Marian Wright Edelman

A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back — but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

Marian Wright Edelman (born June 6, 1939) is an American activist for the rights of children. She is president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund.

Quotes

• I've been struck by the upside-down priorities of the juvenile justice system. We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep a kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.
  • Reported in Margie Casady, "Society's Pushed-Out Children", Psychology Today (June 1975).

• A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back — but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.
  • Reported in Dick Richards, The Art of Winning Commitment : 10 Ways Leaders Can Engage Minds, Hearts, And Spirits (2004), p. 11.

• In Montgomery, Alabama, Jonah and I went to the Civil Rights Memorial, and then we walked around to Dexter Baptist Church and went up into Martin's pulpit. I'd forgotten what a little place it was. We looked out from the little pulpit in that little church and talked about how something so big started from a place so small. Just a lot of committed people of faith in church on one side of the street, and all the power of Alabama in the state capitol right across the street. As a young lawyer, I used to listen to Dr. King in chapel at Spelman College. One of the thngs I liked about him was that he didn't pretend to be a great powerful know-it-all. I remember him discussing openly his gloom, depression, his fears, admitting that he didn't know what the next step was. He would then say: "Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."
  • As quoted in Mother Jones Magazine May-Jun 1991. Vol. 16, No. 3. p. 77. ISSN 0362-8841.

• The odds continue to be stacked against children of color who made up nearly three-quarters of all poor children in 2018. With nearly one in four poor, they are more than 2.5 times more likely to be poor than White children.
  • Ask the Question: When Are We Going to End Child Poverty in America? in The Charleston Chronicle (23 September 2019)

Attributed

• The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.
  • Reported in Christopher R. Edginton, Peter Chen, Leisure as transformation: Volume 4 (2008), p. 87.

About Marian Edelman

• We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict." Cornel West, bell hooks, Richard Green, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Nell Painter, Albert Raby....Why are these names not as well known outside the African American community as the names of Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries? Are they, in their diversity and dynamism, less representative of the African American community?
  • Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz "Jews, Class, Color, and the Cost of Whiteness" in The Issue is Power (1992)

• Don't count out Marian Wright Edelman, because there is talk that President Clinton may want to shock the nation by putting a real black on the Supreme Court.
  • Carl Rowan, Inside Washington (March 20, 1993).