There are certain motifs in Jonathan Kozol’s half-century of writing about America’s failure to adequately educate poor black and Hispanic children, which began with “Death at an Early Age,” a blistering account of his year teaching at Boston Public Schools.

Dilapidated school buildings with dirty bathrooms and leaky ceilings. Students dumbfounded by scripted curricula and endless exam preparation. Gloomy city neighborhoods with neglected parks, crumbling apartments and harried, underpaid teachers. The desperation is punctuated by bright and lively children, who bluntly notice the obvious unfairness that adults have taught themselves to overlook.

‘Death at an Early Age’, published in 1967, made him the kind of widely read public intellectual that is hardly present anymore.

Now, at 87, he has published An End to Inequality, his fifteenth book – and his last, he says. It is an unapologetic cri de coeur about the shortcomings of the schools that serve poor black and Hispanic children, and thus about the nation’s moral inability to end the inequality he has documented for decades.

Critics have long said that Mr. Kozol has focused too much on everything that is wrong with American public education, and not enough on models for success. They point to the charter schools, charismatic principals and early reading programs that are creating change, even in some deeply segregated neighborhoods.

But Mr. Kozol characterizes these as marginal reforms designed to fit into a system that is inherently unequal. And in his long career, he has seen decades of national reform efforts — “A Nation at Risk,” “No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds” — come and go, while some problems remain largely the same.

Educational opportunities are still largely determined by parents’ ability to pay for housing in desired zip codes. Some aging school buildings are still laced with lead. Black and Latino students are still disproportionately subjected to harsh forms of discipline: quiet hallways, insulation cabinets, even physical disability.

“I will not tolerate forced optimism at this time,” Mr. Kozol said in an interview. “When we talk about Black and Latino children in our public schools, I think it’s unrealistic to be optimistic.”

He spoke from an armchair in the living room of his canary-yellow colonial home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lives alone, aided by several young assistants. He was briefly married and divorced in the 1970s, had no children and devoted years to compelling reporting. He spent his days in schools and homeless shelters, writing by hand late into the evening — still his favorite time to work, he said, sipping an iced coffee at dusk.

The room was full of teddy bears – he started collecting them when he became too weak to care for dogs – and old issues of left-wing magazines like The Nation and The Progressive. A nearby coffee table was covered with memorabilia intended for a possible acquisition of Mr. Kozol’s papers by the New York Public Library.

They include an autographed photo of Langston Hughes, which the poet sent in 1965, after Mr. Kozol, then 28, was fired for teaching a class of mostly black fourth-graders Mr. Hughes’ poem.Ballad of the Landlord‘—then considered a subversive work by Boston administrators.

In “An End to Inequality,” Mr. Kozol uses bold language to make his point.

He rejects the idea, popular in some education circles, that focusing on the problems of racially segregated public schools is tantamount to encouraging a kind of deficit thinking in which black, Latino and Native American children are regarded more for what they lack than for what they lack. for what makes them resilient.

“It is a delicate dilemma,” writes Mr Kozol. “If we cannot speak of victims, if the word is in disgrace, what other language can be used to speak of children who face cognitive oppression in almost every aspect of education?”

He continues: “If there are no victims, no crime has been committed. If no crime has been committed, there can be no reason to demand reparation for what these children suffer from sequestration in their schools. Avoiding an unfavorable word cannot erase reality.”

The solution, he argues, is still the yellow school bus, which transports poor children to opportunities in more affluent neighborhoods and cities, where they can learn alongside upper-middle-class peers and enjoy some of the benefits their parents provide for have secured for them: rich arts programs, foreign language classes, science labs, vibrant libraries.

The system we have now is nothing less than ‘apartheid’, writes Mr Kozol. The continued existence of lead paint and pipes in poor children’s schools is a “cerebral genocide,” he adds, and budget cuts are evidence of a “war on public schools.”

Mr. Kozol, who grew up the son of a doctor and a social worker in the affluent Boston suburb of Newton, credits Archibald MacLeish, the modernist poet who taught him at Harvard, with helping him develop his writing style.

