June Jordan was born (July 9, 1936) in Harlem to Jamaican immigrant parents. Her father, Granville, was a postal clerk, and her mother, Mildred, was a part-time nurse.(Jordan described her childhood once, saying, "I was relatively small, short, and, in some ways, a target for bully abuse. My father was the first regular bully in my life and there were many days when my uncle pounded down the two flights of stairs in our house to grab the chair, or the knife, or whatever, from my father's hands".)[1] When Jordan was five, the family moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant. (For most of high school Jordan was sent to a prep school, by her parents, where she was the only black student.)[2] In 1953, Jordan enrolled at Barnard College.((During her time at Barnard College Jordan eventually became dissatisfied, stating in her book Civil War "No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that i learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America." These feelings would eventually cause her to leave before receiving her degree. While attending school she) met a Columbia University student, Michael Meyer. (The couple married in 1955, an interracial marriage that would last ten and a half years before getting a divorce leaving Jordan responsible for their son Christopher.)[3]