Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III
by Robert Coles
Summary
Robert Coles began the research behind Children of Crisis in 1960, when he met Ruby Bridges, the six year old girl who was, that year, the only Black child at her newly desegregated New Orleans elementary school, walking in under federal marshal escort, and that meeting shaped the rest of his career as a researcher of children living through crisis. The full series eventually ran to five volumes; the two that won the Pulitzer together, published in 1971 as Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers and The South Goes North, move beyond the desegregation crisis of the first volume to follow children of migrant farmworker families following the crops across the country and Black families leaving the rural South for cities in the North during the later years of the Great Migration.
Coles's method sets him apart from more conventional social science: he spent long stretches of time with the families he wrote about, taped conversations, collected children's own drawings, and combined clinical psychiatric training with something closer to literary attention, letting children describe poverty, displacement, and racism in their own words rather than filtering their experience entirely through adult theory. The two volumes trace how children absorb dislocation differently depending on where they land, migrant children moving constantly from one temporary community to the next, and children of families who have left the South permanently trying to build a new sense of home in cities that do not always welcome them.
Reading these volumes means encountering a documentary style built from patient, repeated observation rather than argument or statistics, closer in spirit to oral history than to a psychiatric case study, and it suits a reader interested in how American children actually experienced two of the twentieth century's largest social upheavals, migration and the end of legal segregation, in their own voices. Coles never treats his young subjects as case studies to be diagnosed so much as witnesses whose testimony deserves to be taken on its own terms.
Historical Context & Significance
Volumes II and III of Children of Crisis appeared in 1971, and together they won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, a year the prize split between Coles and Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake, an unusual tie that put a study of American children beside a history of the Vietnam War in the same year's citation. The Pulitzer honored these two specific volumes rather than the series as a whole, which had begun with A Study in Courage and Fear in 1967 and would eventually grow to five books.
Coles, a Harvard based child psychiatrist, spent decades pairing clinical training with sustained fieldwork among children whose lives mainstream psychiatry rarely examined this closely, and the Children of Crisis project became the central work of his career. His method, built on patient, long term listening rather than brief clinical observation, set the series apart from more conventional social science of the period.