06/22/2026
blkrosebks.com
On a morning in May of 1965, in a fourth-grade classroom of a Boston public elementary school in the Roxbury neighborhood of the city, a twenty-eight-year-old substitute teacher named Jonathan Kozol, who had graduated from Harvard six years earlier with an English-literature degree and who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford the year after, read aloud to his class of African-American nine-year-olds a fourteen-line poem by the American writer Langston Hughes, titled The Ballad of the Landlord, that had been published in Hughes's 1940 collection Shakespeare in Harlem. The poem, which describes a Black tenant's confrontation with a white landlord over the condition of his rented apartment and the tenant's subsequent arrest by the police, was not on the Boston Public Schools' approved reading list for fourth-grade English.
The next morning, Kozol was fired.
The dismissal letter, which had been signed by the Boston Public Schools' Deputy Superintendent for Instruction, stated, by the documented text Kozol preserved and published in his subsequent book, that no literature which was not in the Course of Study could be read by a Boston teacher without permission from someone higher up. Kozol had not received such permission. He had also been, by the same letter's documented language, the subject of complaints from parents who had heard about the poem.
He had been teaching for approximately seven months.
Jonathan Kozol had been born in Boston on the fifth of September, 1936, to Harry Kozol, a neurologist and psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and Ruth Kozol, a social worker. He had attended the Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, graduated from Harvard summa cm laude in 1958 with a degree in English literature, and accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford the same year. He had left Oxford after his first year, traveled to Paris, and spent four years writing a novel in a tenement room in the same neighborhood where the American expatriate writers Richard Wright and William Styron were working at the time. He had returned to the United States in 1963 with a draft of a novel that no publisher would purchase and a stated plan to apply to doctoral programs in English literature.
In the summer of 1964, while preparing his graduate-school applications, he had volunteered as a tutor at a freedom school in the Roxbury neighborhood — an unaccredited summer school operated by civil-rights activists as part of the broader campaign for desegregation in the Boston Public Schools. He had decided, by his own subsequent account, that what he had encountered in that summer program was the work he wanted to do. He had withdrawn his doctoral applications. He had taken a position as a substitute teacher in the Boston Public Schools in September of 1964.
The school to which he had been assigned, by the documented record of his subsequent writing, was a fourth-grade classroom in which the textbooks had been published in the nineteen-forties, the heating system had been inoperative throughout the winter, and the rate of student turnover had been approximately one student per week. He had taught the curriculum he had been issued, and he had supplemented it, on his own initiative, with poetry he had selected from the published anthologies of American verse he had in his own apartment.
The poem he had selected on the morning of the firing had been written by Langston Hughes in 1940. He had not received permission to read it.
He published the account of his year in the Roxbury classroom, two years later, as a book called Death at an Early Age. The book was issued by Houghton Mifflin in October of 1967. It won, in March of 1968, the National Book Award in the Science, Philosophy and Religion category. It would, by the documented sales figures of the publisher, sell more than two million copies in the United States and Europe over the subsequent decades.
It would also be the first of approximately fifteen books that Kozol would publish over the following six decades on related themes. He published Rachel and Her Children, on family homelessness, in 1988. He published Savage Inequalities, on the disparity between American school districts' per-pupil funding levels, in 1991. He published Amazing Grace, on his fieldwork in the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City, in 1995. He published The Shame of the Nation, on the ongoing racial segregation of American public schools, in 2005.
He continued teaching, throughout the writing years, on a part-time basis at the Newton Public Schools — the suburban Boston district he had himself attended as a child.
Jonathan Kozol turned eighty-nine in September of 2025. He continues, by the documented record of his publishing schedule, to write.
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