A famous figure who lives a very long life risks outliving his fame. That was the case for Robert Coles, the celebrated child psychiatrist and social critic, who died earlier this week at age 97. From the 1960s through the 1990s, Coles was revered by succeeding generations of young people (including mine) for his empathic writings about everyday experience in an America divided by race and class. Many of these writings first appeared in The New Republic, where Coles was for many years a contributing editor.
I encountered Coles in the spring of 1979, when, as a Harvard junior, I took his wildly popular lecture course, Soc. Sci. 33: Moral and Social Inquiry. Coles was a campus celebrity, profiled the year before on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and not especially admired by his academic colleagues because he lacked “rigor.” (Coles returned the disdain by heaping scorn on the social sciences for being too abstracted from the meat and gristle of everyday life.) Drawing on an eclectic and compelling reading list—George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, essays by Simone Weil, short stories by Flannery O’Connor—Coles urged his votaries to lead lives that made moral sense. He didn’t tell us exactly how to go about it, but he made clear we would find no spiritual refreshment on Wall Street.
Coles also warned his compatriots on the political left against ideological complacency. A veteran of social movements regarding civil rights, Appalachian poverty, and migrant farmers, Coles told the Harvard Crimson in 1968 that “I’m very worried about the dangers of a kind of political activity that ignores the ironies and ambiguities of life, including political life.” For example:
The [predominantly Black low-income] people in Roxbury—regardless of what the leaders of SDS or I have to think about it—want to get into the system rather than leave it. The families I work with want to be able to get better service at the Boston City Hospital, they want garbage collection more frequently, they want better heating, they want welfare workers who will help them out. They are not going to take to the streets in order to storm the Winter Palace—there is no Winter Palace to storm.
In his excellent Coles obituary in The Boston Globe, David Shribman writes about Coles’s devotion to what he called “in medias res,” a literary term that describes a narrative that begins in the middle of the story. (The phrase is Latin for “into the middle of things.”) Coles was drawn to studying life “in the midst of trouble.” His first experience doing so was in 1960, when he witnessed a tiny Black girl named Ruby Bridges enter an all-white elementary school in 1960 on the authority of a federal judge’s desegregation order.
“I happened to see this little child going into a school in New Orleans,” Coles later recalled, “at the age of six, in the first grade, and I thought to myself: I’d like to know that child. I’d like to know what’s happening to her.” Coles spent months meeting with Ruby regularly, “rather puzzled at how normal and stoic and strong she was, going through this kind of living hell. Two hundred people waiting at 8:30 in the morning to tell her they were going to kill her.… Twenty-five federal marshals taking her into that building.” Ruby’s father lost his job, and her grandparents, who lived in a small Mississippi town, feared that they would be lynched. Coles figured it was only a matter of time before Ruby would “start developing symptoms and get in trouble.” But she didn’t.
One day Ruby’s teacher told Coles she’d seen Ruby, as she walked past yet another fist-shaking crowd of angry white segregationists, pause to say something. When Coles asked Ruby what she’d said, she explained she’d recited a prayer: “Please, dear God, forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing.” The result of that conversation was Coles’s five-volume series, Children of Crisis. “Ruby had a will,” Coles wrote later, “and used it to make an ethical choice: she demonstrated moral stamina; she possessed honor, courage.”
Religious faith was hugely important to Coles, a practicing Catholic. He wrote about faith often, and these passages were usually the first to get cut out by editors. I know this because Coles told me so himself while I was editing an op-ed I’d assigned him for The New York Times. It was his response to my cutting, in fact, a passage about faith. In that instance, it was for space (I swear!), but he didn’t believe me, and maybe he was correct not to. Coles later tried to help make Dorothy Day a saint by telling the Vatican that his wife, Jane, had prayed to her and was healed in some way. At the moment, though, Day is designated only a “servant of God.”
But I digress.
After Ruby Bridges, Coles’s next in medias res experience was one that’s gone largely unmentioned in his obituaries, which is a shame because I find it his most interesting. “He was [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s] resident shrink,” an Atlanta-based reporter named Pat Walters said in that long-ago Times Magazine profile. “When people got to the cracking point, he was there for them.”
