We are now operating a school system in America that’s more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

Kozol’s remark argues that, despite the formal end of Jim Crow, U.S. public education has drifted back toward racial separation through housing patterns, district boundaries, unequal school funding, and policy choices such as selective admissions and uneven enforcement of desegregation orders. By measuring the present against the post–civil rights era immediately following King’s assassination, he underscores a sense of moral and political regression: segregation is no longer always mandated by law, but it is reproduced by structures that appear “neutral.” The quote functions as both diagnosis and indictment, urging readers to see segregation as an ongoing, systemic condition rather than a closed historical chapter.