Why I Moved Into Roxbury

(This article has just appeared in the first issue of the Bay State Banner, Boston's new Negro newspaper, and is reprinted here with its permission. Jonathan Kozal '58 was graduated summa cum laude, held a Rhodes Scholarship, and is author of the novel Fume of Poppies. He was the object of nation-wide attention last spring when he was fired from his post as a fourth-grade teacher in the predominantly-Negro Gibson School in Roxbury. The reason given him was that, along with poems by Frost, Longfellow and Yeats, he had read to his pupils Langston Hughes' "Ballad of the Slumlord," a poem not listed in the Curriculum Guide. Despite the highly vocal efforts of many satisfied parents, he failed to win reinstatement. --C.T.)

I would like to say clearly in the beginning that there was no slosh of false optimism or any drift of phony phantasizing mingling with my real reasons for moving from Cambridge into the South End.

I did not come here because I like to watch ratty-eyed kids in ratty sweaters running at a rat-like gait from gloomy hovels populated, in too many cases, by crowded families and owned in an equal number of cases by the opulent residents of Brookline and Newton and other suburban greenbelts South and West.

And I did not come here out of infatuation with darkness--neither the night's, nor life's, nor skin's.

I did not come, either, because I believe that poverty is particularly moving or poetical. It is not one and not the other. It is three things: Drab. Sad. Grim.

I do not believe that there is anything particularly beautiful or especially moving about blatant human grief and I do not draw any comfort out of the inter-position of another's pain and fears beside my cash and safety.

Bars without rich smells but only spilled beer not wiped away, and neon blinking greenly, are no lovelier here than any other place. Urine long gone dead in hall-ways stinks as bad on Columbus Avenue as it does up two blocks from Charles Street or down two blocks from Harvard Square. And women on the corner, winos in the doorways, cops with callous faces and hardened eyes, do not summon up for me, as they do for some poetical white spirits, any vast romantic phantasies of luscious and previously unknown satisfactions.

Whites who move into Roxbury for these reasons will move out just as fast.

They should.

They will not have seen the people.

They will not have known the children.

They will not have understood what the heart and the dignity and the character of a community are all about.

I came here because of the people. I came not because they have made greatness out of poverty but because they have made greatness despite it. I came because I was a teacher and knew many children more worth knowing, more worth admiring, and (in their promise of future urgency) more worth respecting, even fearing, than any children that I had ever known or met.

I came here because, when the school doors closed at three o'clock, I did not enjoy turning my back upon the neighborhood in which my students lived--and finding, by a swift express route back across the Charles River, an escape from and an evasion of everything they hated, feared and loved.

There is a Jewish scholar I admire named Edgar Friedenberg. Of the Negro people he wrote this:

"But this is undoubtedly our society's last chance to infuse into itself a stream of people whose moral vision has been--relatively, at least--preserved and sharpened by exclusion from opportunities for self-betrayal as well as advancement. The Negro is the only American whose loyalty to his country has not made him an accomplice in a succession of dubious enterprises from Cuba to Southeast Asia. If the vision of the Negro is sometimes distorted by hatred, it is seldom blurred by guilt."

In a city of banalizing values in which I grew up, a white amongst ambitious whites--not by others but essentially by myself betrayed--the saving character of a people who have held onto the roots of uniqueness, moral courage, political bravado and intellectual guts provide me today with one solid base to stand on, one place of life worth vitally living, one neighborhood where individual honesty and verbal directness still exist.

There are a lot of children on my block. When they wake me up in the morning it sounds as if there must be a million of them. At evening in the summer, when the sun goes down on these rooftops, they are all over the sidewalks. On the steps of my house they sit and study small objects (bottle-tops, bent-in beer-cans) with an atomic scientist's endless concentration and precision. I stop to take a look. . . .

They are likely either to hammer at my shoe or twist my fingers and my sleeve.

In the later evenings, still in the summer, when their parents are around, we sit on the doorsteps sometimes after supper and just talk. . . .

Miss Marguerite Sullivan of the Boston Public Schools, from whom God save our children, has pointed out recently with her killing condescension that the people of Roxbury speak in "native dialects"--as it were, a different language from the one that the rest of us speak.

Miss Sullivan is correct.

They do speak a different language.

And Miss Sullivan would gain many blessings, as would many of us, if she could ever learn to speak it too.

It is the language of kindly humanism, of natural generosity, of many intensities, and, above all, of truth.

I have come here for good.