Integration: What Happens to the Kids

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On his record, Psychiatrist Robert Coles, 33, should be tending bothered Brahmins on Boston's Beacon Street. A graduate of Milton Academy and Harvard (magna), Coles got his M.D. at Columbia and trained at proper Boston hospitals, from Children's to McLean to Massachusetts General. He even married a Hallowell—a word that some Boston tots think is part of the Lord's Prayer: "Hallowell be thy name."

Instead, Coles has been off tackling one of the great questions of U.S. education: How, in detail, does desegregation affect children? He may now be the nation's leading expert on the subject. As gifted with words as he is with feelings, Coles last week issued an eloquent report under the auspices of the Southern Regional Council and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

Sharing the Strain. In the tense summer of 1961, Coles moved to Atlanta, where ten Negro children were girding themselves to "integrate" four white high schools. Bomb rumors spread; abusive phone calls gave the kids bad dreams. With foundation money, Coles and his wife set up a unique "practice" —fulltime sharing of the kids' trials and triumphs over the next two years.

Every week Coles tape-recorded interviews with each of the Negroes and a dozen of their white classmates, half of them from intensely segregationist families. By 1962, his "patients" included 40 more integrated Negro students and additional whites, plus numerous teachers and parents. Once a month, he similarly interviewed 19 grade-school children in New Orleans including the four Negroes who went through desegregation riots there in 1960. Along the way, he scoured other integration hot spots from Little Rock to Clinton, Tenn.

Paroled to America. Coles found that youngness is the key to successful desegregation. Much as he was moved by one small Negro girl's drawing of herself in New Orleans as "a lonely blackbird, cautiously winging her way toward the school," he observed that the youngest children show the least strain. In New Orleans, white six-year-olds gravely promised their parents to avoid Negro children—and then happily skipped rope with them as soon as they got to school. Equally important, the world of school shut out adult rioters; all they did was create more school spirit. "Frantz School will survive," sang the kids in New Orleans, and it did.

Atlanta's teen-agers had a lot tougher time. Though untouched by violence, they had to unlearn old fears amid "normal" adolescent strains. One Negro boy worriedly studied karate before entering a white school: another dreamed of himself in Little Rock, holding off whites with a machine gun. Yet integration spurred many to sudden pride and progress. Instead of "always watching and peeking around," as one boy put it, "I feel as if I've been let out of jail and into America."