UHS Psychiatrist Fears Roxbury May Explode Again, Blames Hicks

"Boston may be the first city to have repeated riots in one summer," Robert Coles, a University Health Service psychiatrist said in an interview yesterday.

Coles, whose study of ghetto children has taken him into Roxbury almost daily during the past three academic years, is convinced that the area is still one of the most explosive racial tinderboxes in the country.

"One might think the last riot let off a lot of the steam. But I think the steam may just be beginning to build up now," he said.

Coles blames much of the present tenseness of Roxbury on Louise Day Hicks and her cohorts. "Roxbury Negroes with a past in the South associates her with Bull Connor, "he said. She makes the same repressive, uncomprehending, vicious response to their problems that the Southern sheriffs do, he elaborated

Louise Day

"Negro friends of mine, " Coles said, "tell me that the police make a point of signing off on their radios 'All the way with Louise Day.' Negroes feel the police are hoping to win the election for Mrs. Hicks so that they can put the black men back in their place."

In all my experience in South and North, "Coles concluded, "this city of Boston--because of its political atmosphere--is probably right now the most hostile, most tense, most tense, most unfriendly to the Negro I've ever seen."

Coles has visited Hartford, New York, and San Francisco repeatedly to gather data on ghetto children to compare with his Roxbury findings. He also became familiar with Cleveland's ghetto while preparing a study in 1966 for the city's civil rights commission. He lived in the South seven years studying the problems of rural Negroes.