Marian Wright Edelman has worked for human rights in this country since 1964, when she began the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. She was deeply involved in numerous school desegregation cases and related civil rights causes during the '60s, and served on the board of one of the largest Head Start programs in the country. In 1968 she founded what became the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), the organization she now directs.
The Children's Defense Fund is active in a wide range of children's and family issues in an effort to change policies and practices that result in the neglect of children. Its work includes research, litigation, public education, community organizing, and the monitoring of federal programs and policies. CDF's annual National Legislative Agenda for Children, covering 1981, is now available. The organization also publishes the results of its studies and a monthly newsletter, CDF Report.
To her advocacy of the poor Marian Wright Edelman brings personal compassion as well as political analysis. Sojourners sought her out to pose the questions on the following pages about the current situation and future prospects of poor black children and their families.--The Editors
Sojourners: The Children's Defense Fund put out a report several months ago called Portrait of Inequality that with page after page of shocking statistics effectively shattered any notions about the progress black people have made in the last 20 years. In the course of compiling that report did you find any one thing that was most disturbing or revealing about the situation of black people?
Marian Wright Edelman: It's interesting that while we're very preoccupied with Atlanta and the violence against black children, the one statistic in the report that most upset me was that black preschoolers 1 to 4 years old are more likely to become homicide victims than any group of white teenagers. As a mother that struck me very, very strongly.
Then when you look at the homicide rates among black teenagers, you find that they are five times more likely than white teenagers to be victims. You begin to ask whether the Atlanta experience can teach us about the reality of daily poverty and violence for children living in poor neighborhoods.
The fact is that one in two black children are born poor today. That translates into poor environments and unsafe neighborhoods. I hope we can make people understand the connection between the day-in and day-out poverty and the feeling of unsafety.
At a time when budget cuts are taking away our parks and similar facilities we must focus on the lack of recreation and positive community alternatives for children; it is that lack of alternatives that makes them more street wise.
I grew up in an era when black children in the South had very few outlets. We couldn't go to the white swimming pool, we couldn't sit down at the white drugstore counters. We didn't have many of the things that children in the middle-class white communities could take advantage of. On the other hand, the churches opened up. The children were very involved in the church community, and I remember that we had a playground behind our church that was our "alternative" segregated playground. And through the churches and our teachers we were constantly involved in community activities.
Today we really need to focus on community supports for our young people. The lack of external supports for black children is not new, but what is new is that the internal supports that used to buffer kids against the outside world are no longer there.
I'm frustrated by people who say that an individual or a church can't make a difference. That is just so untrue. I went to a church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a very poor neighborhood, for a lovely celebration last summer. The entire church took a hotel and had a banquet out on Coney Island to celebrate the fact that nine young people from their church had graduated from high school. The celebration said that the church valued education and was really behind the young people.
At Children's Defense Fund we are trying to figure out how we might break down these big problems into manageable pieces. For example, one of the reasons kids don't get health care is that parents don't know about the importance of prevention or even if it is available to them. How can you begin to educate parents on prevention? We're trying to work on Sunday School materials that build on these things.
We've got to get our institutions alive again and relating to the problems of kids. How many doctors in our churches serve Medicaid clients? If only half the black churches in Washington, D.C., asked only half the black doctors in their congregation to serve Medicaid kids you could reach an awful lot of kids.
Sojourners: What has happened between the time that you grew up and now to destroy the internal supports for black children?
Edelman: People have a very unrealistic notion about change in this country. We have a quick-fix mentality. We made a lot of movement in the last 15 years and thought the problem was solved. People don't understand that change is a long-term, step-by-step thing and that getting change is only the first step. Keeping it and moving it ahead is a continuing effort.
As long as Martin Luther King, Jr., was around and we were talking about clear-cut goals with wonderful moral underpinnings, it was engaging and easy to participate in the movement. We understood what we were for. But when the issue became national, more complex, and more economic at a time when the economy was waning, a lot of early courage became weaker. The times demanded more self-sacrifice. People got very tired of it and began to yell, "What do you people want? Haven't you all made it?" They saw many middle-class blacks living better, but they forgot about all the poor who were left behind.
And we now have less cohesion in the black community. Integration brought great advantages but also disadvantages. We lost a sense of community as more of our young people had more options. We must recapture that sense of community and tie to the past.
I think it's terrific that all these black young people are at Yale and Harvard. But I'm concerned that as some go off to Wall Street, others also will go back to Mississippi and Atlanta. We need the tradition of community service that has been lost because we adults have not kept that fire alive and not provided new avenues for people to feel that they can do something important.
