(The Health and Human Services poverty line for a three-pe...)
The Health and Human Services poverty line for a three-person family in America is $11,8oo in annual income. One in every five American children is growing up in poverty. What does child poverty mean for the economic and societal future of our country? The Children's Defense Fund, widely considered the most powerful force for children in America, has assembled expert and ground-breaking information on how poverty affects health, childhood deaths, low birth weight, and injury; on the insidious connections between low family income and learning disabilities; on links between poverty, abuse, and neglect and self-esteem; and much more. Wasting America's Future is the crucial citizen's handbook as we continue the national debate on welfare reform.
Guide My Feet: Prayers and Meditations for Our Children
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Here are prayers and meditations for parents and other...)
Here are prayers and meditations for parents and others who strive to instill values of faith, integrity, compassion, and service in our children at a time when these ideas are threatened by commercialism and violence. With warmth and conviction, Edleman shares his own prayers as well as inspirational readings from others. Turn in this book for guidelines and support--again and again.
The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation
(In America today, the gap between the rich and the poor i...)
In America today, the gap between the rich and the poor is the greatest ever recorded--larger than any other industrialized nation. It has become far too easy to ignore the hardships of millions of children plagued by poverty, poor health, illiteracy, violence, adult hypocrisy, and injustice. As founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman knows all too well the suffering of so many of our nation's children, who live every day with adversity most of us can barely imagine. In The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small, Edelman asks difficult questions about what we truly value, and looks hard at what we can--and must--do to build a nation fit for all children. With the passion and conviction that have made her our leading child advocate, she calls us all to stand up for the future of America. What have we done and what have we left undone? What lessons can we learn from our past and our present to realize a just and peaceful national and world vision for our children and grandchildren?
Marian Wright Edelman challenges all of us--our leaders, our teachers, the faith community, parents, grandparents, and future generations--to end the epidemic physical and spiritual poverty afflicting millions of our children. We can leave our children with a better, safer, and fairer world if we care enough. And we can--and must--do it now.
I Can Make a Difference: A Treasury to Inspire Our Children
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Marian Wright Edelman has drawn from a variety of cultu...)
Marian Wright Edelman has drawn from a variety of cultures and peoples to compile these timeless stories, poems, songs, quotations, and folktales that speak to all children to let them know that they can make a difference in today's world.
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Throughout her life and work, Marian Wright Edelman ha...)
Throughout her life and work, Marian Wright Edelman has been at the heart of this cantury's most dramatic civil rights and child advocacy struggles. In this stirring, heartfelt memoir she pays tribute to the extrordinary mentors who helped light her way including Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, and William Slaone Coffin. She celebrates the lives of her parents and the great Black Women of Bennetsville, South Carolina- Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate-who gave her love and guidance in her youth, as well as the many teachers and figures who inspired her education at Spelman College and empowered her early as an activist in the 1960's.
Illustrated with many of the author's personal photographs, Lanterns also includes a "Parents' Pledge" and "Twenty-Five More Lessons for Life" to guide, protect, and love our children every day so that they will become, in Edelman's moving vision, the healing agents for national transformation.
(Marian Wright Edelman's collection of prayers has an imme...)
Marian Wright Edelman's collection of prayers has an immediate, honest voice that touches on issues that children and teens face in today's increasingly complicated world. Grouped according to themes such as hope, gratitude, and help, and filled with wisdom and insight, these prayers offer our children a powerful opportunity to connect with their own spirituality. Bryan Collier, recipient of the Caldecott Honor Medal, among other honors, captures the vibrancy of our multicultural world in his stunning collage artwork.
Marian Wright Edelman is an American lobbyist, lawyer and civil rights activist.
Background
Marian Wright Edelman was born in Bennetsville, South Carolina, on June 6, 1939, and was named for the singer Marian Anderson. She was the youngest of five children born to Arthur Jerome Wright and Maggie Leola (Bowen) Wright. She spent her early years in Bennettsville. It was, as she described it, a small-town, socially segregated childhood. Edelman's quest for political, economic, and social rights and justice has its beginnings in her childhood. The elder Wrights instilled in their children a strong sense of service to others by their words and deeds. When she was 14-years-old, her father died after suffering a heart attack.
Education
She went to racially segregated public schools, but excelled academically. She took piano and voice lessons and became a drum majorette in her high school band.
