She’s a Baptist preacher’s daughter who fears becoming too preachy, a believer in government who has felt betrayed by the government and a master of facts and figures — 15.7 million children living in poverty, 9.4 million children subsisting without health insurance, 1 million 2-year-olds not vaccinated against preventable diseases — whose best hope isn’t facts but faith.
Times like these test the mettle of Marian Wright Edelman, 56, the Mississippi-born, Yale-educated, much-honored, vastly influential founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. Known by children’s advocates as the nation’s “First Mom,” she is the woman who helped redefine the national concept of poverty by putting a child’s face on it.
It’s small wonder that her new book, “Guide My Feet: Prayers and Meditations on Loving and Working for Children” (Beacon, $17.95), pleads for God’s help and includes Edelman’s favorite prayer, on Page 88: “Oh, God, forgive our rich nation that lets children be the poorest group of citizens.”
Edelman is on a 22-year mission on behalf of children. She and her followers see a mean future for kids spinning from the congressional transfer of the vast national social safety net to the states through budget cuts and new block-grant legislation.
Beverly Jackson Roberson, director of the national Zero to Three early intervention program, calls 1995 “the roughest year of our lives,” pointing to federal spending cuts being considered for programs aiding children and families, ranging from medical care to nutrition to education.
Edelman goes even further. “What we’re seeing from Congress,” she says, “is evil. I thought I was beyond shock, but what they’re doing will redefine what it means to be an American.”
Among her biggest disappointments: that the Clinton administration, which she has staunchly defended, hasn’t taken a stand on behalf of the threatened programs.
Edelman still wields considerable clout in Washington though, and throughout the country. One indicator: the 75,000-copy first printing of “Guide My Feet.” And during her national tour she hopes to use that clout to rally three groups in particular to her cause: clergy, youth and parents.
The common threat facing all three “is, at bottom, a spiritual crisis,” she says. “How can we accept that a child is killed with a handgun every 18 minutes in America? Every community must find its moral voice.”
Sounding angered, shaken and both determined and uncertain, Edelman describes her goal as starting what she calls a “national conversation.”
Here is a sampling of the topics she plans to bring to that conversation:
– On changes in the federal social pact — which, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, has included a national commitment to protecting poor children:
“The fat lady hasn’t sung yet,” says Edelman, “but the actions of Congress have made this the worst year for the Children’s Defense Fund. They are dismantling the moral contract. They are digging up 60 years of social policy started by Roosevelt. All of that is being destroyed in the name of welfare reform.”
A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study of a pending Senate welfare-reform bill estimates it will push another 1.1 million children into poverty.
“But the greater urgency in America is the creation of jobs and opportunity. What is our future going to look like? Even as jobs shift abroad, we are eliminating summer job programs and college loans. Hundreds of thousands of poor children also are being left behind by the computer age. Congress is literally taking away money for programs children need to get those skills. We are shrinking the pool of opportunity. There is a sense of hopelessness among the poor. There is nothing out there for them.”
– On the Clintons, whom she still considers good friends:
Edelman says she still talks often with Hillary Rodham Clinton but can’t predict how far the president, in an extremely tough election year, will go to protect funding for programs such as Head Start, children’s nutrition and child care.
“What is the president going to do?” Edelman asks. “This is the most important social revolution since I’ve been alive. It would be a travesty to sign these block-grant bills that dismantle what began 60 years ago. And it would be inconsistent with the president’s pro-child record.
“The Clinton administration started off very strongly, but these cuts undermine everything it has accomplished in three years. Mr. Clinton has got to make this a moral litmus test. I am unwavering in calling on the president to state what is at stake here.
“He has to say, `This isn’t right. I can’t be a part of it.’ “
– On grass-roots involvement, which she says has been missing from the children’s movement, especially among the established churches and synagogues:
“We’ve got to build a movement, one that asks, `What does it mean to be an American?’ Is this really about money and budgets, or about deeper values, about bringing people together, giving everybody a decent chance?’ It’s all so excessive, so unjust. I’m very scared.
“We’re asking people to take a neighborhood audit: what children are in their neighborhoods, who are they, and what are their dreams?
“The irony is there are millions of good people doing good things all around the country. The Million Man March in Washington was symbolic of that spiritual hunger — all these men coming to Washington to say, `See us. We want to help. We want to do things ourselves.’ But we’re being outmessaged by TV. How, in this glitzy, 10-second culture, can we make the moral voice be heard?”
– On leadership:
She is no Martin Luther King Jr., Edelman says. But she contends that a Kinglike figurehead may not be what the children’s movement needs anyway.
“Each of us is always looking for the hero with the silver bullet. But all of us have to offer our hands and feet. For me, it’s wonderful to be considered a symbolic leader, but no one can do it alone, not even the president. We’ve got to empower people. I’m just frustrated at how uninformed Americans are about this moral revolution.”
– On prayer and faith and how she came to write a collection of prayers rather than a conventional book:
“Writing has always helped me clarify what I believe. But I started out trying to write a policy agenda that simply would not come. I struggled with the idea of what King called `chaos in community.’ And finally, prayer came.
“Prayer has always been private to me. My father taught me that. And I’ve always been afraid of becoming self-righteous, of sounding like I have some kind of corner on God. We’re a diverse nation, and I don’t want to offer prayer in a way that makes judgments about other folks.
“I’m only hoping it helps us find meaning and purpose. We want to create a theology of childhood.”
