As Congress debates the bailing out of the wealthiest corporations in America, what about those at the other end? How is it that the gap between the rich and poor here in the United States is the highest ever recorded and higher than in every other wealthy industrialized nation
Marian Wright Edelman has been advocating for children, particularly the poor, for more than forty years. She is the founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, now celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary. The group works to lift children out of poverty, protect them from abuse, ensure access to healthcare and education. She served as counsel to Martin Luther King in 1968 and helped organize the Poor People’s Campaign.
One program, Head Start, became a bright light in the darkness of discrimination and poverty for many children. Healthcare, hot meals and creative teaching helped prepare poor children for school and a better future. Concerned that powerful politicians wanted to dismantle Mississippi’s Head Start, Marian Wright, a young civil rights lawyer and the first black woman to pass the Mississippi Bar, helped lead the fight for Head Start and committed herself to improving the lives of Mississippi’s children. But poverty persisted, and by 1967, one in seven Americans was poor. The problems of race and poverty seemed hopelessly intertwined.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy, moved by her testimony, went with her into the Mississippi Delta to investigate. Senator Kennedy got help and food to Mississippi children, and in 1968 he urged Marian Wright to help Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. organize a Poor People’s Campaign that demanded immediate action for the poor and an end to hunger.
But two months before the campaign was to take place, Dr. King was gunned down. The march went on without him. Led by Dr. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and Marian Wright, the poor came to Washington to tell the nation about their plight.
Marian Wright remained in Washington and became a permanent voice, first for poor people and families through the Washington Research Project and then for all children, and in 1973 the Children’s Defense Fund was born.
The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation.
What is happening in America, where a child is born into poverty every thirty-three seconds, and there is an increase in child poverty, 500,000 in the recent—in the last three years.
Half a million children between 2005, 2006, and that’s before the downturn in the economy; where we have a child who is born without health insurance every forty-one seconds, is neglected or abused every thirty-six seconds, is having a child every minute; and where we have got one in three black boys who are seven years old today who is going to go to prison in his lifetime, one in six Hispanic boys likely to go to prison in his lifetime, one in seventeen white boys to go to prison in his lifetime—we’re the world’s biggest jailer, and US is spending three times more on incarceration than on public education per pupil—and where there is ten percent children drop out of school every ten seconds of every school day; and where 65 percent of all of our children are not reading at grade level in twelfth grade if they’ve stayed in school, and a half of them have not; and where over 80 percent of our black and Hispanic children cannot read at grade level in fourth, eighth or twelfth grade. The real economic downfall and the—is in these figures, and people have got to begin to get their heads screwed on straight and to begin to invest in the future and in US young people today.
US prisons are big business, and states are spending on average three times more per prisoner than per public school pupil. When Democrats are in power, they too serve the corporate interests, they started welfare reform. This was under President Clinton. Marian’s husband quit the Health and Human Services Administration, Peter Edelman, huge rift, saying this is “welfare deform,” this is not helping people.
Marian said, “We have seen, an ideological and economic coup d’etat over the last decade, where we’ve taken from the poor, taken from children, and given in massive tax breaks to the rich and in prosecuting several wars. And, this is just—we are upside-down. We have got to reset our moral compass. We have got to redirect our attention to our internal human infrastructure, because I am convinced that what we are failing to do today in educating our children, providing them very basic healthcare, is going to be a moral and economic Achilles’ heel that is going to topple America’s leadership in the world in the future.”
– from www.democracynow.org