Robert Coles

For months six-year-old Ruby Bridges must confront the hostility of white parents when she becomes the first African American girl to integrate Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.

In the 1950s Robert Coles began studying, living among, and, above all, listening to American children. The results of his efforts — revealed in five volumes published between 1967 and 1977 — constitute one of the most searching and vigorous social studies ever undertaken by one person in the United States.
Here, heard often in their own voices, are America's "children of crisis": African American children caught in the throes of the South's...

Dr. Coles shows how the work of writers, artists, and thinkers of the past two centuries can inspire our own reflections on our daily lives. He offers a compelling call to venture outside our own selves and lives and to listen, attentively and with growing humanity, to the way others get through life, and he encourages us to examine our own character, kindness, and complexity by studying the wisdom of authors from Charles Dickens to Flannery O'Connor,...

Harvard professor Robert Coles recounts the story of six-year-old Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Franz Elementary School in New Orleans in the 1960s.