wfn.org | Jonathan Kozol calls UCC Synod to action for social justice

[George Conklin <gconklin@wfn.org>]

United Church of Christ
Office of Communication
700 Prospect Ave.
Cleveland, OH 44115
contact: Barbara Powell
phone: 216-736-2222
email: powellb@ucc.org
http://www.ucc.org

Prize-winning author fights for kids

by William C. Winslow
        PROVIDENCE, RI - July 3, 1999 - Jonathan Kozol and Mario are pals.
Mario
is a precocious seven-year-old with the face of  a “light brown olive with a
smile painted on it.” The youngster lives in the South Bronx of New York City,
the poorest Congressional district in the nation, but don’t tell him. 
        “Welcome to my neighborhood, Mr. Rogers,” he beamed when Fred Rogers of
children’s television fame visited the mean streets.
        Mario, Jonathan Kozol told General Synod Saturday night, loves to be
sprinkled with holy water at St. Anne’s, a “safe” building, “especially when
he’s done something bad and wants God’s forgiveness.” 
        Kozol discovered the boy when he was doing research for his book
Amazing
Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. The only thing on
Mario’s mind when they met was how old his new friend was. Sixty.  Mario he
crossed himself -- Kozol could die at any minute.
        Mario “is one of the sweetest kids I’ve ever known,” confessed the
prize-winning author and social critic who first burst into the public
consciousness in 1964 with Death at an Early Age, a searing expose of a
fourth-grade public school in a low-income neighborhood in Boston. Little Mario
has never read the book, he’s never been in a school with white kids and he
doesn’t know that from the rooftop of his tenement he can’t see the Statue of
Liberty, only Rikers Island, the world’s largest penal colony. White kids are
only glimpsed on TV in Mario’s world.
        That’s a snapshot that bothers Kozol. A veteran of the civil rights
struggles of the 1960s, he laments the fact that all of his liberal friends
seemed to have developed ethical amnesia. “My rich liberal friends now look at
me like I want to redistribute their wealth, which I do,” he said as the Synod
audience applauded in approval.
        Jonathan Kozol then shifted gears to fill in Mario’s world with harsh
statistics. New York City spends about $6,000 a year to educate their Marios,
while a white boy in an affluent suburb like Greenwich, Conn. is allocated
$60,000.
        “I hate it when the business community looks at its own kids and sees
them as a future generation of physicians, businessmen, lawyers, but looks at
inner city kids as only entry level workers,” he said. 
        But his little friend, Mario, may be in for some big government money
after all. Ten years down the line, said Kozol, Mario -- in despair, with a
dead-end job or no job -- may commit some crime. “We’ll spend $6,000 to educate
this child, but $60,000 to incarcerate this ruined man.”  
        “What kind of society,” he demanded to know, “would ever spend 10 times
as much to penalize him as it would to bless him?”
        Kozol thinks social injustice is a matter of theology:  “Jesus
said, ‘If
you love me, feed my sheep.’ He didn’t say only the sheep whose parents make
smart choices.”  And Kozol worries that some of the country’s clergy have also
turned a deaf ear to the plight of South Bronx Marios. 
        “It saddens me to see so many ministers and priests dodging the
issue of
desegregation,” he said. “They appease their congregants by taking a sack of
toys at Christmas to Mario and his friends. To me, that is sheer hypocrisy.”
        But there is hope. Nobody remembered Jonathan Kozol’s 60th birthday,
except Mario. He sent him a card.  
“I thank God for giving wise hearts to small children,” said the grateful,
no-longer-lonely man.