E-mail a friendMarian Wright Edelman
airdate October 23, 2008
Marian Wright Edelman is known for her work on behalf of children and the disadvantaged. The first Black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, MS, was counsel for the Poor People's Campaign and founded a public interest law firm, the Washington Research Project, from which grew the powerful lobby, the Children's Defense Fund. She's written many articles and books, including an autobiographical New York Times best seller.
Children rights advocate argues that the U.S. education and incarceration systems are becoming the new American apartheid. (4:30)
Full interview. (22:55)
Marian Wright Edelman
Tavis: I am always pleased and honored to welcome Marian Wright Edelman to this program. She has spent her entire adult life as a tireless advocate for civil and human rights, first as a member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and for the past 35 years as the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund.
Her latest book is called "The Sea is So Wide, and My Boat is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation." There are few people, almost no one, who I love and admire more, and I'm always honored to have you on this program.
Marian Wright Edelman: Oh, I'm honored to be here, Tavis. I love you, too.
Tavis: It's good to see you.
Edelman: Nice to see you.
Tavis: I was saying to you before, while the opening credits were running, I was saying to you how much I admire you and how you have this knack for writing these books that are small, to the point, nothing dense about this, but it packs a powerful punch. I've got a couple of your books on my shelf and I go to them from time to time, but they all have this same - you have a strategy here, I take it.
Edelman: Well, I wrote these long policy books for the Children's Defense Fund. (Laughter)
Tavis: And nobody read them.
Edelman: And nobody read them. Well, some folks read them but it's a narrow audience, and so I was trying to figure out how to translate this to ordinary people so that we could mainstream these issues. And so you do have to be short and punchy and get down to the point right there.
Tavis: When I saw the title of the book, it didn't surprise me. Every time I get a letter from you or do any work with the Children's Defense Fund, I always look forward to seeing the stationery. Because on your stationery, as you know, is this wonderful title with this wonderful piece of art, "The Sea is So Wide, and My Boat is So Small." Where did that come from?
Edelman: It comes from a little girl's drawing which I found in Harvard Square. The saying, "Dear Lord, be good to me; the sea is so wide, and my boat is so small," is claimed by Scottish fishermen and Swedish fishermen and Admiral (unintelligible) used to carry it on his ships, and John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter both had it on their desk.
But I saw this child's rendition of it, and so that became our logo. And they dropped the "dear Lord," but the Lord knows I'm calling on him or her, and used that for the title of this book. And I think it expresses exactly the plight of children and all of us today in this very rough sea of life.
Tavis: Speaking of logos and mottos, what did you make of the fact that in his first term President Bush and his administration essentially lifted your theme for the Children's Defense Fund, leave no child behind, and turned it into legislation, in fact?
Edelman: Well, we didn't like it. It was our legal trademark. If he'd meant it like we mean it, that would have been one thing; but he's left no rich child behind and no millionaire behind, but he really, I think, dishonored the name, and he violated our trademark.
They did not cease and desist, as we asked them. We thought about suing them, but we couldn't get anybody to take the case for the first two years - "Who you want to sue? The president of the United States? Ya'll want to sue the Republican National Committee? You've got to be kidding." (Laughter) You've got to be kidding.
And we had a real act to leave no child behind, which was not the same as the one that we got blamed for. But at any rate, I was sad that they did it. It was illegal of them to do it, but power does but power wants to do. But eventually, one of these days, we're going to make it become a reality because we really mean what we say.
Tavis: Not - I'm sorry, go ahead.
Edelman: No, it was created by Black folk. We had a meeting in the early '90s with 23 Black folk that the CDF called with John Hope Franklin and Dorothy (unintelligible). We looked at the crisis facing Black families and children and concluded that we faced the worst crisis since slavery and we had to do something about it.
And we announced a crusade to leave no child behind, but it was clear (unintelligible) focused groups that title, everybody thought their children were being left behind, that American children were being left behind by the children of the rest of the world, so it became our trademark mission for the entire Children's Defense Fund. But I like the fact that he adopted a Black folks' phrase.
Tavis: I like that, too. I didn't know Black folks had come up with it.
Edelman: We came up with it.