“He encouraged me to use strong words,” he recalls. ‘There is a tendency to assume that the extremes of speech are always wrong, and that truth, by its own preference, likes to live in the middle. It doesn’t always live in the middle.”

After college and a stint as a failed novelist in Paris, Mr. Kozol had planned to pursue a Ph.D. in the literature.

His life changed in 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi.

“What am I doing here,” he remembered thinking, “hanging out in Cambridge and talking about the metaphysical poetry of John Donne?”

Soon after, he taught in Roxbury, a predominantly black neighborhood in Boston, and organized with parents who wanted to enroll their children in higher-quality schools, first in Boston and eventually in the suburbs.

Their activism helped create a voluntary busing program called METCOwhich still exists and transports 3,000 students annually from Boston to suburban schools. Research shows that students who are admitted to the program achieve higher test scores and have better academic and career outcomes than students who apply to METCO but do not win a spot in the randomized lottery.

The big idea in Mr. Kozol’s new book is a massive federal and state investment — “reparations” — to expand voluntary bus programs like METCO. Another model is voluntary roundtrip transit, which uses thematic magnet schools to attract middle-class students. to poorer neighborhoods, freeing up seats in middle-class schools for low-income children.

While Mr. Kozol is anything but dry, his understanding of education research has always been careful and rigorous, says Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, an institute that provides data on the survival of the segregation of schools by race and class.

Dr. Orfield credited Mr. Kozol with not being distracted by the kind of technocratic school reforms often favored by politicians, such as increasing high-stakes testing.

“He’s just ruthless,” said Dr. Orfield. “He is angry and offended by the reality that he continues to see. And no one cares.”

Mr. Kozol is far from the only voice asking the nation to refocus on school segregation and inequality between rich and poor districts. Multiple new organizations in Washington are committed to these issues and have attracted influential supporters.

But Mr. Kozol is baffled that mainstream Democrats rarely support major investments in school desegregation. And he said he is not interested in other forms of school choice, such as charters or vouchers, which also help low-income students escape underperforming schools. Like many traditional liberals, he views these options as financial leeches for the public school system and is skeptical of their support from Republicans and conservatives.

He started writing An End to Inequality before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the book barely mentions how the crisis upended education politics as schools in the country’s most liberal cities were closed for the longest , while low-income students of color ranked even lower. further behind.

Nor does he address the fact that in the wake of the pandemic, parents — including some of those he cares most about — have become more probably to support school choice.

This omission irritates some education activists, even those who admire Mr. Kozol.

“You can’t pay reparations to the system that has harmed people,” said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a group that supports the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. “You have to give it to the people the system has harmed.”

But Mr. Kozol sticks to the traditional idea of ​​public education: one system for all. “A democratic nation needs a truly democratic, well-funded public school system,” he said.

There was a framed picture on a table next to his armchair drawing, now faded, of a sun peeking over the horizon. The artist, Pineapple, was a tenacious girl who appears in several of his books, describing the trials of growing up in the South Bronx in the wake of the crack and AIDS epidemics.

“I asked her, ‘Does the sun rise or set?” Mr. Kozol recalled. “And she looked at me and said, ‘You decide.’”

Kathy Goldman, who dedicated her career as a civic leader to building food banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools to support low-income New Yorkers, died on March 5 in Brooklyn. She was 92.

The cause of death at a hospital was congestive heart failure, said her daughter, Julie Goldman.

Ms. Goldman was determined to confront the collective indifference that she believed had contributed to the Holocaust. Over fifty years, she has worked with many associates to successfully lobby for federal subsidies such as food stamps and nutritional assistance for women, children and infants; creating partnerships between business providers of facilities and local communities; and expand the mandate of anti-hunger programs to include assistance with housing, health care, education, and other needs.

In 1980, she founded the Community Food Resource Center, a food bank, as a buffer against stricter welfare eligibility requirements. Three years later, she helped organize what it is today Food Bank for New York City, which served dozens of soup kitchens and food banks across the city from the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx. She was director of the center until her retirement in 2003.

