical Black History course will slide by the majority experience it pretends to represent. For example, Mary McLeod Bethune will scarcely receive as much attention as Nat Turner, even though Black women who bravely and efficiently provided for the education of Black people hugely outnumber those few Black men who led successful or doomed rebellions against slavery. In fact, Mary McLeod Bethune may not receive even honorable mention because Black History too often apes those ridiculous white history courses which produce such dangerous gibberish as The Sheraton British Colonial "history" of the Bahamas. Both Black and white history courses exclude from their central consideration those people who neither killed nor conquered anyone as the means to new identity, those people who took care of every one of the people who wanted to become "a person," those people who still take care of the life at issue: the ones who wash and who feed and who teach and who diligently decorate straw hats and bags with all of their historically unrequired gentle love: the women."

"1. “The People” shall not be defined as a group excluding or derogating anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, class, or age. 2. “The People” shall consciously undertake to respect and to encourage each other to feel safe enough to attempt the building of a community of trust in which all may try to be truthful and deeply serious in the messages they craft for the world to contemplate. 3. Poetry for the People rests upon a belief that the art of telling the truth is a necessary and a healthy way to create powerful, and positive, connections among people who, otherwise, remain (unknown and unaware) strangers. The goal is not to kill connections but, rather, to create and to deepen them among truly different men and women."

"As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life."

"Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?"

"I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience."

"Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations."

"If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic."

"I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up. I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again."

"I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide and I thought about how my father could not tell whether she was dead or alive. I wanted to get well and what I wanted to do as soon as I was strong, actually, what I wanted to do was I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death. And I thought about the idea of my mother as a good woman and I rejected that, because I don't see why it's a good thing when you give up, or when you cooperate with those who hate you or when you polish and iron and mend and endlessly mollify for the sake of the people who love the way that you kill yourself day by day silently. And I think all of this is really about women and work. Certainly this is all about me as a woman and my life work. I mean I am not sure my mother’s suicide was something extraordinary. Perhaps most women must deal with a similar inheritance, the legacy of a woman whose death you cannot possibly pinpoint because she died so many, many times and because, even before she became my mother, the life of that woman was taken; I say it was taken away."

"And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea we are the ones we have been waiting for"

"Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter. These poems speak to philosophy; they reveal the corners where we organize what we know."

"I feel like those words are going to be engraved on my tombstone. It was brought up every single time I did an interview. I apologized for it; I acknowledged it; I said it was true; I said it was a joke. Do I regret it? I used to regret. Not anymore. I don't regret anything anymore. Would I hope that I would never say something like that ever again? Yes. Am I capable of saying something like that again? I hope not."

"We have this expression, Christy and I: We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day."

"I want to be the George Clooney of music."

"I like the Coen brothers. Their films are smart and disturbing. I am very impressed by what George Clooney is doing now. He is very political. I like the fact that he did Oceans Eleven and Oceans Twelve, made all that money and then leveraged the money and his success into interesting projects. Johnny Depp has also set up a production company and is showing an interest in risky projects that will not be easy. I am sorry that it is hard for the average person, and even for an above-average person, to see a film that is not a Hollywood production. You see those films only in the festivals. There are few people there. That is worrying. People don't think. My goal in work is to make them think. The media do the opposite."

"Yes, I think it’s an obscene amount of money. You know we had some protesters last night when we pulled up in San Francisco – and they’re right to protest, they’re absolutely right, it’s an obscene amount of money. The Sanders campaign, when they talk about it, is absolutely right, it’s ridiculous that we should have this kind of money in politics, I agree."

"We’re very generous people, Americans. We gave a billion a year with the Sudan to protect and help people after these tragedies. We’re going to be involved one way or another; we’re going to be there. It would be a lot better without spending a single dime, without costing any American lives — to get in there now with robust diplomacy, hard-core diplomacy, freezing assets, freezing bank accounts, doing everything we can to protect the people who want to vote for the right to freedom... If you knew a tsunami or Katrina or a Haiti earthquake was coming, what would you do to save people?"

"The hardest thing is trying not to correct everything on the Internet. It'd be night and day—wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. So you just have to say, "All right, I'll take it, bring it on.""

"I'm terrified of waking up at 65 years old, which is getting closer, and to wake up and say I didn't do the things that I was supposed to do... as a citizen... As someone who is well-known, I... can help bring focus... And I try to, as a son of a journalist, when I take on those causes, to be really well informed so that they can't marginalize you or make you an idiot along the way."

"Murrow taking on McCarthy was one of the great high points in broadcast journalism, along with Cronkite stepping out from behind his desk and talking about how Vietnam doesn't work were two moments in broadcast journalism that you could point directly to and say actually changed American policy... I don't know a reporter that doesn't want to break a big news story. It is constantly the battle between commerce and news, or keeping entertainment from pushing the news off the air... I was looking to open a debate, to have a discussion, to be able to talk about issues that I think are important. It's simply saying, as Murrow says in the film, we have to find a way to find a safe place between the protection of the individual and the protection of the state at the same time."

"Some people think reality must be constantly depressing, but I think reality is something you rise above."

"If I give you romantic advice, don't take it. Look what's happening to me. I have the best taste in friends and the worst taste in husbands. I'm never getting married again. That's just stupid. There's no reason on Earth to do that."

"They used to have clauses and contracts where you can't get bad publicity or you'd get fired. But now bad publicity is good publicity. I just keep working and don't think about it much."

"You don’t know how to handle anything today, because you have to go to jail to get some press or fall down drunk."

"My mother once told me never be a second-rate version of somebody else when you can be a first-rate version of yourself."

"It really scared me to do what Mom did because I never did anything that she did. I promised her that I would never sing her songs, and I kept my promise. "You sing them better than anybody. I don't want to be a second-rate example of you. I want to be a first-rate example of myself.""

"I'm carrying on a tradition. But I'd rather be a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of somebody else. I'm proud of my parents, and the only way that I can prove it to them is to take what they gave me and work my head off."

"I don't sing them because I couldn't sing them as well as she did. I'd rather be a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of anybody."