Jonathan Kozol and the Struggle Against U.S. Apartheid

We are the dust beneath your feet. We are the flowers that never bloom.

------beggars in Bombay ¹

Although bookshelves groan under the weight of tracts about U.S. racism, no one's writings on the topic are more unsettling than Jonathan Kozol's. He is among our greatest and most eloquent dissenters. He writes not from studied objectivity but with an impassioned conviction that sears the conscience and haunts the soul. His books, once read, stay with you; his insights, once seen, can never again be unseen. Horrors we once attributed to happenstance or personal failure are revealed by Kozol for what they are: our society's deliberate punishment of innocent poor people, whose very existence reminds us of moral failures we prefer to imagine do not exist.

Son of a doctor, raised in Boston, Kozol majored in English literature at Harvard, then won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. When he got to the elite university he felt as though he'd already been through the experience, as everybody at Harvard had spoken in a phony Oxford accent. Bored, he abandoned the scholarship and went to Paris, spending a couple of years trying to learn how to write from top-flight authors there at the time, including Richard Wright, William Styron, and James Baldwin.

He returned to the United States with the intention of going to graduate school and becoming an English professor, a career he says he "would have loved," but dramatic political events in 1964 brought a different destiny to the fore.

That summer, thousands of young civil rights workers - black and white - poured into Mississippi with the intention of breaking the back of segregation in the state. Three among them - James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman - went ahead of the rest to locate churches and other places where poor people could be taught to read and write well enough to register to vote. They were arrested in Philadelphia, Mississippi and released from jail late at night, then taken into the woods and shot to death by a group of men, including the deputy sheriff who had arrested them. Buried in an earthen dam, their bodies were not discovered until weeks later.

Black people had disappeared many times before without provoking a public response. But this time the three who went missing were a mixed-race group, and a wave of public alarm spread across the country at news of its disappearance. Young people in particular felt an urge to do something.

The day Kozol was supposed to enroll in graduate school at Cambridge, he got in his car and drove to South Boston instead. Entering a black church, he asked the minister, "May I be of use?" The minister replied, "Yes, you can, young man," and congratulated him for realizing that one did not need to go all the way to Mississippi to find black people who needed his help. He told Kozol he could help black children learn to read right there in Boston.

Kozol worked briefly as a volunteer tutor in the church program and then applied to be a substitute teacher in Boston, a move his father cautioned him was a waste of his Rhodes Scholarship. His first assignment was a fourth grade class of thirty-five students (two-thirds black) that had had a string of substitutes all year, and studied in the corner of an auditorium, as there were not enough classrooms to go around.²

Kozol quickly discovered that his students were far short of where they were supposed to be academically: nearly a third of the class read two years behind grade level, and on the first math test, the class average was 36%.³ And the children were frankly wary of Kozol, wondering if he, too, would soon abandon them like all the other teachers had.

One shy student began mumbling to himself and was sent to the assistant principal in the school basement, who beat him with a bamboo whip.* Kozol's colleagues told him to go to the teacher supply store and get his own whip. He went, and verified that whips were indeed a classroom management tool available for purchase right next to the blackboard pointers. A fellow-teacher instructed him on how to properly use one: "Leave it (the whip) overnight in vinegar or water if you want it to really sting the hands." 

The cruelty was more than a perverse professional duty. Kozol wrote that there were times when "the visible glint of gratification becomes undeniable" in the eyes of the teacher using the whip, as it undoubtedly also had in the eyes of slave-masters down through the generations.⁴ (Sadly, over sixty years later Kozol reports that physical beatings continue in many states.)⁵

In spite of the shockingly common physical and psychological abuse, Kozol learned that he was expected to pretend that everything was fine at the school.

"You children should thank God and feel blessed with good luck for all you've got," his colleagues preached. "There are so many little children in the world who have been given so much less."

Kozol jotted in his notes why the claim was preposterous: "The books are junk, the paint peels, the cellar stinks, the teachers call you nigger, and the windows fall in on your heads," the latter a reference to a window that fell out of its rotting frame while he was teaching one day, and which Kozol quickly grabbed, a heads-up reaction that "very possibly preserved the original shapes of half a dozen of their heads," he wrote later.⁶

Given such conditions, the children were naturally distrustful, and it took Kozol until spring to win them over. Eager to spark their interest in anything, it occurred to him that there was nothing relevant to their lives in the boring textbook he had been assigned to teach from. Almost all the faces shown in the book were white, a monotony broken only occasionally by a lightly tan face.