In 1984, she started the Community Kitchen of West Harlem, an innovative program that not only provided food but also helped the hungry with other needs, including housing and health care. After renovations to the dining room, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘It’s like McDonald’s!’ Goldman ‘considered this the greatest compliment of all time from a child,’” Lana Dee Povitz wrote in “Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice” (2019).

In the early 1990s, she persuaded the city to open evening school cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem to serve dinners for older adults.

“She was the leading voice in the fight against hunger in New York for 50 years and the first to focus on food in schools, which led to literally thousands of children eating the food instead of throwing it away,” says Fran Barrett, Governor of New York. Kathy Hochul’s nonprofit interagency coordinator, said by email.

In establishing federal school breakfast and summer meal programs in New York, Ms. Goldman “hired people who had expertise and got out of the way,” said Ms. Barrett, who had been one of her associates (along with Liz Krueger, who would become a senator, and Mary McCormick of the Community Trust of New York).

In 2002, Ms. Goldman was invited to carry the Olympic torch a quarter mile in New York and in 2012 she was honored by President Barack Obama at the White House as a “champion of change” for her contribution to reducing hunger in America.

After retiring from the food center, she and Agnes founded Molnar Community food advocates in 2009 to lobby for universal school lunches and other government strategies to meet Americans’ nutritional needs.

As Mrs. Goldman often said, “If the will were there tomorrow morning, we wouldn’t have to be hungry. There is no shortage of food.”

In 2022, she moved to a retirement community in Sleepy Hollow, NY

Catherine Vera Friedman (she later changed her name to Kathryn, after the actress Kathryn Grayson) was born in the Bronx on January 15, 1932, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her mother, Ila (Goldman) Friedman, was a writer who founded a Hungarian women’s magazine. Her father, Samuel, was a furniture maker and secretary-treasurer of his union.

After graduating as one of the first group of girls admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, three blocks from her home, she became the first in her family to go to college, studying film at New York University and then briefly attending City College and Hunter College went. In 1986, she received a master’s degree in urban studies from Queens College of the City University of New York.

In 1949 she traveled to Budapest, where she worked as a translator at the World Youth Festival; in college she joined the Labor Youth League, which was founded by the Communist Party (although she later said she opposed the Red Flag’s self-interest, dogmatism, and contempt for women); and took courses in Marxism and black history at the Jefferson School of Social Science, once described in The Times as “the premier training center for communists and communist sympathizers in this city.”

She and her husband, Jack Goldman, were active in the Urban League’s campaign against racial discrimination in housing. She also joined a group of white, middle-class parents who supported school desegregation.

In 1966, Ms. Goldman and another activist, Ellen Lurie, compared the reading test scores of every school in the city and published them as evidence that black students were receiving a poor education.

She and Evelina Antonetty organized to improve the South Bronx public schools, develop a bilingual education initiative for adults through United Bronx Parents, and introduce a federally funded free summer meal program for children in 1971; she helped draft regulations when the program was expanded nationally in 1979.

She and her husband divorced in 1974. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her sons, Joseph and Robert Goldman; five grandsons and two great-grandsons. Most of her relatives who remained in Europe after her parents emigrated (her father from Slovakia and her mother from Hungary) were killed during the Holocaust.

“I was really raised to believe that if more people had spoken up, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened,” Ms. Goldman’s daughter quoted her as saying. “If there had been a backlash, it would have been mitigated. I believe that to this day. You can do something. You can make a difference, you can make a change.”

Shafiqah Hudson was looking for a job in early June 2014, switching between Twitter and email, when she noticed a strange hashtag trending on the social media platform: #EndFathersDay.

The posters claimed to be black feminists, but they had ridiculous handles like @NayNayCan’tStop and @CisHate and @LatrineWatts; they stated that they wanted to abolish Father’s Day because it was a symbol of patriarchy and oppression, among other nonsense.

They didn’t seem like real people, Mrs. Hudson thought, but parodies of black women, making ridiculous statements. Like Mrs. Hudson told Forbes magazine in 2018“Anyone with half the sense that God gave a cold bowl of oatmeal could see that these were not feminist sentiments.”

