What Happens to the Kids

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."

A Horrible Thought. For white students, the experience was equally profound. Some felt actual physical revulsion when near a Negro, "like dirt being rubbed on you." But this emotion was often overruled by the horror that all adolescents feel toward the thought of social ostracism. "I've really changed a lot of my ideas," one white boy said of the Negroes. "You can't help having respect for them, the way they've gone through the year so well."

One white problem was telling "them" so out loud--a battle between guilt and conformity. Perhaps sensing this, one bright white teacher suddenly called on a Negro girl named Martha to state her problems in class. When she did so in no uncertain manner, Coles found whites "relieved by this firmness." At year's end Martha was astonished to find her yearbook filled with glowing words. Sample: "I only hope that you will forgive those of us who have been mean and ugly." And: "Martha, I cannot tell you how much I admire your courage and determination."

A Decade More. Though wary of generalizations, Coles believes that children of both races study as hard as ever in newly integrated schools. Negroes drive to catch up, whites to stay on top or improve. Says Coles: "We have yet to hear a Southern teacher complain of any drop in intellectual or moral climate in a desegregated room or school."

All this, Reporter Coles believes, shows how racial myths can in practice be legislated out of existence to the general improvement of education. The law is still a great teacher.

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