"Amazing Grace"
The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
Jonathan Kozol
Currently there are about 600,000 people who live in the South Bronx and about
434,000 who live in Washington Heights and Harlem. This area makes up one of the most
racially segregated areas of poor people in the United States. In this book we focus
on Mott Haven, a place where 48,0000 of the poorest people in the South Bronx live.
Two thirds of the people are Hispanic, one-third are black and thirty-five percent are
children. There are nearly four thousand heroin users, and one-fourth of the women who
are tested are positive for HIV. All of this and more in one little area of the South Bronx.
In the middle of all this chaos and confusion are children. Children who have daily drills
on what to do if gunshots are heard, children who know someone who has died of AIDS,
children who have seen someone been shot right in front of their face wondering if its their
father, children who long to be sanitation workers, and children who die everyday. The
lives of these children almost seem lost with depression, drugs, and death all around them.
As we see, there are little sparks of light in most of these children's eyes, sparks of light
that show just how innocent and intellectual they really are.
Mott Haven seems like a place that no one could even imagine existing. A place
so distant from most peoples reality that it could only exist in a Spike Lee film. A
government owned ghetto that people are just thrown into when the don't fit into normal
society. A place that can be shunned and feared and easy to get away from simply by
shutting a newspaper. One would think that the resources necessary to get these people
back on their feet would be available but we see that they aren't. Children still die from
falling into faulty elevators, people...