But the hashtag remained popular, sending the Twitter community into a frenzy, and the conservative news media picked it up, citing it as an example of feminism gone seriously off the rails, and “a beautiful illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism.” as Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer at National Review, tweeted at the time. Tucker Carlson committed an entire segment from his show to mocking it.

So Ms. Hudson set out to battle what she quickly realized was a coordinated action by trolls. She created her own hashtag, #YourSlipIsShowing, a Southernism that seemed particularly useful, about calling out someone who thinks they present themselves flawlessly.

She started collecting the messages from the trolls below and encouraged others to do so and block the fake accounts. Her Twitter community took up the mission, including black feminists and scientists I’Nasah Crockettwho did some research of his own and discovered that #EndFathersDay was a hoax, as she told Slate in 2019organized on 4chan, the dark community of web forums populated by right-wing hate groups.

Twitter, Ms. Hudson and others said, was largely unresponsive. Nevertheless, their actions were effective. #EndFathersDay was all but silenced within a few weeks, though more and more fake accounts popped up over the years and Mrs. Hudson kept calling them out, like an endless game of Whac-a-Mole.

Yet #EndFathersDay turned out to be more than an absurd joke. It was a well-structured disinformation operation, a kind of test balloon, as Bridget Todd, a digital activist who interviewed Ms. Hudson in 2020 for her podcast “There Are No Girls on the Internet,” put it for subsequent actions: notably the election disruption campaigns launched in 2016 started with tactics that, as Senate hearings showed, were adopted by Russian agents. In retrospect, Ms. Hudson’s efforts provided an early and effective bulwark against what continues to be a threat to democracy.

“It should be an affirmation,” Ms. Hudson told Slate. “But instead it was disturbing and alarming. No one wants to be right about how much real danger we are all in, even if you saw it coming.”

Ms. Hudson, a freelance writer who had worked in nonprofits but devoted herself to Twitter activism starting in 2014, died Feb. 15 at an extended-stay hotel in Portland, Oregon. She was 46 years old.

Her brother, Salih Hudson, confirmed her death but did not know the cause. She suffered from Crohn’s disease, he said, and breathing problems. However, her followers knew from her posts that she had long had Covid and had recently been diagnosed with cancer. And that she had no money to pay for her care. Many volunteered to help.

At her death, her community mourned their lossand expressed frustration and anger that Ms. Hudson had never been paid by the tech companies whose platforms she controlled or properly credited by scientists and news organizations calling #YourSlipIsShowing, and that she had not received the health care she so desperately needed.

“The world owed Fiqah more than she gave her,” Mikki Kendall, cultural critic and author of “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot” (2020), said by phone. Ms. Kendall is one of many black feminists who have adopted Ms. Hudson’s mission and befriended her on Twitter, now called X. “The world owes Fiqah to never let this happen to anyone else again. Sadly, she is part of a long tradition of black activist women dying impoverished. Those who die sick, alone and afraid. Because we love an activist until he needs something.”

Shafiqah Amatullah Hudson was born on January 10, 1978 in Columbia, SC. ​​Her father, Caldwell Hudson, was a martial arts instructor and author. Her mother, Geraldine (Thompson) Hudson, was a computer engineer. The couple divorced in 1986 and Shafiqah grew up with her mother and brother, mainly in Florida, where she attended Palm Beach County School of the Arts, a magnet school.

Shafiqah received a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY in 2000, majoring in Africana studies with a minor in political science. After graduating, she moved to New York City and worked at several nonprofit organizations.

She was new in town and lonely. She found community on blogs and social media sites, including Twitter, which she joined in 2009. (She chose as her avatar an image of Edna Mode, the imperious fashion maven from “The Incredibles.”) And like many black women on that platform, she was mocked and harassed. She received rape and death threats, she told Ms. Todd.

In addition to her brother, Mrs. Hudson is survived by her father and her sisters, Kali Newnan, Charity Jones and Mosinah Hudson. Geraldine Hudson died in 2019.

