Famed Educator, Social Justice Advocate To Give Humanitarian Lecture

A long-time champion of education and social justice issues in America will give Old Dominion University's Marc and Connie Jacobson Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Lecture April 23 at the Ted Constant Convocation Center.

Jonathan Kozol is an award-winning author and advocate for educational equity. In the middle of the civil rights movement in America in 1964 and 1965, Kozol moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston and became a fourth-grade teacher in the city's public schools.

"Death at an Early Age," Kozol's book describing his first year as a teacher, was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion.

Kozol is also the author of "Rachel and Her Children," a book about homeless mothers and their children, and "Savage Inequalities."

His 1995 bestseller, "Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation," described his visits to the South Bronx, the poorest Congressional district in the United States. "Amazing Grace" received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King.

In his most recent book, "Letters to a Young Teacher," Kozol draws on four decades of experience to guide the nation's next generation of teachers into the complicated challenges, but also the "sheer joy and passionate rewards" of teaching as a profession.

Kozol, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar, has been called "today's most eloquent spokesman for America's disenfranchised" by the Chicago Sun-Times.

His lecture, which is free and open to the public, will start at 7:30 p.m. in the Multipurpose Room at the Constant Center.

Kozol will be signing copies of his books immediately after the lecture.