For Black History Month 2021, I posted a profile on or poems by Black poet-activists every weekend. The selected poets, some of them still alive today, were a cohort of seminal writers and intellectuals whose work may not be highlighted within a traditional school setting or by mainstream news coverage due to the erasure of radical Black activists, LGBTQ+ and SGL members of the Black community, chronically ill and disabled members of the Black community, and misogynoir. Read below to learn more about them, their work, and Black people who are continuing their work today as well as terms and ideas coined and named by them that you can further research.
JUNE JORDAN: June Jordan was a Jamaican American poet, educator, essayist, and activist. She penned nearly thirty volumes of often deeply biographical work over the span of her career and founded Poetry for the People (P4P), an arts and activist program focused on teaching and making poetry accessible.
Jordan started writing when she was seven years old. The only Black student at her high school, Jordan earned a scholarship to the then-named Northfield School for Girls. She attended Barnard College and graduated with a bachelor's, going on to teach at Yale and Sarah Lawrence.
She was a part of the 1960s Congress of Racial Equality organized Freedom Fighters. Black and white civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into parts of the segregated United States South. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that segregated bus seating and interstate transportation facilities were unconstitutional (Morgan v. Virginia in 1946 and Boynton v. Virginia in 1960). Everybody knew nobody was enforcing those decisions down South. Black bus-riders knew they would still be subject to Jim Crow, and so the Riders challenged lawmakers and enforcement to actually follow through on the Supreme Court's rulings. The riders were often arrested and attacked by white supremacists. Their protests helped draw international attention to the civil rights movement.
Known as the "Poet of Her People", Jordan was on the cutting edge of consciousness when it came to expressing how the personal is deeply political. She was a member of the Black Power, feminist, antiwar, gay and lesbian rights movements, and all of those interlocking identities were explored intimately and brilliantly in her poems, speeches, and essays. She proclaimed a vision of liberation for all people and, as the Poetry Foundation puts it, "frequently imagine[d] a radical, globalized notion of solidarity among the world's marginalized and oppressed." She wrote about the importance of portraying Black people with dignity, especially in their death, and how Black women (especially SGL Black women), were expected to champion everyone's causes and liberation and yet could rely on no one but themselves to fully champion them.
June Jordan purposefully wrote in Black English and once said, "Language is political. That's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law." Though Jordan passed away in 2002 of breast cancer, her voice continues to set the groundwork for conversations and creative writing on interlocking oppression, writing about Black family life, and radically imagining the liberation of all of the world's disenfranchised peoples.
June Jordan essays, speeches, and poetry for further reading:
- "Where is the Love?" Jordan's essay on how Black feminism is a crucial act of love.
- Jordan's 1997 National Black Lesbian & Gay Leadership Forum speech on intersectionality and the erasure of bisexuality.
- "Oughta Be a Woman" Jordan's poem on the expectations and demands put on Black women.
- "July 4th, 1874" Jordan's poem on watching her son step into his legacy.
- "Poem for My Love" a poem whose title pretty much says it all.
Related:
Research: Kimberle Williams Crenshaw and the theory of intersectionality.
Remember: The Combahee River Collective and the CORE Freedom Rides
JAMES BALDWIN: James Baldwin was a Black writer and educator who employed radical truth-telling when covering topics such as disillusionment with the American Dream and the future of the U.S.
James Baldwin was born in 1924 and became a youth minister in a Harlem Pentecostal church in his mid-teens. By high school, his literary prowess was already becoming obvious to those around him. He published plays, short stories, and poems in his school's magazine. He graduated in 1942 and, in order to support his seven younger siblings, put college on hold and worked whatever jobs he could find. He encountered workplace racial discrimination that barred him from garnering positions at restaurants and other establishments.
After his stepfather passed, Baldwin befriended writer Richard Wright and, with his help, landed a fellowship. His work began attracting the attention of national publications. Soon after, Baldwin earned a fellowship in Paris. There, he began to write more freely about race, its personal and political implications, and what it meant to be Black, part of the same-gender-loving community, the recent descendant of enslaved peoples, and a writer both in the U.S. and in the world as a whole.
He thoroughly explored many intersecting and taboo topics in his works, fleshing out how it felt to be a perpetual outsider in the eyes of dominant society and in your own communities. He wrote about interracial relationships, Black men who loved Black men, and through his writing emerged as a leading voice within the Civil Rights Movement.
TW: Extreme acts of anti-Black violence mentioned in the following two paragraphs.
Baldwin's essays and poems are some of his best know works, although he also penned Broadway plays. One, Blues for Mister Charlie, was based loosely on the life and lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till in 1955. He also memorialized the murdered Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers through his writing. He felt it was his duty to show the U.S. its true self, bear witness, and remember.
As he grew older and witnessed the assassinations of Malcolm X and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he became more and more bitter about the state of and future of the United States. It doesn't seem coincidental that it was around this time that critics felt he'd "shifted" and his literary fame began to decline.
Baldwin continued writing right up until his passing from cancer in 1987. Though not all of his works were fully valued while he was alive. Baldwin's truth-telling radically shaped how many people comprehended and conceptualized race and themselves as multifaceted human beings.
James Baldwin essays, speeches, and poetry for further reading:
- "The Giver (for Berdis)" Baldwin's poem on community and giving.
- "Untitled" Baldwin's poem addressed to the Lord about rain.
- "I Am Not Your Negro" a Netflix film based on Baldwin's life and unfinished work.
Related:
Research: Jesmyn Ward and and her collection The Fire This Time
Remember: Medgar Evers.
Thank you for reading!