leading some to jokingly refer to him as "SNCC's resident shrink." Coles also marched with Martin Luther King Jr.

Later in the 1960s, he openly supported Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan--brothers and renegade Catholic priests who opposed the Vietnam War.

He worked for Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy '48, who--along with King--was gunned down in 1968.

Coles' office walls bear images of RFK--as well as those of labor organizer Cesar Chavez and Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was killed by El Salvadoran military in 1979.

Despite his left-wing tendencies, Coles was always careful not to alienate the average people he studied. He had no patience for intellectuals who philosophized without bothering to see what real people were really like.

"He is really concerned about people," Robert Taylor wrote in a Boston Globe review of Coles' 1971 The Middle Americans. "Not group abstractions, but individuals."

A Scholar and a Gentleman

In reviewing Coles's career, one tends to forget that since he left the South in 1964, he has had to balance his activism with the demands of academia.

In 1964, Harvard psychoanalyst and sociologist Erik H. Erikson asked Coles to return to Boston to work with him. Coles says Erikson's Childhood and Society was a major influence on him, and he jumped at the chance.

For three years, Coles led sections of Erikson's classes. When Erikson retired, Harvard offered Coles a teaching job.

Coles gradually extended his freshman seminars of the late 1970s into Gen Ed 105--one of the most popular electives at Harvard.

The idea for the course, says Coles, springs from Erikson, who allowed Coles while a teaching fellow to use novels along with social science texts.

Gen Ed 105 examines modern authors who have written on social problems, ranging from Coles' heroes like Williams and Day to masters like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Flannery O'Connor.

"I love being kept in touch with the books I teach in the course," he says.

Students say what they love most about the class is Coles' level of attention to his students.

Timothy F. Wyant '00 describes Coles as a "wonderfully humble" man who is able to incorporate his own life into his teaching without ever losing his focus on other people.