Coles worked in Mississippi for SNCC during 1964’s Freedom Summer, probably the most dangerous campaign of the entire Civil Rights Movement, led by the fearless and brilliant Robert Parris Moses. Northern college students, most of them white and middle or upper-middle class, were recruited to travel south to register voters, teach African American children math, reading, and Black history, and organize an integrated alternative slate of delegates for the 1964 Democratic convention. Almost immediately, three civil rights workers—Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white and from New York, and James Chaney, Black and from Mississippi—were killed. The murder went unpunished for half a century, when one of the surviving killers was finally convicted, though only of manslaughter.
Coles’s role in Freedom Summer is documented in Thomas E. Ricks’s superb 2022 book, Waging a Good War, which examines the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of military strategy. In many ways, the movement’s logic was just as brutal. When Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner were killed, Ricks reports, Coles, who had known them well, was stunned to realize that although Moses and the other leaders grieved their deaths, they also saw it as a moral victory. “They were realizing that they’d succeeded,” Coles would recall. “Because this became cover stories in the newsmagazines. And the president of the United States was having something to say. So they had won.” Black people had been dying for a long time in Mississippi, Coles realized, and “no one noticed or cared.” Now people would care.
Ricks is right; this nonviolent movement was, in fact, waging war. Coles would later diagnose students with “battle fatigue,” with signs of “exhaustion, weariness, despair, frustration and rage.” To Coles, these young civil rights protesters were “in a war and exposed to the stresses of warfare.”
As Coles recalled in a 1983 oral history, he didn’t feel he had much to teach the (almost entirely Black) veterans of the Civil Rights Movement about how to cope, “because they knew a hell of a lot more about that than I did.” Instead, he was steered mostly to minister to the middle- and upper-middle-class white kids, because “having gone to Harvard, and being a product of what I am,” he knew better what they might need. Some of these kids, he said, “were arrogant, protected by their ignorance and arrogance, to be blunt about it. And some of them were protected in the best sense of the word … by a kind of earnest good will. Some of them were a bit show-offy, some of them were naïve and presumptuous, but so are we all, Black and white.” Such novelistic complexity is characteristic of Coles’s observations; in his writings, nobody is ever reduced to a “case study.”
One of the young idealists Coles encountered in Mississippi turned out to be notably sinister: Dennis Sweeney, who two decades later would assassinate his mentor, the civil rights activist and future congressman Allard Lowenstein (also in Mississippi that summer). Coles examined Sweeney after a dynamite blast to figure out whether he needed to see a doctor. “I heard him say some things and made an immediate diagnosis. I said to my wife on the phone … ‘I think he is schizophrenic.’” Coles hoped that Sweeney’s strange behavior had been brought out by stress, and that it would recede. “But then I noticed that it didn’t, totally.”
In another disturbing incident related by Coles, “some students went to see a doctor because they had been injured by one of these incidents with Klan elements or whatever. And the doctor called the Klan in, and they got hurt more.”
The parents of these white college kids, Coles recalled, “were frightened out of their minds.” Coles was told to talk to one female student whose father was a psychoanalyst in Chicago. “She didn’t seem too depressed to me. She said that the only problem I have is that my parents are calling me all the time.” Coles volunteered to phone them, and when he did the father told him she’d had a depressive episode when she was 12. “I said, oh, now she is 20.… I just talked to her and she seemed fine.” Then the man’s wife came on the phone and said she thought it was her husband who was depressed. “He is very worried,” she said. “Worry is not depression,” Coles answered. “And you have every reason to worry. I can’t tell you not to worry. You should worry. So should we all.”
It is perhaps an unusual psychiatric practice to advise your patients to worry, but then Freedom Summer was an unusual event that occurred in the real world, not in anybody’s imagination. When you’re in medias res it doesn’t make sense not to worry. Ruby Bridges was perhaps spared by being too young to worry. But Coles perhaps sells short his own bravery. In that 1978 Times profile, the late civil rights leader Julian Bond recalls:
He was a model for grace under the pressure of those days. We had one fellow demonstrating against us who’d been accused and acquitted of bombing a synagogue; a real hater, this guy. Coles [whose father was Jewish] just patiently drew him out and the guy burst out in tears one day and sobbed to Bob that his mother always hated him and somehow he was getting back at her. I know it sounds theatrical, but he had this special way with people.
One of Coles’s favorite poems, I remember from his class, was Stephen Spender’s “The Truly Great.” Coles would have hotly disputed that he was a great man, but I feel comfortable stating he was one of those who, as Spender writes,
fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Requiescat in pace, Dr. Coles, and safe travels.
