Jonathan Kozol Quotes
During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.
Kozol, Jonathan. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Crown Publishers, 2005.
Quoted in the Court’s notes of the meeting
There are few people today who could believe that a United States senator would castigate the head of a Federal Agency for spreading “racial equality propaganda.” But at the time—1943—the actions of Education Commissioner John W. Studebaker and his Assistant took remarkable courage.
Following the lead of Arkansas, many southern schools were closed by order of the Governor when they received a court order to desegregate. Southern education was the poorest in the nation and the Southern students not able to go to school made the situation worse. Governor Almond changing his position realized that the cost of defying the Constitution and the courts was the ignorance of the students of the state, and became a major force persuading the state to integrate their schools. He is remembered for his leadership of desegregation and most people have forgotten that at the beginning of his term as governor he was as bad as most of the other Southern segregationist politicians.
In 1848 a free Black applied for admission to Harvard College, amidst protests from the white students:
Arkansas Governor Faubus ordered the national guard to prevent Black students from integrating Central High School in Little Rock. President Eisenhower was a man of action and not rhetoric and his lack of firm public statements overlooked an opportunity to use the Presidential “bully pulpit” and exercise his moral leadership and authority. Armstrong was irate at Eisenhower for appearing to do nothing and say nothing. See {615852}. When Eisenhower did enforce the court order and used Federal troops, Armstrong sent him this congratulatory telegram. His reference to walking into the schools was in support of many who suggested that the best thing the President could have done was to personally take one of the Black students by the hand and walk into the school with him or her. With the mood of the Southern racists, such an act was potentially very risky for the President and it is not known whether of not the President and his staff ever considered such an act.
The organization was initially called the National Negro Committee. The following year the name was changed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Note that at the time, even for Blacks, the concept of desegregation was so far from reality that their efforts were simply to have segregated schools with the same resources as the white children had. The “separate but equal” doctrine was the method of the segregationists.
Black and Hispanic student performance on educational achievement tests were much lower than that of whites. There were many who believed that this gap was responsible for most of the other ethnic differences that made for ethnic and racial inequality. Ironically, it was Romney’s party in Congress that opposed more funding for education and generally was opposed to federal efforts to improve and monitor civil rights. However, Romney was talking to a mostly Hispanic audience and took a position that was seemingly contradictory to his Party’s Platform and the actions of the then Republican Controlled House of Representatives.
Jonathan Kozol is an American writer, progressive activist, and educator, best known for his books on public education in the United States.
