Nathan Cohen; Expert Broadened Social Work’s Focus

Nathan Edward Cohen, a former UCLA social welfare expert who helped shape the field of social work and led an important study on the causes of the 1965 Watts riots, died Jan. 27 at his home in Oakland. He was 91.

Cohen was the first president of the National Assn. of Social Workers, which he helped form in 1955. He was a leader in efforts to broaden the field, which had become heavily focused on the psychological roots of societal problems.

What he urged colleagues to consider was “what were some of the social forces, as opposed to psychological forces, that explain problems society had,” said Leonard Schneiderman, a former dean of UCLA’s social welfare school. “In this larger respect, Nat made a contribution. He was a leader in the effort to incorporate material from social sciences, sociology, political science and economics” in the field of social welfare.

Cohen also believed that social work meant a commitment to social justice. As dean of UCLA’s school of social welfare, he became one of the major forces behind a comprehensive, two-year study of the causes of the Watts riots. The violence that began on a hot summer night in 1965, after fights broke out in a crowd watching the arrest of an African American man suspected of drunk driving, lasted 144 hours and resulted in 34 deaths and more than 1,000 injuries.

Published in 1970 with Cohen as editor, “The Los Angeles Riots: A Socio-Psychological Study” was praised in a Los Angeles Times review as a “brilliant triumph of social science over social myth.”

Study Examined Pre-Riot Conditions

It described the social and political conditions that existed before and after the riots and interviewed more than 2,000 people, including those who lived in Watts and black, white and other residents of the Greater Los Angeles area.

Among its findings were that although 68% of whites “felt that Negroes should stop pushing so hard in an attempt to gain their rights,” 33% were sympathetic to their grievances. The main reasons blacks cited for their unhappiness were poor neighborhood conditions, mistreatment by whites and economic problems.

The study “raised the level of discourse about what was going on in Los Angeles to one of a broader nature than what perhaps was seen at the time,” said Jerome Cohen (no relation to Nathan), a former UCLA colleague who helped write the report. “It really was a kind of revolt rather than a riot.”

The report warned against increasing police power to stifle urban unrest. That tactic would only encourage blacks to take “pride in aggression,” Cohen told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1967, when the panel was considering a House-passed bill to make interstate travel to incite a riot a federal crime.

Cohen, who had been invited to speak at the behest of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and other committee liberals, testified against the bill, arguing that “if all the emphasis is placed on policing, without getting at the causes, we are in trouble.”

A better solution, he said, would be action to ensure blacks that the nation was committed to improving the quality of their lives. He said that blacks, when asked what they needed most, put jobs, education and housing ahead of racial integration.

The son of Russian immigrants, Cohen was born in Derry, N.H., and raised in Boston, where his father ran a meat production plant. He grew up next door to the girl who would become his wife and together they attended the first Girls’ and Boys’ Latin Schools in Boston.

He earned a doctorate in experimental psychology from Harvard in 1934 and was awarded a Sheldon Fellowship in Italy, where he watched Mussolini’s Black Shirts march beneath his window. Observing the Nazis’ rise to power convinced him to switch from “running rats in the laboratory” to work that would have broader social impact.

Back in the United States, he worked for a series of private agencies, including the National Jewish Welfare Board, before becoming a professor of social work at Columbia University. He eventually became an associate dean and chaired the National Council on Social Work Education, which advocated sweeping curriculum changes and the introduction of research and doctoral programs.

In 1958 he became chairman of the School of Applied Social Sciences at Cleveland’s Western Reserve University. While there, he led a group of students to Selma, Ala., to march with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He later rose to vice president and oversaw the university’s reorganization into Case Western Reserve.

In 1964 he was president of the National Conference on Social Welfare and moved to UCLA as a professor of social welfare. At UCLA, he launched a doctoral program in social work.

He served as dean until 1969, when UCLA, like college campuses across the nation, was embroiled in student rebellions.

Although he had championed minority concerns in the school--minority enrollment had increased from 13% to 22% in the last year of his deanship and minority faculty had been hired--Cohen found himself at the center of attacks that the university and the school were insensitive to the needs of Latinos and blacks. He resigned as dean in August 1969, but continued to teach there for another decade.

He is survived by his wife, Sylvia; daughter, Susan, of Berkeley; two sons, David, of New York City, and Edward, of Loomis, Calif.; eleven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Donations may be sent to the UCLA Foundation to support the Nathan E. Cohen Doctoral Student Award in Social Welfare, c/o Department Chair, Social Welfare Department, UCLA, Box 951656, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1656.