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Refusing to be Silenced
A friend shared a story on Facebook this past week. The headline beneath the photo read: “He was fired for reading a poem to nine-year-olds.”
Fired for reading a poem? My curiosity lit up. What was the poem? Who fired him? On what grounds? I began to dig. The year was 1964. The teacher’s name was Jonathan Kozol. He began his teaching career with a class of fourth graders in one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods.
I remember 1964. We were still reeling from the assassination of President Kennedy. The Civil Rights Act had just become law, while the Voting Rights Act had not yet been signed. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading marches across the South, and the country was wrestling with issues of race, justice, opportunity, and equality. Schools reflected those same struggles as they often do.
Against that backdrop, a young Jewish man educated at Harvard and Oxford accepted a fourth-grade teaching position in an overcrowded school in Roxbury, one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. His students were predominantly Black children whose experiences differed greatly from those of the people making educational decisions for them.
The building told its own story. Heat failed during the winter. Textbooks were faded and years out of date. Children came and went—their lives disrupted by poverty. In Death at an Early Age, the book he later wrote about that year, Kozol described the school in unflinching language as “a place where the books are junk, the paint peels, the windows fall on your heads, and the teacher calls you n****r.” The words are painful to read, but they were his testimony about what Black children were enduring in a public school that was supposed to educate and protect them.
Kozol also noticed something the system seemed determined to overlook—his students were sharp, curious, and hungry to be taken seriously. So, one morning in May of 1965, he did something that sounds simple enough. He read them a poem by Langston Hughes, one of the most important Black poets of the twentieth century.
The poem, written twenty-five years earlier in 1940, was Ballad of the Landlord. It opens with a Black tenant asking his white landlord to repair a leaking roof and a broken step or risk not getting paid his monthly rent. As the poem unfolds, the tenant grows increasingly frustrated and angry. The landlord calls the police, the tenant is arrested, and the newspaper headlines read “Man Threatens Landlord,” “Tenant Held No Bail,” and “Judge Gives Negro 90 Days in County Jail.” Classic victim blaming.
What struck me is that although the poem had been written a quarter century earlier, the circumstances it described had not disappeared. Kozol believed it still applied to the lives of many of the children sitting before him. He was offering his students more than a poem. He was giving them literature that spoke about realities they rarely saw reflected in their classroom.
The following day, Kozol was fired. He could not possibly have known where reading that poem would lead. The official explanation for his termination was “curriculum deviation.” Kozol had read a poem without permission. Seven months into his teaching career, reading an unauthorized poem was enough to end it.
I’m left wondering how administrators knew. Did another teacher report him? Did a child mention it at home? Had officials already been watching a young teacher who challenged the treatment of his students? There is probably more to the story than the familiar headline tells us.
I also wonder what those fourth graders thought about when their teacher was suddenly gone. Did anyone explain why Mr. Kozol was not there the next morning? Did they understand that he had been dismissed after reading them a poem by a Black writer? What message did his disappearance send to children who had been told, in countless ways, that their lives were not subjects worth discussing in school?
Losing his classroom could easily have ended Kozol’s teaching career. Instead, he went on to teach for several years in the same district he had attended as a child. But he never forgot the children in his first classroom. He made sure that what he had witnessed would not disappear with him.
Instead of walking away quietly, he documented the story. What one school system tried to silence eventually reached millions. He wrote about the broken heating system, outdated books, overcrowded classrooms, racism, and children whose intelligence and humanity were being ignored. What emerged was not simply a complaint. It became testimony.
Death at an Early Age won the National Book Award and sold more than two million copies. Kozol never treated the book as a finish line. Many more books followed, and Kozol devoted his life to writing about children, poverty, schools, and educational inequality. He’s traveled across the country to communities where children and families were being failed by the systems meant to serve them. He’s written about families living in welfare hotels, documented the spending gap between wealthy and poor school districts, and listened to children in the South Bronx whose realities most of the country rarely see.
Again and again, he’s used his platform to make room for people who had none. He’s listened, documented, and written, returning throughout his career to the same question: What do children deserve?
Kozol will turn ninety this September. More than sixty years after walking into that Roxbury classroom, he is still writing and still engaged in the work that has defined his life. He currently serves on the editorial board of Greater Good Magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. There, his work includes helping interpret research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships. Berkeley is not simply another accomplishment to add to a long résumé. It is the latest chapter in a lifetime spent working on behalf of people whose stories might otherwise go unheard.
Kozol’s story reminded me of Erin Gruwell, whose work inspired the movie Freedom Writers. Through her Foundation, she continues encouraging teachers and students around the world. Neither Kozol nor Gruwell stopped being teachers. Their classrooms simply grew much larger. Kozol later reflected, “I never really stopped teaching.” Teachers today enter classrooms carrying ideas shaped by Kozol’s books, while others have been inspired by Gruwell’s example. His students now include future teachers and anyone willing to look honestly at the lives of children too often overlooked. One teacher influences another until the ripple becomes impossible to measure.
Every August, while children are squeezing every last adventure out of summer and parents are shopping for backpacks, notebooks, and school clothes, another ritual is already underway. Thousands of teachers are preparing classrooms across our country. Most will never write bestselling books or become the subject of a movie. Yet each has the opportunity to encourage a child, awaken a love of learning, or help a young person understand that his or her life matters.
Jonathan Kozol’s work as a teacher has now spanned more than sixty years. The administrators who fired him may have taken away his first classroom, but they could not silence him. Instead, they unintentionally amplified his voice. For more than six decades, he has borne witness—traveling, listening, writing, and helping generations of teachers see children more clearly. It all began with one room full of children and one poem he believed they deserved to hear.