The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

Content Warning: The source text and this guide repeatedly references racism, inequality, and systemic injustice.

In the Introduction to The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol describes his early experience as a teacher. In 1964, three young civil rights activists organizing freedom schools in Mississippi disappeared and were later found murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan and local law enforcement. Something about this tragedy affected Kozol deeply, and he signed up to teach in a freedom school in Boston’s Black neighborhood of Roxbury. Kozol felt “shy and hesitant” in his new role (2), but he quickly got to know the parents of his children and discovered that he liked his students very much.

When the summer freedom school ended, Kozol decided to become “a real teacher.” He was hired easily, despite having little experience, because he was willing to work in a segregated school for very little pay. He was assigned to a fourth-grade class that did not have a classroom of its own, and Kozol taught in an open auditorium he shared with several other classes. In these segregated schools, Black children were “divorced […] from the mainstream of American society” (6), and Black leaders believed that ending segregation in public schools was “the moral starting point of all the rest” (5).