We must rejuvenate people and let them see that there are still problems, that in fact black kids and their families have lost ground in the last decade. We've got to make clear to the American public that while we are all affected by inflation, some are more affected than others. Black families do not have white mothers to go off to work. Their mothers are already working. The gaps have actually widened. People hear this, and they are absolutely shocked. They say, "My goodness, you think it's really that bad? And you mean you really lost ground?"
Sojourners: Maybe the biggest surprise about your report was that it was front page news that there is still inequality.
Edelman: That's right.
Sojourners: The Reagan budget is on everybody's mind now. I wonder if you would tell us about its human toll on black families and children.
Edelman: The budget is an inhumane and very unfair budget. President Reagan and Mr. Stockman have said that they're not hurting the truly needy and that they are providing a safety net. That's simply not true.
Across the board the severe cuts in welfare, social services, Medicaid, food stamps, and child nutrition are going to have an absolutely devastating effect on the poorest families, who have the poorest children. Everybody hates welfare, and I want to say, "Listen. Who's on welfare? It's children, folks!" Seventy per cent of the recipients are children; and their mothers aren't lazy and shiftless, contrary to public opinion. Out of every 10 mothers on welfare, four are working or seeking work, three are taking care of preschool children, one is disabled, and the other two are over 45 and have no work experience. The Reagan budget will throw out hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients, mothers and kids, without any alternative.
And while Reagan is destroying welfare, he is also hurting the working poor, because in the welfare proposal there is actually a disincentive to work. Those mothers who are struggling to work at minimum wage will have no incentive to continue, because the budget will strip away the benefits of working. Reagan is cutting back on the daycare that makes it possible for them to work. The budget is anti-poor, anti-working-poor, and deeply anti-children.
Millions of children already have no access to health care, never see a dentist, never see a doctor. But now there will be a cap on Medicaid that will result in more preventive services being cut. Who's powerful? The hospitals will get their share, and the children will get lost again. Black kids are disproportionately poor and disproportionately dependent on these programs, so the cuts will have a devastating effect on black families and children, on the poorest families.
But more striking to me than the budget cuts are the block grants. As bad as the cuts are, one of these days we could get our money back, but we may not get our rights back. Many people do not understand that Reagan is using the block grants to repeal laws that have come through years of hearings and years of effort. I'm extremely upset about that.
If you take away the right of a handicapped child to go to school, a right that took years and years to get, there is no basis left for keeping that child in school. Already we are getting a tremendous number of phone calls from our state advocates saying that the states are thinking of repealing the state laws for protection of the handicapped in anticipation of the block grants at the federal level. Handicapped children will be pushed back a decade and will have no rights.
We've made substantial progress. Handicapped kids, who were excluded as a group, began to go to school in droves as parents became less ashamed of having a handicapped child with the federal right to education. If that law is repealed, as Mr. Reagan proposes, we'll lose all those gains.
A balanced budget will have very little but a psychological impact on inflation. What this administration is trying to do is to systematically undermine the already inadequate income maintenance assistance for the poor, and more importantly, to dismantle the federal commitments to the homeless, the handicapped, the poor, and the minorities, who have only made progress in the last decade and a half because of the federal laws. The budget is ideological, it is regressive, it is inhumane, and I really do hope that the broader community can begin to understand what is happening before we've gone too far and lost too much.
Sojourners: You've talked about the way that the Reagan budget is going to destroy families. Yet in his speeches Reagan says that one of his top priorities is the strengthening of the American family; some of his allies in Congress even have a piece of legislation they call the Family Protection Act. How do you respond to all this pro-family rhetoric?
Edelman: Sheer hypocrisy. What they say has nothing to do with what they do. That's been one of the frustrations, because Reagan is such a good salesman. His administration is brilliant at reducing its policies to slogans of the most common denominator. Jonah, my 10-year-old son, listened to one of Reagan's speeches and said to me, "Mommy, if you didn't know he wasn't telling the truth you'd really believe him." I don't know how with a straight face they can stand up and say they're not hurting the truly needy. They are devastating the truly needy.
Everybody is feeling overwhelmed and is letting the president have his way, and he is saying that he has the mandate of the American people. I don't think the American people meant for him to devastate the chances for homeless children to have a family or to wipe out the hopes of handicapped kids to go to school.
The administration has had to move quickly, and it has done so in a marvelous rhetorical way. But people must really make the effort to become informed about the specifics of this budget and make themselves heard. We have to begin to tell the administration it is being hypocritical. Where is the consistency in saying every child has a right to be born and then voting against every prenatal care program that would make sure those kids were born healthy, every health program that would make sure they grew up healthy, and every family program that would keep their families together?