Tavis: I gave you credit for it; I didn't give all the Black folk in that room credit for it. I want to move on past that, but not so fast, though. The fact that you couldn't get someone to sue the president or the administration notwithstanding - or the RNC, for that matter - how do you reclaim something that has been the epicenter of your work that has, to your own admission, my phrase, not yours, here, been bastardized by this administration, by this legislation? That's yours. How do you get that back?
Edelman: Well, you make the country honor it by saying we're going to create a level playing field. And I am determined that every child is going to have a healthy start in this country, a head start, a fair start, a safe and moral start, and successful transition to adulthood. And we've got to build a movement to make it happen, and this country has to be, if it's going to honor its creed and be strong and in the new century.
Because I'm convinced that if we don't invest in all of our children, that's going to be our moral and economic Achilles' heel. It's going to make us a second-rate power. And so that slogan has to become reality, so we'll go for the substance of it. They can have the words - we want the work and we want the policies. And we'll get it.
Tavis: I thought about you, and for those who watch this program on a regular basis - I hope that's all of you - they've heard me say this any number of times, so I'm on my soap box again. But I thought about you every time, given the work that you do, I thought about you. In every one of those president debates I thought about you because the word "poverty" never came up one time - not from the moderator, with all due respect; not from Mr. McCain, not from Mr. Obama.
We never, ever heard the word poverty come up, we never heard a discussion about the plight of the very poor in this country; barely the working poor, but no conversation, really, about the very poor in this country. What have you made of this - I know the Children's Defense Fund is nonpartisan, but what have you made about the dialogue, or lack thereof, around the issues raised in this text in this campaign?
Edelman: Well, that's really why I wrote this book; because there are some things that people think they have to do to get elected. But if we are going to deal with the poor, if we're going to deal with children, then it's got to come from an outside movement.
And so you'll see in this book a letter to leaders that talks about America's sixth child, which is our poor child, in this very rich nation, and the cradle-to-prison pipeline, which is driven by poverty and racial disparities. And it lays out an agenda that the next president of the United States and the next Congress of the United States has got to address if America's going to stay strong.
And so I say you've got to address it. You've got to deal with early childhood education, you've got to end child poverty and make a commitment, as other countries have done. And we lay out the six or seven things that we've got to build a movement to get done. And so that's our platform, and when whoever gets elected is in, we've got to make them do that.
Tavis: Not that if John McCain were elected this would change dramatically - that is to say, a campaign for America's children - so not to say that if he were elected it would change dramatically, but I'm concerned - I'm not fearful of it, but I want to get your take on it - I'm concerned that if an African American named Barack Obama is elected that there is going to come - and I see signs of it already - there is going to come this refrain from certain parts of America that Black folk, that brown folk ought to get over it.
There's a Negro in the White House; we don't want to hear no more about these social and political and economic and cultural disparities. I'm starting to see signs of that coming already, the media embracing this terminology of race transcendence and post-racial.
Where I'm going with this is whether or not - if that refrain starts to kick up and we start to hear that chorus, how does that impact and trickle down to the work that you're doing on kids if people don't want to have a real conversation about these issues because there's a Black man in the White House?
Edelman: Well, we can't let that happen. And the fact is that there are more White poor children and more working poor White folk and more White people without health insurance and more White people who are suffering from the absence of childcare and a decent education.
And so these are cross-racial issues, and we must not be intimidated by what people say. We've got to put the substance before the president of the United States and before the Congress of the United States, show how it affects everybody. And even when it comes to sort of talking about the racial disparities which continue in all of our systems, we've got to say to folks you've got to do it even if you don't agree with these things, because they're other people's children, as you think.
But if you don't invest in all of these children, America is going to be a second-rate power. You cannot have a majority of all of your children of all races and incomes not reading at grade level in fourth, eighth and 12th grade, and you sure can't have 80 percent of all of your Black and Hispanic children not reading at grade level in all of these areas.
What are you going to do if you can't read and compute? How are we going to compete with the Indians and the Chinese and the Europeans? And so our self-interest lies in investing in our human capital, and that is our children. And if we don't do it, we're going to be cutting off ourselves at the knees.
And how dumb is it to have this cradle-to-prison pipeline - White folks, Black folks, everybody? I don't want all of these folks sitting up in prison. I don't want our state spending three times more per prisoner than per public school pupil. I want all those prisoners that we're supporting out there supporting us and our Social Security.
