CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Jonathan Kozol and the Struggle Against U.S. Apartheid

Kozol in 2011. Photograph Source: Tim – Jonathan Kozol Uploaded by czar – CC BY 2.0

We are the dust beneath your feet. We are the flowers that never bloom. – Beggars in Bombay 1

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........

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