In the final months of her life, Ms. Hudson posted about her deteriorating health and her fears that she would be unable to pay for her care or housing. Due to her disability she could not work.

She moved to Portland, her brother said, because the climate was better for her breathing problems. But she was unable to obtain health insurance. Doctors had discovered that the painful fibroids she was suffering from were cancerous. She needed money for more biopsies and for transportation to the hospital. Her Twitter community, as always, contributed. She didn’t ask her family for help.

“She was very private and very proud,” Margaret Haynes, a cousin, said by phone, adding that she had spoken to Mrs. Hudson a few weeks before her death. “She said to me, ‘I’m doing well. If I need anything, you’ll be the first to know.’”

Still, on February 9, she told her followers: “I feel like I’m meowing into the void. And it’s raining. And I’m just trying not to drown.”

February 7 had been a rough day. Ms. Hudson was dizzy and in pain, she wrote. Sensing her mortality, she reported her decision to be single and not have children – “to be an aunt and not a mother,” as she put it – and recalled a conversation she had with a young relative. , and portray it with characteristic humor.

“Suppose life on some plane of existence is a dinner at a restaurant,” she explained, then continued, “Let’s say the life Auntie (I) has chosen is the salad option. A life without partner(s) or own Littles. Let’s say the Soup option comes with Littles, and maybe a partner. But you can only choose one. Like it. If you choose the Family Soup, you cannot get the Singlehood Autonomy Salad. ”

She quoted a bit along these lines and then concluded, “Aunt Fiqah chose the salad. Because she only likes soup. And no one can ever convince her that she REALLY likes soup. Or will come. Or that she should. Soup should be enjoyed with love and enthusiasm. What if it’s not possible? Have the salad.”

Mrs. Hudson died eight days later.

Alain Delaqueriere research contributed.

In 1958, when Mary Pat Laffey Inman became a flight attendant – as they were then called – for Northwest Airlines, she was twenty years old and the clock was already ticking. At the age of 32, she would be forced to retire. That is, if she did not marry, became pregnant or even became overweight for that: these were all reasons for ending the marriage. It was the golden age of aviation for everyone, except perhaps the women who served meals to the smartly dressed passengers during the flight.

Six years later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and female flight attendants began joining forces against sexism.

In 1970, Ms. Laffey Inman, a labor leader and Northwest's first female purser — the head attendant on a flight — led a class action lawsuit, Laffey v. Northwest Airlines Inc., which resulted in the airline paying more than $30 million in damages and back wages in 1985. It also set the precedent for non-discriminatory hiring of flight attendants across the industry. But even then, not everything changed: flight attendants at some airlines were still subject to “weighings” until the 1990s. (Northwest merged with Delta Air Lines in 2008.)

Now, decades after the landmark decision, Ms. Laffey Inman, 86, is one of several former flight attendants featured in “Fly with me,” An “American experiencedocumentary chronicling how women fought to overcome discrimination in the airline industry. The film premieres on PBS on February 20. The New York Times spoke with Ms. Laffey Inman about how she made history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired your career in the aviation sector?

I worked at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh. I always wanted to travel, ever since I was a child. As a flight attendant I was able to travel – all expenses paid. I loved it. Other flight attendants and I laugh about how lucky we were to be in the industry at the time. We would bid on three-day stopovers in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo. A limousine is ready to pick you up and take you to the hotel.

What did the training entail at the time?

Flight attendants had a six-week session where we learned about the airline and received emergency and safety training. We learned the commands to use in an emergency. And we had grooming classes – women came and taught us how to apply our makeup and paint our fingernails.

Beyond keeping up appearances, how was sexism evident in the industry?

When I started, senior flight attendants talked about younger men being hired to take charge of the plane and crew, bypassing flight attendants who had been flying for a while. They discussed this in whispers, or sometimes not whispering. It was always a point of contention. Men were elected to positions that controlled the union, and they conducted the negotiations. Flight attendants couldn't really consider the job as a career because we had to quit when we got married or when we were 32. That was always in the back of your mind.