Tavis: But you can't get elected if you're not tough on crime. You've got to build more prisons; you've got to put more cops on the street.
Edelman: Well, we've been building all these prisons when the crime rates have been going down, and most of the people, two-thirds who are in prison are there for non-violent offenses. And we've got to make sure that we're not using punishment as a way of re-segregating and creating a new other.
And I contend in here that in fact incarceration is becoming the new American apartheid, and we've got to watch out for it and we've got to show its dangers and we've got to begin to get us to act on the common-sense principles that Fredrick Douglass told us: "It's better to build healthy children than to try to repair broken men." But we cannot afford to be the world's continuing largest jailor; that's stupid.
Tavis: How do you respond to people, Marian Wright Edelman, who would say, with all due respect, that even the comparison between apartheid and the prison industrial complex is wrong because in apartheid, people were disallowed, they were disavowed, they were disenfranchised for no other reason than the color of their skin, but these persons who sit in prisons are there because they broke the law, and we live in a country where the rule of law has to rule.
Edelman: Well, we all know about the disparities in sentencing and between crack and cocaine, and I just want to come back and say that two-thirds of the folk who are sitting up in prison are there for non-violent offenses.
I'm also trying to talk about the feeder systems which come from children who from birth are already born into an unlevel playing field. We deny them healthcare - only rich industrial country in the world that doesn't provide prenatal care.
And so you get these babies born at low birth weight to poor and single parents without an ability to thrive. They come into the world and we could have brought them in at normal birth weight, healthy. They don't have a strong early childhood education, and we need to invest in early childhood education. Prisons cost $100,000, $200,000 a year; you could sort of give them a good early head start for $10,000 a year.
And then you come to school and they're not ready to learn. And so what we're seeing is a pattern of criminalizing children, young children at younger and younger ages, so we have this scene of 7-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 9-year-olds being arrested by police officers for behaviors - non-violent behaviors - that used to be settled at home or in the school principal's office.
And so you're pushing them out, and what are you doing when these children have attention deficit disorders? We've denied them healthcare. We're putting them into juvenile detention that costs tens of thousands every year.
And so you're creating a feeder system that robs children of the tools they need to survive and thrive, and then you begin to segregate them in these institutions, and then it goes and goes and goes until they get into adult prison, and the minority population is disproportionately, overwhelmingly minority.
And you deny them the right to vote in many states, if they're in there for felons. You deny them a right to make a living because it's like a revolving door; you can't often get a job with a prison record. And most of them are illiterate and many of them are not reading and able to compete in a regular economy.
So there are many parallels to slavery and to apartheid in the sense of the illiteracy, the disempowerment economically, the disempowerment politically, and the total ripping apart of families, and children need families and parents, and they can't all be going to prison.
Tavis: Talk to me about - this is my phrase, not yours - about the color-coded nature of poverty, and I come back to this because you've made the point any number of times that the majority of folk in this country in poverty are White, the majority of folk in this country on Welfare are White - we could do this all night.
And yet I get the sense as I talk about and hear conversations about poverty that there's this color-coded notion to poverty, and I wonder what that has to do with the fact that we don't get more traction on it because folk aren't really aware of the truth, but they see this color-coded conversation about poverty in America.
Edelman: Well, because they've always associated poverty and Welfare with Black folk, and that's been something that's been fed by more powerful interests and rich interests to keep everybody low and to keep wages low and to keep the minimum wage low.
And so I hope one of these days the White folk are going to wake up - working White folk are going to wake up and understand that we're all being victimized by unjust policies that take from the poor and from the middle class and give it in tax breaks to the rich.
And one of the messages we've been trying to do at the Children's Defense Fund is say, "Hey, this is all of our concerns and all of our issues," and the Poor People's Campaign was Dr. King's attempt to try to create a cross-racial movement to say it sure can happen to you. Look at the people who are going to be going on food stamps who thought it couldn't happen to them. Look at all the people who are going to lose their jobs, who've lost their homes, who thought it couldn't happen to them.
And so the economic policies that have always kept Blacks and Latinos at the bottom because of the historical evolution of these problems are affecting all of us, and hopefully, we'll get a wake-up call here to say, "Why don't we try to make sure that there's opportunity for everybody."
