The next year, when Atlanta high schools were desegregated, Coles shuttled back and forth from Atlanta to New Orleans, meeting with children and talking to them informally in their homes.

"I had no institutional affiliation," Coles says. "I was a loner, a maverick."

He took as his guide the advice that Perry Miller once gave him about children: "You have a lot to learn from them."

"Those words have informed my life," Coles reflects.

What Coles says he has learned after 50 years is children and their innate capacities should never be underestimated.

Often, says Coles, psychiatrists and psychologists fail to appreciate this.

"We become blinded by our knowledge," he says. "We forget there is other knowledge to be had."

"Be very careful about applying psychiatric labels to children that often cannot do justice to their possibilities and potential," he says.

Rather than labeling, Coles tries to let children's stories speak for themselves. He won critical and popular acclaim for his five volume work, Children of Crisis, which chronicled his interactions with Ruby Bridges and other children.

A Life of Activism

While giving poor children a voice, Coles was always busy raising his own.

Coles' social conscience was always central to his life, notes O'Connor, who says Coles called himself a "Christian communist" while in medical school.

And necessarily, the subjects of Coles' writing lent themselves to social progress. Concern over Coles' Still Hungry in America directly provoked the food stamp program of the late 1960s.

Coles befriended Catholic activist Dorothy Day after meeting the pacifist egalitarian at her soup kitchen, and he wound up contributing to her journal, The Catholic Worker.

Coles' feet were as active as his pen.

Once in the South, Coles got involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),