How did you become the first female Purser?

In 1968, Northwest hired four men off the street as pursers. I called the director of labor relations and said, “You have to place this bid!” When they did that, a lot of women were intimidated, but I applied and got the job.

How did the duties of flight attendants differ in the 1960s?

We had to work with military air contracts. In times of emergency, the US military has the right to fly aircraft that can be used on a military basis. We flew to Vietnam quite often during the Tet Offensive in 1968. I was a purist, but I was new and had no seniority, so I was assigned to those flights. We would take 165 soldiers to Okinawa, then take them to Vietnam and hopefully bring 165 back. We got in and out of Vietnam as quickly as possible because there were rockets going back and forth.

Taking over a huge company is no easy feat, especially as young women in the 1960s.

We didn't have a legal leg to stand on until the Civil Rights Act, which mandated discrimination based on sex. That was our renaissance.

What role did you play?

In 1967, I became head of the Northwest union and negotiated the airline's first nondiscriminatory contract. We were able to prove that female flight attendants had the same skills and responsibilities. Then we brought back the flight attendants who had been fired because they were over 32, or because they were overweight or because they were married.

How did you end up with a class action lawsuit?

In 1969 negotiations for the next contract began. The negotiating committee was dominated by men. I expected changes, but Northwest refused to include language that would treat female wallets the same as male wallets. I spoke to an employment lawyer who said we had a case. Ultimately, 70 percent of the union signed. The airline dragged it out for 15 years – took it to the Supreme Court twice, but the case was sent back to the Federal District Court of Appeals, where Ruthie Bader Ginsburg was the judge who wrote the opinion in our favor.

When you filed the lawsuit, did you have any idea of ​​the impact you would have on the industry – and on history?

No, I was just looking for equality in pay. I wasn't thinking 40 or 50 years ahead. I just hoped that every step up the judicial ladder would go our way.

As for flying today, with the many reports of bad passenger behavior What do you think can be done about flights and crew stress to make flying better?

I would like to see someone pass a law to widen the seats. That's one of the reasons there is so much tension.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter for expert tips on smarter travel and inspiration for your next holiday. Are you dreaming of a future getaway or are you just traveling in an armchair? Check out our 52 places to go in 2024.

Richard Gambino, the chairman of the first academic Italian American studies program in the United States and a leading critic of those who reflexively viewed Italian Americans as mafiosi and mocked them with ethnic stereotypes in popular culture, died Jan. 12 at his home in Southampton . , NY He was 84.

His death, in a hospice, was caused by lymphoma, said his daughter Erica-Lynn Huberty.

Dr. Gambino was an assistant professor of educational philosophy at Queens College in 1972 when he published a long essay on Italian Americans in The New York Times Magazine, a month after the release of Francis Ford Coppola's film “The Godfather.”

He wrote that the “nativist American mentality, born of ignorance and fueled by malice” emphasized stereotypes of Italian Americans as “spaghetti-twirling, opera-roaring buffoons in tank tops (as in the TV commercial with its famous line, 'That's a spicy meatball'), or dark, sinister hoods in flashy suits, shirts and ties.”

He added: “The incredible exploitation of 'The Godfather' is a testament to the power of the mafia myth today.”

The Mafia myth – which suggested that a significant percentage of Italian Americans were involved in or benefited from organized crime – kept Dr. Gambino in the decades after he was appointed in 1973 to head the newly formed Italian-American studies program at Queens College. It was also one of the topics covered in his well-received book 'Blood of My Blood' (1974), a personal, sociological and psychological exploration of the first, second and third generations of his ethnic group.

“The mafia image of Italian Americans is older than is commonly believed,” he wrote in “Blood of My Blood.” “It has been a cross on the shoulders of every Italian American for well over a century.”

Ms. Huberty said her father had conversations with Mario Puzo, the author of “The Godfather,” the 1969 blockbuster that was the basis for the film, about his motivations for writing the film.