Tavis: You mentioned Dr. King and there are a couple of things I want to ask you about that in a moment. I want to go back, though, 35 years ago when you started the Children's Defense Fund - and congratulations on your 35th anniversary.
Edelman: Thank you.
Tavis: How did this end up being your calling? I mentioned earlier your work at the NAACP Defense Fund, I mentioned your work with Dr. King, as you just mentioned, and the Poor People's Campaign. How did this end up being your work? You've dedicated your whole life to this. How'd that happen?
Edelman: Because my daddy told me that God ran a full employment economy, and if you ever follow the need, just always follow the need, you'd never lack for real purpose. And it was also very clear, because I came - the Children's Defense Fund really came out of the historic battles of Mississippi, the civil rights battles of Mississippi, when it was pretty clear that you can win the school desegregation case, you can win the public accommodations case, but the next day your (unintelligible) - their names were up on the telegram posts, they were thrown out of their houses, they were burned out of their places, they didn't have any food to eat, they didn't have any healthcare, that you couldn't say I'd won freedom.
And so you had to - it was clear in the late '60s that you had to put the substantive economic and social rights beneath those, and that's a part of what Dr. King was trying to do in welding poverty and race together and in creating a cross-racial movement.
And once I got into it, I must say by the time I had my first children, my first child, it became very clear this country was not doing well by investing in its children, whether they were gifted or retarded or different of any kind, and that the problems that I had thought were poor Black children's problems turned out to be much more universal.
The disabled children - the first law we ever got passed from our first report on children out of school in America - more White than Black kids. But the disabled child didn't have a right to education. We have that today; I'm proud of that. The childcare and all of these things that (unintelligible) essential to keeping families strong were, again, critical to the country.
And I am now so convinced that this is the most important thing any of us can be doing, and that if we don't invest in all of our children, we're not only defying our creed, we're saying we're hypocrites; we really don't believe that every child and every person has certain inalienable rights, but we're also absolutely laying the basis for the toppling of America's leadership in the world.
Because human capital is what's going to allow us to compete in this globalizing arena, and you can't have millions of children uneducated and without healthcare, and have America be a leaders. And that's - it's going to kill us.
Dr. King, the week before - the day he died - called his mama and told her his next Sunday sermon title, and it was "Why America May Go to Hell."
Tavis: "Why America May Go to Hell."
Edelman: And he said we were going to go to hell if we didn't really use all of our richness and riches that we've been so blessed with to make sure that we incorporate all the poor.
Tavis: Every time I think of that, I think about how little America knows about that. It's timely to raise now, because of course this year marks the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination, as you know, and most people don't know that, that he called in from that Lorraine Motel to his church to tell them "My sermon this Sunday is going to be 'Why America May Go to Hell.'"
When you think of Dr. King now and having lost him 40 years ago - let me ask it a different way. How often do you think of him in your work now, 35 years later, and what do you think?
Edelman: All the time. He walks with me all the time, and as you know I wrote a letter in there to him to report on how well we had honored his life, because we have celebrated him and we have named streets and schools for him, but we have sanitized him and trivialized him and we have not followed him. And his vision is as alive and crucial for us today.
And I wanted to report on how well we had done in heeding his warnings against those demons which he said could destroy America - racism, excessive materialism and poverty, and militarism. And I think that as I report, he would be very upset today that we're in two wars and not one; Vietnam, the one he saw, was stealing the lifeblood of our children here at home and in that poor country.
He would be very pleased to see that we've got a possibility of a Black president of the United States and all the Black middle class folk and all the folk who are sitting up in Fortune 500s and in the cabinet. But he would not be pleased to see all the poor children and the big bottom that has grown in America, and the fact that we've got the largest gap between rich and poor we've ever had since we began to keep this data.
And he warned us about buying into the valleys of a burning house. And he would not be pleased that a lot of folk who are presiding over the policies that are hurting Black and poor people and that are militaristic are Black folk and we threw out our spiritual baby in the bathwater of American materialism.
And he would be very upset to know that there are 11 million poor children when he died; there are 13 million today, and these people are working, playing by the rules, and I have no doubt he'd be calling for a poor children's campaign or a poor people's campaign. I call for that, and we've got to make our leaders do something about it.
Tavis: As you've been on book tour I've been out on tour as well - I have another product out that we've been out signing as well, and I raise that only because I was at a signing the other day - I've forgotten what - you know how this is; you forget what city you're in.
