Marian Wright Edelman

Marian Wright Edelman is President Emerita of the Children's Defense Fund and its Action Council whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.

Blog Post List

Childcare & Early Education Families & The Federal Budget MomsVote

November 2, 2018

“That candidates were answering to us was really powerful. I was really glad I got to be a part of it. Even though I can’t vote yet, I’m doing everything I can to tell my family and friends the importance of using their vote.” –Kelsey, high school sophomore in Austin, Texas “I thought it was really amazing to be able to ask candidates questions specific to what we [young people] care about.” –Wasiq, college freshman at the University of Houston and gun violence prevention activist Kelsey and Wasiq were two of the young people who participated in the Children’s Defense Fund-Texas’s first-ever...

MomsRising Together

Gun Safety

October 30, 2018

Children continue to be terrorized by the daily reality that there is no safe space in our gun-saturated country. They are filled with fear they will be killed in a school shooting, on the streets of their neighborhoods and even in the sacred places where they and their families worship. A Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. And now the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where worshipers had gathered on Saturday morning for Shabbat services and for a bris to celebrate...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Social & Emotional Development

October 26, 2018

I recently had the joy of presenting an award from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs to Ruby Bridges. As a six-year-old first grader in New Orleans in 1960, Ruby Bridges became the first Black student to attend an all-White elementary school in the South. She showed unforgettable loving forgiveness and courage when faced with ugly screaming White mobs who jeered and taunted her every day as she walked into William Frantz Elementary School. Federal marshals had to escort Ruby to school every day, but she never quit or turned back. Norman Rockwell immortalized...

MomsRising Together

Politics & Policy Social & Emotional Development

October 19, 2018

This week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Black Power salute given by Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos as the American anthem played during their medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympic Games. Their quiet nonviolent protest earned them loud and widespread criticism, death threats and suspension from the U.S track team. Tommie Smith later said: “We were just human beings who saw a need to bring attention to the inequality in our country . . . I don’t like the idea of people looking at it as negative. There was nothing but a raised fist in the air and a bowed head, acknowledging...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Immigration

October 12, 2018

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34) Every third weekend of October many thousands of people of faith come together all across America for the National Observance of Children’s Sabbaths® celebrations launched by the Children’s Defense Fund to unite congregations across religious traditions to respond to the divine mandate to nurture, protect, and advocate for all children. This year...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Social & Emotional Development

October 5, 2018

As parents and grandparents once again struggle to determine how to explain to their children current headlines of moral indecency at the highest levels, adults everywhere are reminded that we must all continue to strive to be the examples we want our children to emulate. We cannot depend on anyone else. I believe the Old Testament prophets, the Gospels, the Koran—indeed all great faiths—history, moral decency and common sense beckon us anew to examine as individuals and as a people what we are to live by and teach our children by precept and example. I urge adults in America of all races,...

MomsRising Together

Immigration

September 28, 2018

“We can’t let people drive wedges between us … because there is only one human race.” –Dolores Huerta, Co-founder, United Farm Workers July 26 was the deadline set by a court for the Trump administration to reunite all children and parents who were cruelly separated from each other at the border by their zero-tolerance immigration policy. Yet we are about to enter October with about 400 children still separated from their families. Nearly two-thirds of these children’s parents have reportedly already been deported without being reunited with their children. Immigrant advocates say some...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education

September 28, 2018

“I can make a difference!” Every July thousands of students from Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom Schools® sites across the country participate in the CDF Freedom Schools National Day of Social Action. This year’s action focused on the need to vote for children and the fact that every vote matters. Though children and teenagers in Freedom Schools are too young to vote themselves, they held rallies and marches urging adults to get registered and vote for leaders this election cycle and in every election who will stand for children. Young people are refusing to sit on the sidelines as they...

MomsRising Together

Gun Safety

September 21, 2018

The school shootings are scary and we feel like nothing can stop it from happening. — 11-year-old girl, Indiana We are afraid because there are too many threats at schools. I want my school to be safe and to have art because kids like art. –8-year-old girl, Wisconsin No one is doing anything to make me feel safe at school. –14-year-old girl, Washington, D.C. We deserve to have a childhood. –13-year-old boy, Pennsylvania What worries children most at the start of a new school year? In simpler times it might have been remembering their locker combination or making sure they had a friend to sit...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Family Economic Security

September 14, 2018

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” These words are from President Franklin Roosevelt’s second inaugural address given January 20, 1937. The President was speaking to a nation crawling out of the Great Depression. Progress had been made but President Roosevelt knew a great nation was still capable of so much more. Below is what preceded that passage: “[H]ere is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education

