The Sociologist Who Reported His Data Even When It Cost Him

At the gate, park staff asked visitors a blunt question: were they there for the rides, or were they there to be arrested?

It was the July 4th weekend in 1963 at Gwynn Oak, a segregated amusement park outside Baltimore. Thomas Coleman, then a boy, had come with his family. Staff at the entrance paired a white family with a Black family, and the Colemans had come to protest. Thomas, the son of sociologist James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University, recalled a photograph in the Baltimore Sun of the family being led away. Detained with hundreds of others in an armory, Thomas fell asleep on a bench while his brother stayed awake to be fingerprinted with their parents.

James Coleman made a career of reporting what his data showed, even when it made him unpopular.

Victoria Cain, who is interviewed about the report, called him "a gifted, well-respected mathematical sociologist," studious and unassuming. She said he paid close attention to numbers but was also attuned to culture. Federal officials noticed him after a large study of how high school nerds and jocks behaved differently, work that showed he could handle data on thousands of schoolchildren. He agreed to lead a national survey of segregation and inequality in schools.

The result was the Equality of Educational Opportunity report of 1966, known as the Coleman Report, more than 700 pages of data. Its conclusion surprised Washington. It confirmed that schools were still segregated and that Black students trailed white students by several grade levels. But it found that two factors predicted achievement most strongly: a family's economic background and educational aspirations, and a classroom with a diverse mix of poor and affluent students. The bottom line was that student learning did not simply improve when resources increased.

His son summed up his rule in his father's words: "This is the data. This is the evidence. You know, you may like it, you may not like it, but this is what it is."

That rule next put Coleman at odds with supporters of court ordered busing, in which children were sent to distant schools to mix Black and white enrollment. Coleman favored integration but opposed busing. He argued in editorials that it would cause white flight, in which white families leave integrated districts, and deepen segregation.

He collected more data and in 1975 published a follow up study making the case against busing. Called to testify before Congress, he was asked by Kentucky Senator Walter Huddleston about alternatives to busing. Coleman urged an option built around increased rights for Black students, in his core phrase, "increased rights for Blacks rather than restricted rights for both Blacks and whites."

The stand damaged his reputation. Some members tried to have him removed from the American Sociological Association. Critics dismissed his later work as "bumper sticker sociology." Robert Crane of the RAND Corporation said Coleman had "set out to advance the cause of private schools."

Coleman answered that testifying required discipline. He said that if you appear before Congress as a scientist, you have to act as a scientist, meaning you present what the numbers show and do not bend them to please either side. He kept publishing studies to the end, still looking for an answer officials could use.