Amazing Grace was recommended to me by my son. It made me gasp, shudder, revolt, cry and pray. It is the most gut wrenching, yet heart warming story of humanity I have ever read. Jonathan Kozol gives us a first hand look at the poorest school district in the United States. In the South Bronx, the neighborhood of Mott Haven is the innermost of inner city projects. It’s population of 48,000 is 2/3 Hispanic and 1/3 Black. In 1991 the average household income was $7,600. Here Kozol spends a year learning about the people of Beekman and St. Ann’s Avenue; especially the children. With the help of Pastor Overall from St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, Mrs. Washington, an HIV infected mother, and her teenage son, David, he creates Amazing Grace. The children of this neighborhood deal with drugs, HIV, shootings, putrid living conditions, dry oatmeal for breakfast, and death on a daily basis. Yet, they smile and rise like the Phoenix from the ashes to face another day. A riveting account of racial isolation.
Questions gleaned from this reading:
1) How can a country with any kind of social or moral conscience allow this to happen?
2) What can we do as educators to break the cycle of illiteracy manifesting in this community, or any other like it?
3) Is the strength of familiarity attached to one’s culture so great it will keep a person from extending beyond it?
4) Does token integration of white schools by taking ‘the brightest of the black’ have a debilitating effect on the already struggling public or neighborhood school?
5) Has this ghetto culture been ‘internalized’ generation after generation,
or like water dripping on a stone, been the result of moral erosion
Jackie Ekelund