Death
Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, aged 65. She was survived by her son, Christopher Meyer. The June Jordan School for Equity, or JJSE (formerly known as the Small School for Equity) in San Francisco was named after her by the founding group of students who, through a democratic process of research, debate, and voting, chose her over Philip Vera Cruz and Ella Baker.
Shortly before her death, she completed Some of Us Did Not Die, her seventh collection of political essays (and 27th book), which was published posthumously. In it she describes how her early marriage to a white student while at Barnard College immersed her in the racial turmoil of America in the 1950s, and set her on the path of social activism.
Read more about this topic: June Jordan
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Voice number one says,
“I am the leaves. I am the martyred.
Come unto me with death for I am the siren.
I am forty young girls in green shells....””
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“We term sleep a death ... by which we may be literally said to die daily; in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers.”
—Thomas Browne (1605–1682)