Determined to find some way to engage the students, he went to the Cambridge library and checked out a book of poems by Langston Hughes and brought it to class. He read several of the poems aloud, including "Ballad of the Landlord," a defiant verse depicting slum conditions with raw honesty. In response, a girl Kozol had been unable to reach all year, promptly got up from her seat, walked almost the entire perimeter of the classroom to arrive where Kozol was, then gently caressed his shoulder and said, "Thank you," before asking him if she could borrow the book overnight. That night, the girl memorized the poem, came back to class the next day and recited it to her classmates, reducing them to tears. 

A day after that, Kozol was unceremoniously fired, an event that made headlines in the Boston Globe - "Rhodes Scholar fired!" He was not even allowed to say goodbye to his students. The cause of termination was "curriculum deviation," as Langston Hughes was considered "inappropriate" material for fourth grade students, and "Ballad of the Landlord" was not on the approved list of poems.

"No poetry that described suffering was felt to be suitable," Kozol wrote later, nor was "Negro dialect" considered appropriate in an English class.⁷ A school official told Kozol that his offense was so serious that he would never again be hired to teach in a Boston public school.

The parents of Kozol's students were outraged, partly out of loyalty to him, but also because of the Langston Hughes incident. They and Kozol founded a Free School the following year, run by the mothers, with Kozol as head teacher.

Kozol's next public school position was in Newton, an attractive suburb where many of his new colleagues were fine teachers directed by an accomplished principal, and all enjoyed much more attractive physical surroundings than anything he had seen in Roxbury. Still, Kozol missed the depth of involvement he had experienced his first year, and found he wanted to return to Roxbury. So in 1965 he moved there, describing his new neighborhood a decade later in the pages of The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home: 

"Twenty thousand people live here. With the exception of two redeveloped and well-demarcated sections of the district, most of the residents are Puerto Rican, black, poor-white, Chinese or Lebanese. In one direction or another, it encompasses approximately fifty square blocks. Many buildings have been boarded up; some are still partly occupied, one or two families camping out in partly heated rooms. There are many broken-down rooming houses, crumbling brownstones, urine-smelling city welfare-projects. In the alleyways and on the fringes of this neighborhood there are large numbers of poor derelicts; solitary men and penniless old women, dozens of whom die along the sidewalks or between the cars each winter, two thousand heroin addicts and four thousand homeless men, many of them alcoholics who live on the cheapest brand of sweet wine. The largest numbers, though, are neither derelicts nor alcoholics. They are the poor, the black, the undefended."⁸

In surroundings such as these, Kozol could not avoid a constant and painful confrontation between his own class background and that of the mass of poor people who lived all around him. It took all of his considerable literary talent to describe this loss of innocence, but he did so brilliantly, as in this haunting passage:

"BOSTON, BLUE HILL AVENUE, TEN DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS: A child falls down in the middle of Grove Hall. She is epileptic, but her sickness either has not yet been diagnosed or else (more probable) it has been diagnosed, but never treated. Tall and thin, fourteen years old, she is intense and sober, devastated but unhating. Her life is a staccato sequence of grand mal convulsions: no money, no assistance, no advice on how to get a refill of expensive script for more Dilantin and more phenobarbital. 

"This night, she comes downstairs into the office where I work within the coat-room underneath the church-stairs of a Free School: standing there and asking me please if I would close the door and hold her head within my arms because she knows that she is going to have an epileptic seizure; and closing the door and sitting down upon the cold cement while she lies down and places her head within my arms and starts to shudder violently and moves about so that I scarcely can protect her wracked and thin young body from the cement wall and from the concrete floor; and seeing her mouth writhe up with pain and spittle, and feeling her thrash about a second time and now a third; and, in between, the terror closing in upon her as in a child's bad dream that you can't get out of, and watching her then, and wondering what she undergoes; and later seeing her, exhausted, sleeping there, right in my arms, as at the end of long ordeal, all passion in her spent; then taking her out into my car and driving with her to the City Hospital while she, as epileptics very often feel, keeps saying that she is going to have another seizure; and slamming on the brakes and walking with her in the back door where they receive out-patient cases, and being confronted on this winter night at nine P.M. in Boston in the year of 1965 with a scene that comes from Dante's Purgatory: dozens and dozens of poor white, black and Puerto Rican people, infants and mothers, old men, alcoholics, men with hands wrapped up in gauze, and aged people trembling, infants trembling with fever; one hostile woman in white uniform behind the table telling us, out of a face made, as it seems, of clay, that we should fill an application out, some sort of form, a small white sheet, then sit out in the hallway since the waiting room is full; and then to try to say this child has just had several seizures in a row and needs treatment, and do we need to do the form; and yes, of course you need to do the form and wait your turn and not think you have any special right to come ahead of someone else who has been sitting here before you.