I think it's time for the caring Christian community to say that if we want children, let's figure out a way to work together to keep them. What is so depressing to me these days is how quiet and unorganized those of us are who say we care about the poor and minorities. The Christian community is not providing the alternative to the Moral Majority, and that disturbs me.
Many Democrats on Capitol Hill are confused and scared. I think they don't perceive that people who are for social programs are willing or able to protect them politically. They are worried about the 1982 elections, and they say that the labor unions have lost their constituency, that the women's movement is not going to elect anybody, that the ones to be afraid of are the Moral Majority. "Where are your supporters?" they ask us. We need to ask ourselves where the counterbalance will come from that will create a new atmosphere for decency.
We have a lot to defend, and we ought to be out there defending it. Why should we give the "family" label to the right wing? They say that government interference is breaking up homes, while they are pushing for government interference of a different sort. We've got to stop the government from breaking up lives.
Sojourners: What specific contributions do you think churches and people of faith can make?
Edelman: There is a need for the church to provide a strong voice and presence on children and family issues, particularly those affecting blacks and other minority groups. The church must begin to provide a conscience and a voice for the poor and for those who are being asked to bear the brunt of what the Reagan administration is doing.
People are concerned that the Reagan administration is trying to repeal the progress of the last three decades. A strong church voice saying that the federal government has a continuing role in making sure the people are fed is important. I would like to see the churches do for children and families what they did on the hunger issue--maintain a strong investment in the problem and foster community involvement in the campaign against it. I would like to see similar campaigns around specific children's issues, such as child health or the preservation of the very hard-earned gains we've made for children.
The pulpit is a wonderful platform for information. Many parents are not aware of their rights, or of the importance of preventive health care and where to get it. I would like to encourage outreach and information through the pulpit. For instance, the Children's Defense Fund would like to prepare bulletin inserts on child health, child welfare, or the problems black kids face. I hope that ministers and churches would be willing to pass these out as a way of educating their congregations and encouraging them to get involved either as parents or as concerned individuals.
It seems to me also that there are specific things congregations can do, such as opening their doors to a daycare center or, if they have a daycare center, seeing that those children are receiving the things the family may need. A church could also be a drop-in center for parents, who often feel very isolated. Our churches can be places where children and parents come to be with each other or where teenage parents learn about parenting, talk about their sex problems, and get help. If you are a single parent, a teenage parent, or a parent who has run into lots of difficulties, being able to share with other families and parents and have a place of respite is very important.
Some other kinds of projects come to mind. For instance, jailing children in adult jails is a problem all over the nation. There is no reason why church groups couldn't decide to go and spot check their local police lock-up to make sure that this isn't a practice in their own community. And people can visit local mental institutions to examine conditions there for themselves.
Letter-writing campaigns and petitions to the White House and members of Congress could make the church's presence felt on specific issues of the budget cuts and block grants. There is a wide range of concrete problems that can be addressed by churches and by individual members of churches engaging in the political and policy arena on behalf of kids. What is happening in Washington will have long-range impact on the well-being of millions of children and families.
Sojourners: In the midst of the current economic situation and its meaning for low-income families, where do you find hope?
Edelman: I was raised to try to do the right thing whether or not it will have success, and I think it's terribly important that Christians who say they have faith and want to do the right thing do that in fact. People must be willing to stand up for things that matter even though they lose, and that's one of the things I think is needed today.
One of the lessons I learned from my parents and from Martin Luther King, Jr., was that very often when you take a step in faith you never know where the whole thing is going to end up. But it's your job and your obligation to take that step of faith. You know it is right and the decent thing to do, and you must have faith that it will lead somewhere.
I have been very influenced by people in Mississippi who had far fewer choices than I ever had--I could always leave--and I have been terribly impressed with their staying power and often asked myself whether I could be as devoted as those people down there who keep at it year after year. It's been very discouraging for them--they take one step forward and five steps backward, but it never occurs to them to quit, because if there's a need that's obvious you respond to it. I think that individual acts of decency and understanding add up to broad public and institutional patterns of justice.
In an era when so many are saying that individuals can't make a difference, I believe that individuals can make all the difference. So many of the hurtful things that are happening with children are the result of individuals simply saying, "Well, I can't take the time to do this right or see that this child is getting the service she ought to have." And that kind of thinking results in the broad institutional problems of our schools or the child welfare system.
Those in the Christian community have to follow the example of what they say they believe about reaching out to those in need around them. They must try to do what is right, even if they know they're moving against the grain. I hope that people will stand on their faith and be willing to take that step for decency.
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