Mr. Puzo “told him he knew he would make money writing about the Mafia,” Ms. Huberty said in a telephone interview. “My father wasn't exactly happy about it, but he understood it. He had a similar problem with David Chase, with 'The Sopranos.' He wouldn't look at it.”

Richard Ignatius Gambino was born on May 5, 1939 in Brooklyn. His father, Dominick, an immigrant from Palermo, Sicily, was a meter inspector for Con Edison. His mother, Catherine (Tranchina) Gambino, a first-generation Italian-American, worked in a shoulder pad factory and then as a bookkeeper.

When he attended Queens College in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he watched 'The Untouchables', the television series starring Robert Stack as Eliot Ness, the Prohibition agent who fought organized crime in Chicago in the 1930s. He noticed that many of the criminals' names were Italian.

“I remember gritting my teeth in anger and humiliation when I heard some students casually refer to the program” with a slur on Italians, he wrote in “Blood of My Blood.” He wanted to fight them, but feeling isolated on a campus with few Italian Americans, he didn't.

He graduated from Queens College in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy. He went on to earn two more philosophy degrees: a master's degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1965 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1968.

He was hired by the New York Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan in 1965 as a leader and teacher of adult education. Two years later he moved to Queens College.

Dr. Gambino directed the Italian-American Studies Program – an interdisciplinary minor with subjects in history, political science, psychology, literature, art and music – for more than 20 years.

“He brought Italian American studies to the broader public,” Anthony Julian Tamburri, dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, also at Queens College, said by phone. “It was a way to get more working-class Italian-American and foreign Italian students into the classroom to show them the real history of Italian-Americans.”

Early in his tenure, Dr. Gambino faces overt discrimination based on his ancestry. After a neighbor was murdered, he told United Press International in 1974, a police detective questioned him about what he believed were his Mafia connections.

That year he founded the magazine Italian Americana. He continued to write throughout his academic career, and was also widely quoted in articles advocating the broadening of the cultural views of his ethnic group.

In his book “Vendetta” (1977), he wrote about the murder of eleven Italian Americans – two of them shot, nine hanged – by a frenzied mob in New Orleans in 1891, after a jury failed to find a group of Italian to condemn Americans. for the shooting of David Hennessy, the city's police chief. In his final words, Chief Hennessy reportedly blamed Italian Americans for the attack on him, using an ethnic slur.

“There was no evidence that those men or Italian Americans were responsible for Hennessy's murder,” Dr. Gambino in 1977 to The Daily News in New York. He called the incident “the largest lynching in American history.”

In 'Vendetta' Dr. Gambino notes the persistent prejudice against Italian Americans. He quoted the president Richard M. Nixon to one of his aides, John Ehrlichman, on a 1973 White House recording: “They're not like us. The difference is that they smell different, look different, behave different.”

“Vendetta” was adapted into an HBO movie in 1999 with Christopher Walken as James Houston, a lynch mob leader, and Clancy Brown as Chief Hennessy.

Dr. Gambino also wrote plays — “Camerado,” about Walt Whitman, and “The Trial of Pope Pius XII” — which were performed on Long Island in the early 2000s.

He Gambino left Queens College in 1998. From 1994 to 1997, he also taught at Stony Brook University as a visiting professor of European languages.

In addition to Mrs. Huberty, Mr. Gambino is survived by his wife, Gail (Cherne) Gambino, whom he married in 1971 and whose father, Leo Cherne, was chairman of the International Rescue Committee; another daughter, Doria Gambino; a son, Mark; a stepdaughter, Lisa Beatty; and two grandchildren. His marriage to Barbara Barnett ended in divorce.

Dr. Gambino remained alert to prejudice against Italian Americans throughout his adult life.

In 1993, he criticized Jack Weinstein, a federal district judge, for saying during the sentencing of a mob boss that “much of the young Italian-American community should be discouraged” from turning to crime.

“This is more than an example of a thoughtless, insensitive comment,” Dr. wrote. Gambino in New York Newsday; it is “another confirmation of what investigative journalist Jack Newfield has called 'the most tolerated intolerance' in the United States today: anti-Italian prejudice.”