Word: children
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...suppose my loyalties as a person and as a worker are with the immediate lives of the people that I work with, and in that sense I suppose I am not ideological. I want the police to protect these families from fires, from sniping, and I want the children that I know in Roxbury not to be killed by a burning building or by bullets...
...knew that I couldn't go with that sports car into some of these communities because I had decided that that would interfere with my relationship with these people. Well, it took me a long time to feel free enough to get to know some of these children well enough so that they could visit us in our home, and now, of course, I have found that these children love my sports car, and that these children don't begrudge me it, and that these children don't begrudge me a lot of the things that I begrudge myself...
Coles, dissatisfied with children's books that "abusively romanticize" real experience, wrote a children's book this year--Dead End School--depicting the difficulties faced by two ghetto boys when they are thrust into a desegregation effort. The boys, Larry and Jim, are modeled after two boys Coles got to know in Roxbury. The story gives Jim's view of his own experience in the bussing crisis. Larry peripherally presents a black militant reaction to that same experience...
Coles comments on the difficulty of communicating social complexities to children...
COLES: The book was described by one critic as "well-scrubbed." It was meant to be a compliment, but it's a terribly accurate and I think just criticism of the book. Those children emerge as well-scrubbed because I couldn't use some of the swear words I would have liked...