In Person: Jonathan Kozol

Few writers can put a human face on poverty and suffering like Jonathan Kozol. And few speakers are able to evoke tears of pathos, compassion, and yes, shame, as Kozol did on October 28 during his keynote address to some 3,200 principals, teachers, and school counselors in the Austin Convention Center.

The author of such books as Death at an Early Age and Savage Inequalities, Kozol has again turned his focus on the downtrodden, this time to the poorest and most miserable place in the United States -- the South Bronx in New York City. His new book, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, is the product of his year's journey into that community, in which he found the people (children, especially the children) not merely unlucky. Or lacking good values. Or Godless. They are people, he said, who have been literally and systematically cast off.

Cases in point: the "cleanup" or "renewal" of midtown Manhattan, which began in the mid-1980s. Kozol told the audience that homeless families and those living in squalid welfare hotels were removed from there and shoved into the South Bronx instead. In a caustic, trembling voice, he explained why.

"The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see Les Miserables to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk," Kozol boomed.

When reading test scores are bad for poor children, as they inevitably are in the South Bronx, the newspapers blame the wrong people and name erroneous forces, he said. "[T]hese are children exiled from the common places of shared democracy," Kozol cried. "We have isolated them, cast them out, poisoned, and despised. And they know they are despised. They know that they are perceived as a human version of trash."

He ended his speech with some advice -- "Go to your church or synagogue and pray" -- and quoted by-now-familiar lyrics from the hymn "Amazing Grace." Why? "It is our nation which is blind, and needs our prayers," Kozol said.

-- Roseana Auten