"Two hours and four seizures later, you get up and go in and shout in her cold eyes and walk right by and grab an intern and tell him to come out and be a doctor to an epileptic child sitting like a damp rag in the hallway; and he comes out, and in two minutes gives this child an injection that arrests the seizures and sedates her, then writes the script for more Dilantin and for phenobarbitol and shakes his head and says to you that it's a damn shame: 'Nobody needs to have en epileptic seizure in this day and age . . . Nobody but a poor black nigger,' says the intern in a sudden instant of that rage that truth and decency create. He nearly cries, and in his eyes you see a kind of burning pain that tells you that he is a good man somehow, deep-down, someplace where it isn't all cold stone, clean surgery and antiseptic reason: 'Nobody but a poor black nigger needs to have an epileptic seizure anymore.'

"So you take her home and you go back to the church, down to the office beneath the stairs, and look at the floor, and listen to the silence, and you are twenty-eight years old, and you begin to cry; you cry for horror of what that young girl has just been through; and you long not to believe that this can be the city that you really live in. You fight very hard to lock up that idea because it threatens all the things that you have wanted to believe for so long; so you sit alone a while and you try to lock these bitter passions into secret spaces of your self-control. You try to decontaminate your anger and to organize your rage; but you can't do it this time; you just can't build that barrier of logical control a second time. It's eleven o'clock now, and soon it's quarter of twelve; and it's cold as stone down here beneath the wooden underside of the church-stairs, and still you can't stop trembling. Grand mal, you think to yourself, means a great evil; it's twelve-fifteen and now you are no longer crying so you get up and you lock the door of the coat-closet which is the office of a Free School underneath the church-stairs; and you go up the stairs and turn out the light and then you close the door."⁹

Kozol stayed in Roxbury long term, honoring the loyalties he had formed in his first teaching year, and continuing what would become a life-long battle against poverty and educational apartheid. In fact, he formed loyalties wherever he could find them in the struggle against such evils, in the 1970s even traveling to Cuba to learn about the island's astonishing success in its 1961 literacy campaign, which reduced Cuban illiteracy to under five percent in nine months, while the Latin American median remained 32.5%.¹⁰ An appreciative Kozol commented: “Cuba's triumph in the eradication of illiteracy . . . exceeded anything that has to this day been achieved by any other nation in the world.”¹¹

The means employed were as impressive as the outcome. Thousands of Cuban children spent most of a year risking their lives and working like demons while living on six hours sleep a night in the same houses and sometimes even the same rooms as some of the poorest peasants in the country, their hammocks slung above dirt floors. This remarkable story Kozol published in “Children of the Revolution – A Yankee Teacher In The Cuban Schools” in 1978.

“Cuba had been weakened for centuries,” he wrote, “by the isolation of the peasants and the consequent inability of urban students to identify with rural poverty and exploitation.” Building a sense of solidarity between these two groups was both a goal and consequence of the literacy campaign.¹²

As he did in all his works, Kozol sought out usually unheard voices and let them speak for themselves. One of those he spoke to in Cuba was Armando Valdez, a twelve-year-old “teacher” who participated in the literacy campaign and later became a member of the Cuban foreign service: “I never could have known that people lived in such conditions,” Valdez told him. “I was the child of an educated, comfortable family. Those months, for me, were like the stories I have heard about conversion to a new religion. It was, for me, the dying of an old life, and the start of something absolutely new. I cried, although I had been taught men must not cry, when I first saw the desperation of those people – people who had so little . . . No, they did not have 'so little,' they had nothing!”¹³

Contrast this painful but valuable insight with Kozol's remarkable description of how the vast majority of Americans are trained to never see poverty at all:

“There is one city in North Africa I know which never has found its way into the textbooks issued to the children in the U.S. schools. It is a city that has, for several decades, been a diplomatic colony – almost a military outpost – of the U.S. government. Each morning, U.S. diplomats and businessmen and military attaches, their wives and children come out from the hotel doorway and proceed across the city square. Outside the hotel, in a long, long line of silence, patience and despair, are dozens of very old and often crippled people, wrapped all in white, the women in white veils as well, and often with a quite small child standing at the side of mother or grandfather.

