"The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King"
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Policy is supposed to be the boring part: the plumbing that makes lofty ideals livable. Jonathan Kozol flips that expectation and delivers an accusation with the force of a moral audit. By pinning “the greatest difference” not on shifting attitudes but on “public policy,” he refuses the comforting story that civil rights failed because hearts didn’t change enough. His point is harsher: the machinery of government learned to speak the language of equality while designing outcomes that hollow it out.
The choice of “eradicated” is deliberately surgical. It suggests not neglect, not drift, but an active campaign to remove something at the root. Kozol’s career-long subject is segregation that survives by technicalities - district lines, funding formulas tied to property taxes, selective enrollment, housing policy, punitive discipline. In that light, “the dream of Martin Luther King” isn’t reduced to a poster slogan about getting along; it’s the integrated, materially equal society King demanded, including economic justice and robust public goods. Kozol is arguing that the dream didn’t die of nostalgia. It was outmaneuvered.
The 1964 marker matters because it evokes the hinge moment: the Civil Rights Act, the peak of legislative promise, the era when desegregation was a national project rather than a local inconvenience. Kozol’s subtext is that the post-civil-rights period perfected a softer, more defensible segregation: one that can be denied in speeches while being enforced in budgets.
It works because it names the betrayal without romanticizing the past: progress happened, then the rules were rewritten to contain it.
The choice of “eradicated” is deliberately surgical. It suggests not neglect, not drift, but an active campaign to remove something at the root. Kozol’s career-long subject is segregation that survives by technicalities - district lines, funding formulas tied to property taxes, selective enrollment, housing policy, punitive discipline. In that light, “the dream of Martin Luther King” isn’t reduced to a poster slogan about getting along; it’s the integrated, materially equal society King demanded, including economic justice and robust public goods. Kozol is arguing that the dream didn’t die of nostalgia. It was outmaneuvered.
The 1964 marker matters because it evokes the hinge moment: the Civil Rights Act, the peak of legislative promise, the era when desegregation was a national project rather than a local inconvenience. Kozol’s subtext is that the post-civil-rights period perfected a softer, more defensible segregation: one that can be denied in speeches while being enforced in budgets.
It works because it names the betrayal without romanticizing the past: progress happened, then the rules were rewritten to contain it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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