It’s the birthday of author and psychologist Robert Coles, born in 1929 in Boston. He wrote more than 60 books. He was in the South at the dawn of the civil rights movement, planning to lead a low-key life as a child psychologist. During a visit to New Orleans in 1960, he saw a white mob surrounding a six-year-old black girl named Ruby Bridges who was kneeling in her starched white dress in the middle of it all to pray for the mob that was attacking her. Coles decided to begin what would become his work for the next few decades, an effort to understand how children and their parents come to terms with radical change. He conducted hundreds of interviews on the effects of school desegregation and he shaped them into the first volume of Children of Crisis (1967), a series of books for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
When Coles was 66 he co-founded a new magazine about “ordinary people and their lives.” It was called DoubleTake and it featured photography and writing in the documentary tradition. The magazine was printed on fine paper with big, beautiful photo reproductions and it won lots of awards.
Robert Coles said, “We should look inward and think about the meaning of our life and its purposes, lest we do it in 20 or 30 years and it’s too late.”
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