“At eight A.M., as the sun comes up above the city square, the oldest people will be standing straight with palm outstretched before them, the other hand resting gently on the child's head, the child's palm outstretched as well. By twelve o'clock, the oldest people start to bend somewhat, forehead declined beneath the heat of noon, eyes closing slightly. By night, the old, old people are asleep, or half-asleep, asleep in pain, in fixed and frightening immobility there against the long white silence of the wall beneath the evening heat.

“The Americans pass, and pass again, as they go to and fro in crisp bright jackets, seersucker and cord, attractive people, clever and adept, graceful and well-tailored in the modulation of their own compassionate reactions. Children at times will pull their mother's or their father's arm, or cry, or shudder, or in other ways react to what they see. Mother is cool and calm, well-bred and cleanly limbed and neatly dressed for travel. Father is concerned about his government assignment or his business plans.

“At midnight often, when the hotel guests return from various places they have been, voices shrill and bright with good delight and memory of fine colonial service in some French or British club, the old blind beggars have fallen down the full length of the wall, unspeaking, uncomplaining and, but for the slow decline along that wall, unmoving since the dawn. Crouched, huddled now, stooped over, bent in one white triangle of silence, anaesthesia and oblivion, the beggar slumbers at the bottom of the day's long journey downward while infant, borrowed companion or grandchild sleeps as well, curled up against the older person's side, sores on forehead, scars and scabs and growths all over legs and arms, feet filthy, small toes bare, but hand still open, outstretched still, with palm still pleading even in the sleep of midnight on this silent street, where only the attractive young Americans from New York or from San Francisco might still chance to come by once, and shudder once, then to move on to customary and appropriate places of refined and air-conditioned slumber.

“The child, unsophisticated, cries or questions. His parents, better instructed in the disciplines of North American adulthood, know well by know how to control their sense of unrest and to keep on with the evening's pleasure. If they ever stop to think about this street of misery at all, it might be only to persuade themselves that what they see before them is, in some way, spurious or inauthentic: a trick to fool the heart or to subvert the mind. In any event, they can assure themselves that grief and pain of this variety and on this scale are unrelated to the world of glass and steel in which they work and dwell.

“At worst, it is a matter of marginally perceived despair that is permitted to exist somehow within the same world as seersucker and fresh linen. Connections there are none: causations there are not any. They are Americans: rich, fortunate, well-educated, skillful. These others in the white veils are, admittedly, real people, but not rich, or fortunate, well-educated, skillful. Clean steel edges in the secret places of the well-indoctrinated brain have drawn explicit demarcations. Things break down into acceptable divisions. They are, indeed, well-educated: trained and schooled to logical postures of oblivion and acceptable self-interest. They live in one world: the starving beggars and their desperate children in another. It is a property of reason, of good sense and civilized adulthood, both to respect and understand the space that stands between.”¹⁴

Such obliviousness leads to schizophrenic social policy praising civil rights leaders (in our better moments) while perpetuating an informal segregation not all that different from the Jim Crow version they achieved their fame opposing.  Schools named after champions of integration like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Thurgood Marshall, Kozol has pointed out for years, invariably denote failing, segregated schools housed in old, filthy, ugly, often rat-infested buildings with the largest class sizes, the lowest funding, the highest turnover of teachers, and the worst outcomes, including the lowest graduation rates. 

A 14-year-old East St. Louis girl Kozol talked to for his book Savage Inequalities told him that it seemed like a "terrible joke" was being played on history: "Every year in February we are told to read the same old speech of Martin Luther King. We read it every year . . . We have a school in East St. Louis named for Dr. King. The school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every student in that school is black."¹⁵ Very seldom, comments Kozol, does any member of the capitalist press point out the dark irony in this glaring feature of our “equal opportunity” society.

At the other end of the spectrum are wealthy white kids, who, Kozol has often noted, tend to lose their verbal competence and stumble when serious questions of poverty, inequality, and injustice are on the table for discussion. As long as such topics are treated superficially, as though they were an abstract consideration instead of a matter of humanity and conscience, such students remain clever and adept at expressing their views, which are often glazed over with a "What's in it for us?" cynicism. Kozol warns that such self-interested competence may have been won by sacrificing access to the deepest and perhaps most valuable parts of their being: "The verbal competence they have acquired here may have been gained by building walls around some regions of the heart," he says.¹⁶

No such walling oneself off from pain is possible for poor people. When Kozol once asked an 11-year-old girl in the South Bronx how AIDS orphans handle their ordeal, she replied softly, but without hesitation: "They cry. They suffer. People die. They pray."¹⁷

