For almost 20 years now my wife and I have been working with the children of rather well-to-do, if not rich, families. We began, and have continued our work, on quite the other side of the railroad tracks. We started visiting white and black children from New Orleans at their homes in 1960, when that city was seized by rioting mobs bent on preventing school desegregation. As is often the case, the boys and girls caught up in a terrible and continuing social crisis (for them an intensely personal one) were without exception from relatively hard-pressed families—in the case of the blacks, extremely poor, in the case of whites, working-class at best.
