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

An eloquent and passionate call for educational transformation.

In the culminating work of his career, groundbreaking educator Jonathan Kozol goes back into urban schools, where racial isolation is at the highest level since he became a teacher and is now compounded by a new regime of punitive instruction and coercive uniformity that is deemed to be appropriate for children who are said to be incapable of learning in more democratic ways, like children in more privileged communities. Kozol believes it’s well past time to batter down the walls between two separate worlds of education and to make good, at long last, on the “promissory note” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

We Shall Not Bow Down takes aim directly at the disparate agenda that denies Black and Latino children the right to ask discerning questions about a system that places them in toxic sequestration and substitutes draconian penalties and a constant fear of failure for anything resembling healthy motivation. This extreme degree of indoctrinational and authoritarian instruction, Kozol writes, has robbed too many of our children of the power to think independently at a time when it is desperately needed in the face of an administration that is threatening the very essences of democracy.

We Shall Not Bow Down is a significantly revised and expanded version of Kozol's book, An End to Inequality, which the New York Times called “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.”

At this moment of political retrenchment, with Trump and Musk riding high, it may seem an impossible dream, but Kozol argues convincingly that it’s a goal worth fighting for.

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.