James Baldwin once noted that the U.S. originally needed black people “for labor and for sport,” but that, “now they can't get rid of us.” The urge to be rid of the “problem” of race relations by warehousing black and brown bodies in ghettoes far from affluent areas puts the exploitation well out of sight and completely out of mind, a great convenience for a capitalist social order that does not want to be reminded of the cost of making profit the only goal that counts. A 16-year-old girl Kozol spoke to in the South Bronx for his book Amazing Grace said she thought white people would actually feel relieved if all the poor people died or somehow vanished. Another teenager ventured his opinion that the hideous conditions of the ghetto might even be viewed optimistically by whites, in hopes that,"maybe they'll kill each other off."¹⁸

"A sense of justified and prophetic rage," says Kozol, is voiced freely by Harlem kids, but never by the press, which prefers to refer to "racial sensitivities" and "racial tensions," but not exploitation and injustice.¹⁹ In this, the kids are more straightforward than the journalists, who know that successful careers are not built on exposing official lies about American apartheid.

Ironically, Kozol never had children of his own, though his love for them is palpable and he has spent his life among the most vulnerable of them. Some of those he befriended years ago who survived the ordeal he writes so eloquently about, today help him out in his old age, undoubtedly a great blessing for a man who turns ninety in September. Meanwhile, Kozol will publish one final book - We Shall Not Bow Down - later this month.

This is what solidarity looks like - not slogans or ideological fights - but sensible people banding together and solving their common problems with courage and intelligence. As poverty widens amidst capitalism's ever-accelerating barbarism, few lessons seem quite so important to remember.

 

*A quarter-century after publishing Death At An Early Age, Kozol provided an update on this boy in Savage Inequalities, who was an eight-year old orphan in 1965. Never given psychiatric care or counseling, he was repeatedly whipped. He had one delightful talent - drawing pictures - which the art teacher at the school shredded in front of the class while saying, "he muddies his pants." In response, the humiliated boy stabbed a pencil point into his hand. Seven years later he was an alcoholic living on the streets, demonically laughing at passersby. Three years after that he was in jail, his face "scarred and ugly," Kozol wrote, his head marked with jagged lines where it had been badly stitched together after being shattered by a baseball bat. He was serving a 20-year sentence for murder.

Footnotes

1Jonathan Kozol, “Letters To A Young Teacher,” (Crown, 2007) p. 61

2Jonathan Kozol, “Death At An Early Age,” (Bantam, 1967) p. 29

3Kozol, ibid, p. 190

4Kozol, ibid, p. 18

5Jonathan Kozol, “An End To Inequality,” (New Press, 2024) pps. xiv, 35-39

6Jonathan Kozol, “Death At An Early Age,” (Bantam, 1967) pps. 32-3

7Kozol, ibid, p. 202

8Jonathan Kozol, “The Night Is Dark And I Am Far From Home,” (Continuum, 1975) p. 41

9Kozol, ibid, pps. 59-61

10Jonathan Kozol, “Children of the Revolution,” (Delacorte Press, 1978) p. 54

11Kozol, ibid, p. 49

12Kozol, ibid, p. 22

13Kozol, ibid, p. 22

14Jonathan Kozol, “The Night Is Dark And I Am Far From Home,” (Continuum, 1975) pps. 36-7

 

15Jonathan Kozol, “Savage Inequalities,” (Crown, 1991) pps. 34-5

16Kozol, ibid, p. 127

17Jonathan Kozol, “Amazing Grace,” (Crown, 1995) p. 131

18Kozol, ibid, p. 40

19Kozol, ibid, p. 42

Sources

Jonathan Kozol, "The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," Portland Oregon, September 30, 2005

Source: "Social Justice In Education with Jonathan Kozol," DePaul College of Education, November 7, 2017

“Beyond Divides: A Conversation With Author Jonathan Kozol,” www.appleseednetwork.org April 24, 2024

Jonathan Kozol, “Death At An Early Age,” (Bantam, 1967)

Jonathan Kozol, “The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home,” (Continuum, 1975)

Jonathan Kozol, “An End To Inequality,” (New Press, 2024)

Jonathan Kozol, “Children of the Revolution,” (Delacorte Press, 1978)

Jonathan Kozol, “Savage Inequalities,” (Crown, 1991)

Jonathan Kozol, “Letters To A Young Teacher,” (Crown, 2007)

Jonathan Kozol, “Amazing Grace,” (Crown, 1995)