Jonathan Kozol Quotes

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.

The MLK Shabbat Suppers focused on the theme of educational inequity, which Dr. King considered inextricably linked to the struggle for equality and justice.

Our nation cannot call for respect for human rights when it lacks the moral courage to save its own cities, its own poor, its own minorities whose rights are trampled upon.

American democracy is a failure. It is a miserable failure. It has failed because it is a limited and racial and divisible democracy …. How can we fight for democracy in Burma, a country we have not seen, when we don't have democracy in Birmingham, a city we have seen.

Let me assure you that New Democrats will support a bold agenda to tackle inequality, even though it is certain to encounter strong opposition from vested interests.

... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.

Apartheid is alive and well and it lives in our schools, and I'm sad to say it lives in the halls of the State legislature.

We insist that educationally and socially we maintain a segregated society …

Undoubtedly, to salve your conscience, you have now and then helped some miserable human being, but millions of human beings were murdered and nary a protest was heard.

Savage Inequalities

There are two things we don’t like to talk about: bad government and bad culture.

There is a profound unfairness embedded in the economic system.

Colored people are quite ignorant, mostly uneducated and I doubt that they would seek an education if they had an opportunity.

We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population … set off from the real contribution to solving national issues because of a division of race lines …

I cannot escape the conscientious discharge of my duty towards a class of American citizens, whose only crime consists of their color.

Society continues to pay the bill for the school segregation that was a part of our history.

To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.

This case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few.

Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation.

You can make too much of inequality because there is always so much of it.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

For evil to take place, the acts of a few people are not sufficient; the great majority also has to remain indifferent.