June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation. Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture. Jordan was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in 2019. Early life Jordan was born in 1936 in Harlem, New York, as the only child of Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Maude Fisher, immigrants from Jamaica and Panama. Her father was a postal worker for the USPS and her mother was a part-time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. Jordan credits her father with passing on his love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven. Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood. She explores her complicated relationship with her father, who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but who would also beat her for the slightest misstep and call her "damn black devil child." In her 1986 essay "For My American Family", Jordan explores the many conflicts in growing up as the child of Jamaican immigrant parents, whose visions of their daughter's future far exceeded the urban ghettos of her present. Jordan's mother died by suicide. Jordan recalls her father telling her: "There was a war against colored people, I had to become a soldier." Jordan's education began in the New York City public school system, "beginning her studies at P.S. 26 elementary school." Jordan attended Brooklyn's Midwood High School for a year, beginning at age 12, before enrolling in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England. Both Milwood and Northfield had primarily white student bodies. Throughout her education, Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe" by attending predominantly white schools; however, she was also able to construct and develop her identity as a black American and a writer. In 1953, Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College in New York City. Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book of essays Civil Wars, writing: No one ever presented me