THE CREATIVE SPIRIT + HOPE 

"I want to say to children that I love you and that you are beautiful and amazing regardless whether you are—and also precisely because you are—Black or female or poor or small or an only child or the son of parents divorced: you are beautiful and amazing: and when you love yourself truly then you will become like a swan released in the grace of natural and spontaneous purpose. 

And I want to say to children let us look at hunger, at famine around the world, and let us consider together, you at five years of age, and me at forty-one, how we can, how we must eliminate this genocide, this terror. 

And I want to say to children let us look at tiger lilies blooming to their own astonishment, and learn to cherish their own form and orderliness and freedom for our own. 

And I want to say to children, tell me what you think and what you see and what you dream so that I may hope to honor you. 

And I want these things for children, because I want these things for myself, and for all of us, because unless we embody these attitudes and precepts as the governing rules of our love, and of our political commitment to survive, we will love in vain, and we will certainly not survive. 

I believe that the creative spirit is nothing less than love made manifest. 

And I deeply hope that we can make love powerful because, otherwise, there will be no reason for hope." 

— June Jordan, "The Creative Spirit: Children's Literature" 1977
speech at UC Berkley, re-printed in Revolutionary Mothering