A Glimpse of Integration Moved Psychiatrist to Aid ‘Children of Crisis’

On an autumn day in 1960, Robert Coles was on his way to a session with his psychoanalyst when, suddenly, something occurred that changed the direction of his life. He was himself a young psychiatrist serving in the Air Force and the memory of that day in New Orleans remains among his most vivid.

“I was driving along when I saw a shouting mob on the street and got out of my car to find out what was happening,” said Coles, recalling the incident he describes as “a kind of conversion” in his life. “And I walked over to the corner and saw this little girl being led into a school by about 75 armed federal marshals.”

He sighed, a deep, inward kind of sigh; then the gravelly voice, which is filtered through a nasal, Boston twang, continued: “And when I saw that--that little girl surrounded by a mob of men dealing with a mob of people--it was a real conversion. Something very, very important happened to my head.”

The girl was Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old black child who earned her place in history by integrating a school in New Orleans. Escorted each day past the taunting mobs into a school that was empty except for one teacher who had been threatened with the loss of her pension if she did not show up, Ruby coped with the situation in her own way: She prayed for those who threatened her.

“Can you imagine? A child praying for those who threaten to kill her?” said Coles, now 60, a Harvard professor, prolific writer and the man who has been called “the greatest social conscience of his generation.” He shakes his head sadly. “Anyway, I just stood there and looked. And it really got me going. I wondered what was going on in her mind. Here was this child, all alone, going through this terrible crisis. And I just thought, ‘God, what is she feeling ?’ ”

It was a question that led Robert Coles away from his original plan of returning to his native Boston after the Air Force and establishing a private practice in child psychiatry. Instead, he turned his psychiatric and psychoanalytic training--with the strong support and encouragement of his wife, Jane Hallowell Coles--to studying the impact of school desegregation on children and families, both black and white, caught up in the exploding civil-rights battle in the South.

His attempts to find institutional funding for the project, however, proved futile. “I wrote letters to foundations and was turned down by all of them--and turned down by form letters!” He paused. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Forty seconds passed. Then: “It’s something I’ve never forgotten,” he said finally, the lingering anger edging into his voice as he recalls that early rejection of his work by the Establishment. “I was able, finally, to do it because my father financially supported it and my wife’s grandmother supported it.”

The result of that early work, in which Ruby Bridges figured prominently, was the first volume, in 1967, of his famous five-volume “Children of Crisis” series. The series was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. And the chance encounter with Ruby Bridges marked the beginning of what Coles now calls “30 years of trying to find out how children get on in the world.”

It is a modest description of Coles’ groundbreaking work. For 20 years he traveled with his wife and three sons throughout the rural South--through Appalachia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia--and also to New Mexico. Working as a team, he and his wife talked to children--most often disadvantaged children struggling in the midst of some kind of change--trying to understand, to tease out the inner lives of sharecropper families, migrant workers, mountaineers, Indians, Chicanos, as well as some children of privilege and wealth.

“My wife and I were wanderers, trying to figure out what was happening, moving from city to city. I had no office, I was connected to no institution,” he said, recalling some of his feelings of isolation at the time from his profession and from any institutional support. “But we were very much connected to the civil rights movement.” In fact, he placed himself in great physical danger in Mississippi during the summer of 1964 at the height of the movement.

“I was in a freedom house there and it was dynamited. And I suddenly thought, ‘My God, we’re all going to be killed.’ And then I wondered, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I had been an English major who intended to teach; I had no political interests. . . . My father was a conservative Republican whose great hero was Robert Taft. My mother was from the Midwest and loved Harry Truman. . . . But what permeated our family life was literature, not politics. Why was I doing this?”

Eventually he found the answer; he located it in his unconscious. “I think unconsciously we know everything,” he said, smiling. “And I think at that time there was some rebellious part of me that was ready to take this kind of risk. That I was ready to work in a situation that was unconventional and dangerous and to be involved with people who are seriously hurt or handicapped--whether by virtue of medical illness or, in this case, social illness.”

Peter Davison, who edited the “Crisis” series as well as many other books by Coles, recalls his first impression of the young psychiatrist he met in the early 1960s: “There was a sense that he was angry and indignant. And he was. And I think he’s been angry from that day to this. But I also think he’s very compassionate. He’s angry at those who try to control others and compassionate for those who have been pushed around.”

Jane Coles, who co-authored two “Women of Crisis” books with her husband, described the man she married in 1960 as “very shy. I think the reason he gets on well with children is that they find a fellow child and get protective with him. And the shyness works because it slows him down in telling them what he wants, rather than pushing them.” Jane Coles, who was a teacher until several years ago, suffers from a severe hearing loss and offered her answers to a reporter’s written questions through her husband.

Sitting in his cozy suite of offices near Harvard Square, its walls lined with photos of Anna Freud, James Agee, Erik Erikson, William Carlos Williams and other friends and mentors, Robert Coles--a graduate of Harvard class of ’50 and Columbia University Medical School--looks more like a graduate student than a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities. Remarkably youthful-looking at 60, he was dressed casually in chino trousers and a shirt open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up. His hair is dark and unruly, his body wiry, and he sends out huge jolts of physical energy in every movement he makes.

Later, in one of the classes he teaches (a course officially named “The Literature of Social Reflection,” but unofficially dubbed by irreverent Harvard students as “Guilt 105”), Coles talked about character and about Ruby Bridges and about “those small moments in our lives that have their own ways of shaping history.” He asked his students to think about their own lives and how they can become members of a larger community. Students are guided to such personal reflection and meditation through the works of writers such as Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, William Carlos Williams and Walker Percy.

“I took the course 10 years ago and it changed my life,” said Jay Woodruff, 29, who is on leave from divinity school and serves as Coles’ assistant. Coles’ class tops the list of Harvard’s 10 most popular courses and the more than 800 students enrolled in it make it the largest class on campus.

Coles says he feels most comfortable among students. “I’m afraid I’m not a very good grown-up,” he said, sighing that inward sigh. “My wife has always felt I’m more comfortable with children than grown-ups. And you know, I teach a fourth-grade class in a public school once a week--I teach them my version of art history--and I just love sitting in those little chairs.”

Then the man that Davison calls “the world’s greatest listener” laughed that gravelly laugh: “Sitting in those little chairs, talking to those kids about artists and feelings--it’s my equivalent of taking a tranquilizer.”