131 Quotes by June Jordan

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.

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

The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.

The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity -- the incredibly outgoing energy -- of righteous rage.