Cover
story Get
out of the way
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff Washington
Theres a new movement
a-borning. Right now its manifestation is Marian Wright Edelman tapping the
tabletop. Not hard, but emphatically. Soon enough she and other mothers and
grandmothers may be knocking heads together and taking to the streets if
we have to.
Movements are born when the system doesnt work. And for more
than a quarter-century the now 60-year-old founder of the Childrens
Defense Fund has worked every angle of the U.S. system on behalf of
Americas children.
Despite building a nationwide organization (10 state offices),
working with Congress and the establishment, seeing regulations written and
laws passed, pushing or wooing or fighting with liberals and conservatives to
press for changes in the nations priorities for its kids, Edelman fears a
hollow success -- and wont settle for it.
This country is morally dead, said the 1960s civil
rights lawyer with the same smilingly fierce determination that faced down
Mississippi bigotry in court and in the street. Were going to hell
unless we take care of our kids. How we deal with childrens lives is the
moral Achilles heel of this nation.
I think and I will say to you, she said, again rapping
the tabletop in her 25 E Street N.W. office, that even though over the
last 25 years we have tried to talk about the inclusiveness movement, across
race and class and every discipline, it is time for the mothers and the
grandmothers to say to the men in power: Get out of the way. We will no
longer permit the public killing of our children. We will no longer talk of
spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Star Wars anti-missile systems when
kids are dying like flies. We will no longer see our children treated unfairly
-- whether its health care or child care.
The challenge is how do you make people treat our children
right. Its going to take a movement, she said. Perhaps we
should have done it 10 years ago.
This wasnt grandstanding. Marian Wright matured (see
accompanying story) during the civil rights movement as a 20-year-old
preachers child at Atlanta sit-ins, as the potential scholar of
19th-century Russian literature who instead went to Yale law school so she
could go back to Mississippi and work for its voteless 915,000 blacks --
citizens without rights.
Now, for children, the system has failed. Again.
Weve tried every method, she said. We have
issued hundreds of reports documenting for this good, sensitive democratic,
decent nation -- tell them the truth and theyll do the right thing.
OK?
I think the issue of building a movement, laying the seeds
of a movement, [means] moving outside the traditional incremental box of how we
go about change.
Its more difficult than in the 60s. You
dont have an enemy on the other side. Youre taking on these
extraordinarily powerful industries, each of which is different, because
youve got to deal with child health, child care, child education, child
lives.
Edelman is gearing up to shift tactics, even if it means
taking on our friends. Said the mother of three sons, A lot of our
friends are running bad school systems. [They] see their jobs as more important
than educating children. A lot of our friends are doctors and nurses more
concerned about reimbursement rates than getting children a healthy start --
our friends who somehow think that keeping themselves in power is more
important than helping poor children get a chance in life.
Edelman, though she grew up a preachers daughter in
segregated rural Greenville, S.C., speaks (and writes) with deep feeling about
her own chances in life thanks to her parents, who sought out the poor (The
Measure of Our Success: a Letter to My Children and Yours, Beacon
Press, 1992). Finding another child in my room or a pair of shoes gone
was far from unusual.
She speaks (as she writes) of the support that comes from an
all-pervading deeply spiritual life (Guide My Feet, Beacon Press, 1995),
support from the strong black women who were her mentors (Lanterns,
Beacon Press, 2000), from the family and community dedication to education that
saw her through Spelman College and Yale law school.
In its 26 years, the Childrens Defense Fund has undertaken
an impressive range of activities and has published an important series of
reports.
In the 1970s, Children Out of School in America
documented the 2 million children absent from classrooms; Children
Without Homes documented a half-million children living away from their
families; in the 1980s, the first Childrens Defense Budget and reports on
maternal and child health, family economic plight, child care needs. (The
at-times ideological Edelman had some fierce scraps even with liberal
Congressional allies. Daycare was one such battle.)
In the 1990s, Childrens Defense Fund reports focused on
topics such as the safety of child-care, children in rural America and the
costs of child poverty.
