CHARLESTON- Marian Wright Edelman was apparently destined for a life of service to humanity.
The lessons about helping others that her parents taught her and the abject poverty she saw in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s instilled in her the determination to do something to make a difference, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) told a standing room only audience at the Sottile Theatre at the College of Charleston Tuesday night.
"One of the earliest lessons I learned was that I am God's child and that nobody can look down on me and because we are all God's children, that I can look down on nobody," said the Bennettsville, SC, native who founded the CDF in 1973. "Those with financial, material, intellectual and other kinds of wealth have a responsibility to share with others" to promote justice and equality.
Edelman's speech was the first in the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture's Race and Social Justice Initiative, a response to recent tragic events in the Charleston area, including the shooting death of Walter Scott by a police officer in April 2015 and the mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in June 2015.
A graduate of Yale Law School and the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, Edelman spoke of the continuing need to fight for justice and equality in an "ethically-polluted" society that is often indifferent to such values.
"It appears that we have too often lost the sense of what is important," she said. "Truth-telling and morality seem to have become unimportant. Yet, we live in a nation that spends three times more to house prison inmates than on public school students. That's about the dumbest investment I can think of. Mass incarceration is the new slavery."
Before founding the CDF, Edelman had been director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. She is also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Prize" Fellowship and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.
"We've got to save our nation's soul," she said, as she turned her remarks towards the poor treatment many children in the United States receive and the danger that she said that presents for the nation. "Black children, Latino children and Native American children can take nothing for granted."
Referring to recent national discourse about immigration and national security threats, she said that "the real enemy is the failure to invest sufficiently in all of our children. Leaving children to struggle and trying to grow up in an ethically-polluted society for the very things they need to thrive is the real national security issue."
Edelman ended her speech by exhorting the audience to be vigilant in the struggle for justice, fairness and equality for all people. Despite the challenges, her life and work and that of people like SC natives Benjamin E. Mays and Mary McLeod Bethune confirm what is possible when one is determined that nothing can stop them.
"Be a strategic flea" and bite the big dog of injustice and inequality, she said. "Do all you can where you can with what you have. With enough fleas biting him, the biggest dog will have to move."
