Kozol Calls on Community to Help Stop Segregation

Jonathan Kozol in Chapin Auditorium (photo by Fred LeBlanc)

On the day that Rosa Parks, mother of the civil rights movement, passed away, and 51 years after the Supreme Court banned segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, writer and education critic Jonathan Kozol painted a bleak picture of the country’s inner-city schools before a packed audience of students, faculty, staff, and community members in Chapin Auditorium on Tuesday, October 25. Kozol’s lecture on his latest book, Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, was part of the Weissman Center’s Law and Dis/Order fall series. Lois Brown, director of the center, introduced Kozol and spoke of Rosa Parks’s unforgettable mark on history and invited the audience to stand for a moment of silence in honor of her passing.

A passionate, even angry Kozol, 69, spoke of his days teaching in public schools in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he was fired for a “curriculum deviation” after reading a Langston Hughes poem to his class. He spoke of his involvement with the civil rights movement and sitting at the feet of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He spoke of his visits to more than 50 inner-city public schools across the country, which he said look no different from segregated schools in Mississippi or Alabama in 1935 and have the lowest level of white students since the death of King in 1968. He spoke on how more than half of eligible students in urban areas are denied entry into the development program Head Start while their wealthy counterparts are getting three solid years of prekindergarten preparation, for which some parents pay $22,000 a year, and of “high stakes” testing that starts in kindergarten, when poor children don’t even know how to hold a pencil properly. And he spoke of children like Pineapple, whom he described as “like a young Oprah Winfrey,” whose Bronx school spends $11,000 per student each year in comparison with the $19,000 she would get at a school just ten minutes to the north. “In church they say that all children have equal value in the eyes of God, but not in the eyes of America, because of the archaic, unjust way we finance education,” Kozol said.

For 40 years, Kozol has been an active voice for educational equality in inner-city schools. Admittedly not a social scientist, Kozol has written of observations and human interactions, not numbers and figures, leading critics to accuse him of “not giving statistics, only writing about things he knows.” So Kozol said to himself, “I’m gonna get me some statistics.” For five years he visited schools throughout the country, where he saw firsthand the extent of segregation that has occurred. Of the 11,000 students in the South Bronx elementary schools, exactly 26 were white. “I may not be good at math, but I can do long division, and that’s a segregation rate of 99.8 percent,” Kozol said, labeling it a socially and economically enforced apartheid. “The real heartbreak of it,” said Kozol, “is that if you want to see a really segregated school, just ask for one that’s named for Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks or Thurgood Marshall.” They are “ugly, smelly schools in old buildings with the least funding,” he said, pleading that we “save the name of Dr. King for a school that lives up to his name.”

Kozol’s aim was not to make the audience gloomy, but to make them angry, and to call them to action. “When I meet young souls devoted to social justice, I persuade them to come into teaching, the frontline of democracy.” Kozol said that it will take another civil rights movement to fix the problem, and he called upon young people to learn from the old organizers while they’re still alive. “This book is an invocation to young people to join the abolition of apartheid,” he said, while sympathizing with students who are afraid of taking a chance, or going against what their parents want them to do. “I count on the youth to refresh this weary earth,” he said. “It’s going to take some risks, don’t be scared of risks.… There’s nothing wrong with ruining a few Thanksgiving dinners for the sake of a good cause.”

Apparently, the audience agreed, as they gave Kozol a rousing standing ovation before queuing up around the stage to meet Kozol and get signed copies of his book.

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