Children of Crisis by Robert Coles
"Children of Crisis" is a comprehensive five-volume study by Robert Coles, focusing on American youth during a pivotal era of social upheaval from the late 1950s through the 1970s, particularly against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. The work originated from Coles’s experiences as a child psychiatrist and civil rights activist in the racially segregated Deep South, where he held discussions with black children integrating public schools and others affected by these societal changes. The first volume, which gained significant recognition and awards, highlights the experiences of Southern children involved in integration efforts, while subsequent volumes explore the lives of diverse groups, including migrants, Appalachian families, and affluent children.
Coles emphasizes the importance of understanding the perspectives of children, presenting their insights and emotional states in their own words, while contextualizing their experiences within broader social, economic, and political frameworks. His approach blends personal narratives with sociocultural analysis, advocating for respect and transformation regarding the socioeconomic structures impacting marginalized communities. "Children of Crisis" remains influential for its accessible discourse and its call for deeper societal change, encouraging readers to engage with critical issues affecting American society.
Subject Terms
Children of Crisis by Robert Coles
First published:Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear, 1967; Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers, 1971; The South Goes North, 1971; Eskimos, Chicanos, Indians, 1977; Privileged Ones: The Well-Off and the Rich in America, 1977.
Type of work: Cultural criticism
Time of work: 1958-1970
Locale: The United States
Principal Personage:
Robert Coles , a child psychiatrist
Form and Content
In 1958, Robert Coles, a physician serving in the United States Air Force and beginning a career as a child psychiatrist, first encountered the racially segregated Deep South. Over several years he held weekly conferences with the black children who were integrating the public schools, and he met also with their parents and advisers and with whites who were caught up in the crisis. Soon he became a civil rights activist. This almost casual beginning led to the lasting commitment that underlies his career as a social critic.
Children of Crisis, the centerpiece of his literary work, is a five-volume study of American youth in the years of social crisis, from about 1958 to 1970, when the Civil Rights movement was most active and when vast numbers of Southern rural poor, uprooted from their homes, migrated to Northern and Midwestern cities. Four volumes concentrate on racial minorities and on poor, chiefly Appalachian whites; the fifth treats wealthy children.
The first and most famous volume describes the Southern children caught up in the earliest efforts to integrate the public schools, especially those in New Orleans and in Atlanta with whom he worked closely for several years, and moves out from the base of his observations of these children to describe their families, the civil rights workers, and the local white figures who opposed the movement, supported it, or were involved in it without taking a personal stand. Later volumes focus on migrants, sharecroppers, mountaineer families of the Appalachians, Chicanos, Indians, Eskimos, and Southern working-class families, black and white, who have moved to Northern cities.
In all volumes, Coles reports at length on his conversations with children, their elders, and certain figures significant in their communities (teachers, clergy, law officers, social workers, and office holders), but he is principally concerned with the children themselves. Disguising their identities, he reports their states of mind, often in their own words, as they describe, evaluate, and speculate on their lives and problems. He presents the social and psychological context for their remarks, describing the terrain, economic and social dynamics, culture, and political patterns of their lives. Thus, he provides extended descriptions of camps and of migrant travel, and his book on the affluent analyzes their choices of vacation residences and second homes. In each volume he discusses his working methods, explaining his long-term involvement with the people whom he is studying and the fairly limited extent to which he brings psychoanalytic techniques to bear on his material.
Critical Context
The first volume of Children of Crisis appeared when the fact of racial crisis was generally recognized and when informed, compassionate comment on the struggle for integration was widely appreciated. Among many awards, Coles received a Pulitzer Prize for the second and third volumes of Children of Crisis, collectively. The whole series found a large readership, to which he offered an informed, conscientious, and unconventional analysis of some of the deepest problems of American society. He showed, and called for, respect for the religious convictions and the practical ways of making do that the poor have made part of their lives.
Coles’s presentation is disconcerting, seeming at first to ask simply for justice, fairness, and tolerance but in fact calling for a far-reaching transformation of socioeconomic structures and political relationships. The second volume may be the most significant in the series, since the struggle to improve the lot of migrant families has achieved so little. Although Coles’s reluctance to accept the interpretive privileges of his own psychiatric credentials and his reliance upon Christian categories of thought have rendered his work suspect to many readers, his approach has also brought him credibility, a lasting audience, and some influence among religious people whose social views are largely conservative. With his avoidance of social science jargon, he has enabled more readers to join in informed debate concerning the future of American society.
Bibliography
Caudill, Harry. Review in The New York Review of Books. XVIII (March 9, 1972), p. 21.
Friedenberg, Edgar Z. Review in The New York Review of Books. IX (September 28, 1967), p. 28.
Poussaint, Alvin F. Review in Harvard Educational Review. XXXVIII (Spring, 1968), p. 373.
Schnell, R. L. “Contributions to Psychohistory: Individual Experience in Historiography and Psychoanalysis: Significance of Erik Erikson and Robert Coles,” in Psychological Reports. XLVI (April, 1980), pp. 591-612.
Vidal, Gore. Review in The New York Review of Books. XXV (February 9, 1978), p. 9.
Yancey, Philip. “The Crayon Man,” in Christianity Today. XXXI (February 6, 1987), pp. 14-20.