Edelman went to Spelman College, an historic African-American institution for women in Atlanta, Georgia. While at college, she won a Merrill scholarship to study abroad. Her search for a broad international perspective took her to classes at the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and with the help of a Lisle Fellowship, to Moscow just prior to starting her senior year. She had planned on a career in the foreign service, but changed her plans as the events of the 1960s' civil rights movement occurred. Caught up in the African-American social consciousness of the times, she participated at sit-ins in Atlanta's City hall and was arrested. The experiences stimulated her to believe that she could contribute to social progress through the study of law. She entered Yale Law School on a scholarship after receiving her undergraduate degree in 1960. She did not love law but explained that she decided to study law "to be able to help black people, and the law seemed like a tool needed. "
Career
Edelman began her career as a lawyer hired by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in New York after receiving her law degree in 1963. After one year she moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to continue her work with the association. Her career changed direction after she became a lawyer for the Child Development Group in Mississippi and successfully lobbied for the restoration of Federal funds for the Mississippi Head Start programs. This started her subsequent life-long effort to lobby for children's interests.
Moving to Washington, D. C. , she began to expand her work on the problem's of Mississippi's poor to the national political arena. Edelman started the Washington Research Project of the Southern Center for Policy Research. It was created to lobby and research programs to assist children in poverty. In 1971 the Edelmans moved to Boston, where Peter, her husband, served two years as vice-president of the University of Massachusetts. She directed the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University. That year Time magazine named her one of the top 200 young leaders in America.
Under Edelman's guidance the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) was founded in 1973. It was to become a major advocate, research, and lobbying organization designed to seek aid for children. She campaigned for a number of programs. Among these were programs to help children remain healthy, stay in school, and avoid teenage pregnancy; to prevent child abuse; and to stop drug abuse. In her words, the CDF "works with individuals and groups to change policies and practices resulting in neglect or mistreatment of millions of children. " Again the Edelmans moved as their career paths evolved. Her husband joined the faculty of Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D. C. , in 1979. She relocated with her family to join him. There she continued to be president of the Children's Defense Fund, working long hours to convince government officials of the need for her children's aid programs. When Bill Clinton was elected U. S. president in 1992, it was expected that Edelman, a friend and intellectual soul mate to First Lady Hillary Clinton, who had served as chairman of the CDF, would command a level of attention within the new administration that had been absent during the tenures of Presidents Bush and Reagan. There were even rumors that she would join the cabinet, bet she was quick to discount such rumors.
In 1992, Edelman and the CDF began its "Leave No Child Behind" campaign. She estimated that it would cost as much as $47 billion to fulfill all the goals of a fully-funded Head Start, proper medical insurance for all children and their pregnant mothers, vaccinations for every child, and an expanded children's tax credit for children.
On June 1, 1996, Edelman and the CDF held their "Stand For Children" in Washington, D. C. An estimated 200, 000 supporters showed up to march in support of children and the CDF's goals.
Many of Edelman's critics had previously criticized Edelman and her ideas as outdated. But with the large support she received during "Stand For Children, " she demonstrated that she and the CDF are still a force to contend with in American politics.
In 1997, Edelman criticized President Clinton for his welfare reform package by warning it could lead to record numbers of uninsured children, increased child abuse, and rising firearms deaths. The CDF's "The State of America's Children Yearbook 1997" criticized the package and warned that "if America does not stand up now for its children, it will not stand strong in the new millennium. "
Edelman has been widely recognized for her spirited activity as a lobbyist for her causes. She lectures, writes, and travels to convince others of the many needs facing young people. She is the author of the books, Families In Peril: An Agenda For Social Change (1987); Portrait of Inequality: Black and White Children in America (1990); The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (1992); and Guide My Feet: Meditations and Prayers on Loving and Working for Children (1995). In 2002 she published I’m Your Child, God: Prayers for Children and Teenagers. In 2005 she published I Can Make a Difference: A Treasury to Inspire Our Children, and in 2008 she published The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation.
She is also the author of several reports, and many articles in support of children and her causes.
Quotations:
"Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time. "
"Segregation was wrong, something to be fought against. "
"Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay-it's are we going to pay now, upfront, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on. "
Connections
She met Peter Benjamin Edelman, a staff assistant to Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy, while he was conducting research in Mississippi. They were married on July 14, 1968, and have three sons: Joshua Robert, Jonah Martin, and Ezra Benjamin.