Quote

In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of dissent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.

June Jordan

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June Jordan
Age: 65 †
Born: 1936
Born: July 9
Died: 2002
Died: June 14
Essayist
Lgbtiq+ Rights Activist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Harlem
New York
June Millicent Jordan
Experience
Equal
Original
Segregation
America
Groups
Slavery
Dissent
Problem
Problems
Issue
Wasted
States
Issues
Spread
Unemployment
Think
Rights
Group
Hasn
Segregate
Thinking
State
Travel
Target
Measles
Like
White
Drug
Drugs
Supposedly
People
Black
Crime
Originals
Suppression

More quotes by June Jordan

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In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
June Jordan
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To believe is to become what you believe.
June Jordan
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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.
June Jordan
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The United States Supreme Court, once a reliable if ultimate recourse for progressive and even revolutionary grievances, has become a retrograde wellspring for enormous economic and social distress.
June Jordan
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To tell the truth is to become beautiful.
June Jordan
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... if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force? What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart, and that attempts to dictate the public career of an honest human body?
June Jordan
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In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
June Jordan
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But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.
June Jordan
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We are the ones we've been waiting for.
June Jordan
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It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.
June Jordan
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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.
June Jordan
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What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?
June Jordan
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The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet
June Jordan
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What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.
June Jordan
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To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.
June Jordan
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We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.
June Jordan
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A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.
June Jordan
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If any of us hopes to survive, she 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.
June Jordan
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Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
June Jordan
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and if i if i ever let love go because the hatred and the whisperings become a phantom dictate i o- bey in lieu of impulse and realities (the blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees) then let love freeze me out. (from i must become a menace to my enemies)
June Jordan