The political battles for childrens rights -- in state
capitals and national agencies -- were numerous and are unceasing.
Organizationally, with a $10 million-plus, mainly
foundation-supported budget, more than 100 employees, the Childrens
Defense Fund has created or partnered child watch coalitions, child-care
networks, Stand for Children chapters, and 10 state offices. The first opened
in Mississippi in 1974.
Is there a danger that the Childrens Defense Fund is a cult
around Marian Wright Edelman?
One has to constantly watch out for idolatry of self, the
idolatry of work. she replied. I remember Thomas Merton a lot as
hed say: I dont know what Im doing. I dont know
where Im going. I dont know if Im really doing your will or
mine. Or someone elses. So I say, am I willing to let go?
The answer appears to be yes.
If we dont have three to five people in this
institution [shes the president] to succeed me in the next five years,
weve failed. If we dont have in every state office somebody who can
step up in every department, then we really havent done our job.
I guess [this is] where I am with God right now, trying to
get the faith and trust to let go. Ive done the best I can. Ill
continue to do the best I can but Ive got to leave the results to him. I
have to wait on him to send whatever resources and whatever visions and
whatever strength is needed.
You know, there have been many dark nights, but hes
never let us down so far.
For its first 15 years, the Childrens Defense Fund never had
a public relations person, so insistent was Edelman that others take the credit
for whatever was achieved. It is only in the past decade that the nation at
large has been made aware that Edelman and the Childrens Defense Fund --
whose motto is Leave No Child Behind -- exist.
For every American child, Edelman wants what she had: caring
people, health care and education. Shes always had prayer, now she
contemplates new forms of action.
As I have grown older and wearier trying to help get our
nation to put children first, she writes in Guide My Feet,
and become more worried about my own and other peoples children
growing up in an America where moral values and common sense and family and
community values are disintegrating, I pray more and more.
Shes finally accepted that, unprovoked, the United States
will not deliver. It will take, she said, what his four friends did for the
lame man in Marks Gospel.
The crowd out there was mighty loud, said Edelman,
in front of doors, like Congress and the administration. You go there and
stand there and get in line with your little request. But somehow the friends
never get before the Seat of Grace -- thats wrong, she said,
correcting herself. Theres no grace in Washington.
But the friends didnt give up. They decided
theyd go to higher ground, climb up on the roof, and let him down
inside. A smiling Edelman reached for her glasses and continued,
emphasizing with knocks on the tabletop, Its time for us to get to
higher ground, get on the roof and knock some shingles off and insist
that whatever has to be done gets done.
It will take what Edelman calls the critical mass of
numbers. Adding to the mothers and grandmothers, the movement will pull in
the young people like the 2000 new generation young black leaders,
trained by the Childrens Defense Fund through its Black Community Crusade
for Children. Another possible point of cohesiveness for the movement is the
links among people with common experiences in Clinton, Tenn. In 1994, the
Childrens Defense Fund bought Roots author Alex Haleys
126-acre farm there as a spiritual renewal, leadership development,
intergenerational, interracial and interdisciplinary communications center.
If a sharp focus, unlimited passion, determination, courage and
organization skills are essential to creating a movement, Edelman has those.
More, her ire and fire come not from observable Defense Fund failures but from
the harsh awareness of how little has altered despite an incredible record of
cumulative Childrens Defense Fund successes.
And then there are guns. We will no longer permit the
killing of our children. We lose 84 pre-school children a year to guns, 4,000
kids a year. We sit here and we protect guns rather than children. Its
absolutely unbelievable that guns are the only unregulated consumer product in
this country. Two hundred million guns.
Shes still smiling, and banging the table, giving that
emphasis to each new phrase.
We need to get more and more people to understand that you
can be No. 1 in everything, but if you really cant walk in your
neighborhood and if you cant hold your family together and the children
have no spiritual anchors -- whats it all for?
She paused. Perhaps to look into the future.
I think the next five years are really a time of reckoning
for this country, she said.
National Catholic Reporter, March 24,
2000
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