When a Boston school fired a teacher over Langston Hughes lesson

Fifty-nine years ago this month, Jonathan Kozol was fired from his substitute teaching job at the Christopher Gibson School in Boston.

• The reason? He shared some Langston Hughes poems with students that weren’t in the curriculum.

The intrigue: Boston’s history of racism illustrates tactics that are used to this day in other parts of the country to remove stories by and about Black and brown people.

• Far-right leaders in Florida, Texas and other states have removed books about Black fiction and history, conflating them with critical race theory.

Zoom in: One of the poems Kozol recalled sharing is Hughes’ “The Ballad of the Landlord.”

• "Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak," it states. "Don't you 'member I told you about it Way last week?"
• The poem illustrates a Black tenant’s struggle to get his landlord to repair his dilapidated home and ends with the tenant being jailed for getting fed up and threatening the landlord.

The firing sparked sit-ins by parents, who called for the school to add a library, notify parents if students misbehave and implement other fixes in addition to Kozol’s reinstatement, the Boston Globe reported at the time.

The big picture: At the center of this controversy wasn’t just Kozol, but Black students and their parents who pushed for equal access to quality education — and education that didn’t solely focus on white history.

• Joyce Johnson, a spokesperson for the sit-ins, said at the time, “We are ending our sit-ins, but not our fight against conditions at the Gibson school."

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