Edelman: I do.
Tavis: By the way, you're in Los Angeles tonight.
Edelman: Thank you very much. (Laughter)
Tavis: I was at a signing the other day - and I've seen these all over the place as people are standing in line to meet me and get the product signed - a woman walked up to me the other day, and I've seen a bunch of these t-shirts that have Obama and King on the shirt together. And there are all kind of iterations on it, but Obama and King on the t-shirt.
And this sister walked up to me and she said to me, "I've been dying to ask you one question." I said, "What?" And she did like this, she said, "What do you think of my t-shirt?" And I looked at it, and I knew what she wanted; she wanted my take on this Obama-King, King-Obama comparison and all that goes with that.
It's not about what I said to her, but I raise that only because since we're talking about King, what do you make of these prima fascia comparisons between Obama and King and the t-shirts and the hats and all that? What do you make of that in this moment?
Edelman: Well, I think we're all standing on Dr. King's shoulders, okay? And I think that I try to take these as an affirmation that there was a great prophet that came and set the stage for all of us, that some parts of his dreams are being fulfilled. And I think that he would be very proud of Barack Obama.
Now the issue is, how do we build the citizens, though? Because a President Obama or a President McCain - none of these are going to be able to do what we need to have done in our country in resetting our moral compass and in resetting our priorities without a citizen's movement and without accountability, so that our job is not only get out and vote and make sure that we get the best person who we could get out of our choices today, but then we've got to make sure that we put forth Dr. King's dream, which is ending poverty in America and making sure that every child - next year, Tavis, you helped us a lot.
But we need to have healthcare for everybody, but we can't get healthcare for everybody. We sure have to get it for every child and pregnant woman, and we've got to make sure that our children are getting an education so that the agenda has to be there, and we've got to create the ruckus and the noise and the space that makes it very clear that it's in the substance of the policies, that the dream is going to be realized.
And so I think he'd be very proud of Obama, and I think it's a next step forward. And I was struck that Bobby Kennedy had said - since they died the same year, 40 years - that he thought there could be a Black president. So this is a major step forward in progress, but we've got to finish the job of getting the substance and changing the priorities of my nation.
Tavis: My answer was very similar to that, so I guess I wasn't too far of the mark. (Laughter)
Edelman: Good, good, good.
Tavis: I should have recorded this and just take it with me on the road and just push the play button when I get asked that question again about King and Obama.
Let me ask this - after all these years and all the evidence that I could give you, though I don't need to give it to you because you lay it out in the text - I was in a conversation on this program the other night about faith being the substance of things hoped-for, the evidence of things not seen. You know this; your daddy was a preacher.
The evidence does not suggest that you should be hopeful about the work that you're engaged in, and yet I assume you are, because you get up and do it every day.
Edelman: Oh, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. I thought I would be out of business by 35 years. (Unintelligible) I thought that if you told America the truth, you'll say this is going to hurt you in this way and that way and that way (laughter) and then they'd go and do (unintelligible) and we all love little children and we're all going to do this thing.
It's amazing how hard this has been. On the other hand, we've got a whole body of law that's on the book that weren't on the books 35, 40 years ago. There are millions of disabled children going to school, Head Start reaches millions, childcare is reaching millions. We've got how many children getting healthcare, but we've still got nine millions without it.
So - and poverty, a lot have escaped poverty, a lot of folk have gone on to college. So you've got a record of accomplishment, you've got lots of young leaders who are out there who are going to carry on to the next stage. But we're going to have to finish it, and we've got - movements are long in coming. But one of the things that we know, we've got some models for change. We know what works, and we've just got to get everybody to sort of wake up.
It takes a long time, but I have every faith that we're going to build this movement and we're going to make this thing happen, and we're not going to give up - just not going to give up.
Tavis: She is an authentic American hero, or shero, if you prefer. Always delighted to have her on the program. I feel I can walk a little taller out of the studio just because she came this way. Her name, of course, Marian Wright Edelman. Her new book, I'm sure destined to be a bestseller like her previous books, "The Sea is So Wide, and My Boat is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation." Marian Wright Edelman, always an honor to have you on the program.
Edelman: Lovely to be here. Thank you, Tavis, for all you do.
Tavis: Good to see you. Thanks for your work.
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