Essay Collection: Some of Us Did Not Die

Overview

Some of Us Did Not Die gathers a powerful lifetime of June Jordan's essays, articles, and speeches into a single volume that testifies to her fierce moral intelligence and unflinching commitment to justice. The pieces range from intimate meditations to trenchant cultural criticism, reflecting decades of engagement with the political and literary worlds. The collection moves between personal memory and public argument, showing how lived experience and political analysis can illuminate one another.

Themes and Subjects

Recurring concerns include racial justice, gender and sexuality, education, immigrant rights, and the responsibilities of writers. Jordan interrogates how language shapes social power while insisting that naming injustice has ethical force. Her work consistently centers African American identity and struggle without isolating them from broader debates about democracy, freedom, and human dignity.

Voice and Style

Jordan's prose blends lyricism and polemic: sentences can be precise and forensic one moment, incandescent and poetic the next. She favors direct address and rhetorical urgency, often writing as a witness and as a teacher. Humor, tenderness, and righteous anger coexist in paragraphs that aim both to persuade and to console.

Form and Range

The volume includes political speeches, magazine essays, reflective memoir pieces, and literary criticism, demonstrating Jordan's versatility. A teacher's instincts shape many pieces; she frequently models how to read texts and histories with an ethic of care. Her engagements with other writers, both canonical and marginalized, reveal a deep devotion to literature as a site of struggle and possibility.

Notable Pieces and Moments

Several essays stand out for their clarity and forceful insight, moving from personal recollection to systemic critique with ease. Portraits of everyday resistance sit alongside analyses of institutional racism and the politics of language. Moments of autobiographical revelation provide emotional ballast to sharper polemics, making abstract claims feel urgent and embodied.

Politics and Ethics

Jordan's activism informs every page: she writes with the conviction that intellectual work must be allied to social movements. Her critiques of the criminal justice system, educational inequities, and media distortions are grounded in an ethic that privileges human dignity and collective responsibility. In argument and anecdote she models a politics of accountability that resists cynicism.

Impact and Legacy

The collection captures why June Jordan mattered to multiple generations of readers: she taught how to speak truth in public, how to refuse erasure, and how to treat language as both weapon and balm. Her insistence on intersectional thinking, long before the term was widely used, makes the essays feel remarkably prescient. For writers, activists, and readers seeking moral clarity and rhetorical courage, the volume offers sustained exemplars.

Why Read It Now

The essays remain urgent because many of the structural problems Jordan addresses persist, and because her method of combining personal testimony with rigorous analysis remains instructive. The volume is as useful for its arguments as for its example: it shows how to write in a way that refuses to separate art from struggle, grief from hope. Her voice continues to call readers toward clearer attention and firmer commitment to justice.