Life & Wisdom Quote by June Jordan

The line lands like a snapped cable: respectful of the movement, impatient with its rules. When June Jordan says, "CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not", she isn’t performing macho rebellion; she’s staging a moral argument about what violence actually is and who gets blamed for it. CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) made nonviolence not just a tactic but a public identity, a way to claim legitimacy in a country eager to romanticize Black suffering as long as it remained polite. Jordan’s blunt "but" rejects the demand that the oppressed audition for citizenship by absorbing harm gracefully.

The subtext is less "I want to hit back" than "I refuse the script". Nonviolence, in American political culture, often becomes a test of decorum rather than a strategy - a way to discipline Black anger while leaving white violence and state power unexamined. Jordan’s phrasing yanks the conversation from personal temperament to structural coercion: if the world is already violent (policing, poverty, segregation), then insisting on nonviolence can read as asking the targeted to be the only ones disarmed.

It also signals a generational and ideological shift within civil rights history: from integrationist optics toward Black Power skepticism, from faith in moral suasion to a harder appraisal of self-defense, survival, and autonomy. Jordan compresses that pivot into nine words, and the sting comes from how calmly she refuses to reassure anyone. The sentence doesn’t invite comfort; it demands accountability for why comfort was ever the price of justice.