We Shall Not Bow Down: Children of Color Under Siege: An Invocation to Resistance

An eloquent and passionate call for educational transformation.

“An unapologetic cri de coeur about the shortcomings of the schools that serve poor Black and Hispanic children, and thus, the moral failure of the nation to end the inequality [Kozol] has documented for decades.” —New York Times

In We Shall Not Bow Down, legendary educator and bestselling author Jonathan Kozol confronts the extreme and unabated racial segrega­tion in our public schools and the regimen of punitive control that denies Black and Latino children the power of independent and creative thinking that is still more likely to be encouraged in more privileged communities.

Returning to the schools where he worked with children and their teachers for more than fifty years, Kozol reports that separate and unequal education is now at its highest level since the early 1980s. Children of color, Kozol says, are frequently deemed to be a different class of child than students in the mainstream of the nation and are being prepared to accept a subordinate role in the corporate economy. And he directly confronts the far-right’s assault on education and any remain­ing semblance of diversity and equal opportunity.

At this dangerous political moment, Kozol argues—in this greatly expanded paperback edition of his 2024 hardcover, An End to Inequality—that it’s well past time for militant resistance on the part of decent citizens. Kozol is old enough to remember “the promissory note” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. To some, it may seem an impossible dream, but Kozol believes it is still a goal worth fighting for.

“Jonathan Kozol is without doubt one of the most important thought leaders on the past present and future of public education in America…. I am painfully aware that this may be the last great book from this great thinker which is all the more reason we should pore over every single page relishing not only the beauty of his writing and the stories he shares but also the delightful way in which he interacts with even the most vulnerable children.”
—from the introduction by Randi Weingarten, author of Why Fascists Fear Teachers

JONATHAN KOZOL is a Rhodes Scholar, former fourth grade teacher, and a passionate advocate for child-centered learning. Kozol is one of the most widely read and highly honored education writers in the nation. His first book, Death at an Early Age (1967), a description of his first year as a teacher in a Black community of Boston, received the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Among his other major works are Rachel and Her Children, a study of homeless mothers and their children, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and Savage Inequalities, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. His 1995 best-seller, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ten years later, in The Shame of the Nation, a description of conditions that he found in nearly 60 public schools, Kozol wrote that inner-city children were more isolated racially than at any time since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The Shame of the Nation appeared on The New York Times bestseller list the week that it was published.

RANDI WEINGARTEN is president of the American Federation of Teachers and a lifelong champion for children and teachers in public schools. She is the author of Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy.

THEODORE M. SHAW is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and the Director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights. He attended Columbia University Law School and then practiced as a Trial Attorney in the Honors Program of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C. In 1982 Shaw joined the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) where he worked for over 26 years. Shaw has taught at the University of Michigan Law School, Columbia University School of Law, CUNY School of Law at Queens College and Temple Law School. He is currently a faculty member of the Practicing Law Institute.