September 7, 2018

“There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues – the most dominating virtues of human society – are created, strengthened and maintained.” Joseph Miles is 51 years old, but says he spends a lot of time today thinking about this quote by Winston Churchill because it helps him understand everything that was missing in his own childhood. Joseph is currently incarcerated and serving a life sentence. He is a regular participant and leader in SALT: Schools for Alternative Learning and Transformation, a participatory educational community inside Riverbend...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Social & Emotional Development

August 31, 2018

As children across the country return to their classrooms, I share prayers for them in this new school year. I begin with a special prayer for children struggling to beat the odds: Live child – no matter what! Don’t let anybody or anything stop you Like the flowers in the crannied walls squeezing life as ivy, ferns, molds, and yellow buds stretching towards the sun rise from the rocky soil cling to the naked bumpy walls work your roots into the tiny crevices, nooks, and crannies of the unfriendly walls of race and class and gender that try to block your way Live no matter what lapping up sun’...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Social & Emotional Development

August 24, 2018

I wrote recently about a few of the brave children who helped change our nation during the Civil Rights Movement. There are many, many others whose examples should inspire us today. Claudette Colvin – sometimes called “The First Rosa Parks” – was a 15-year-old Black girl who challenged bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama on March 2, 1955, nine months before Mrs. Parks. Claudette boarded a Montgomery city bus and refused to give her seat to a White person when ordered by the driver to do so. Claudette had been studying the U.S. Constitution and the connection between constitutional rights...

MomsRising Together

Gun Safety

August 10, 2018

Last weekend in Chicago, 12 people were killed and at least 60 others were injured by guns. Fourteen of these shooting victims were children and teenagers, the youngest an 11-year-old boy who was shot in the leg. Seventeen-year-old Kenny Ivory was shot and killed on Sunday afternoon while riding his bike a block from his home. Seventeen-year-old Jahnae Patterson died after being shot in the face while standing outside during a nighttime block party. Her mother said Jahnae, the middle child in her family and oldest daughter, wanted to be a lawyer someday. Two more 17-year-olds and a 14-year-...

MomsRising Together

Gun Safety

August 3, 2018

On July 16, 10-year-old Makiyah Wilson was shot and killed in front of her Washington, D.C. home trying to buy ice cream. Makiyah was a rising fifth grader who loved basketball, football, art, and puzzles. She had just opened her front door on her way to the ice cream truck in the courtyard when four young men pulled up in a car and started shooting into a crowd of people enjoying the summer evening. Four people, including Makiyah’s 18-year-old sister, were injured and Makiyah was hit in the chest. Neighbors watched helplessly as her mother screamed and prayed over her dying child still...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Immigration Politics & Policy

July 27, 2018

Who counts as a person in America? The answer is more complicated than it should be. Every ten years the government is required by the Constitution to count the entire resident population of the United States. The Census matters for a very long list of reasons beginning with political representation: the count is used to determine how seats in the House of Representatives are distributed and states rely on it to map their own legislative districts. Census data are used to determine how federal and state funding are distributed for Medicaid, nutrition assistance programs, Head Start, education...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Politics & Policy Social & Emotional Development

June 8, 2018

On the night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who had announced his decision to run for president, was campaigning in Indiana when the news came of Dr. King’s assassination. He movingly shared the terrible news with the waiting crowd of mostly Black people, urging them not to hate and reminding them that a White man had killed his brother too, and spoke even in that terrible heartbreaking moment about his vision for what America could be: “[Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country,...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Family Economic Security

May 25, 2018

When I was a young civil rights lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Mississippi, I was called in 1967 to testify before Congress about the embattled Head Start program in Mississippi that was serving thousands of children after the state turned its federal funding down and community groups exercised their option to apply. But after defending the Child Development Group of Mississippi overseeing Head Start, for which I served as counsel, I added my urgent concern about the deep poverty and high levels of hunger in Mississippi. I asked the Senators to come see the hungry children and...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education

May 25, 2018

When Dovey Johnson Roundtree passed away on May 21 at age 104 our nation lost another far too unknown extraordinary groundbreaking Black woman leader. During World War II she was part of the first cohort of Black women admitted to the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Later she became one of the first women to be ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. Above all she was a pioneering Black woman lawyer in an era when neither Black nor women lawyers were welcome in many courtrooms. She was often forced to leave the building to use the restroom or eat during her trials. But she...

MomsRising Together

Childcare & Early Education Social & Emotional Development

May 18, 2018

In a few weeks . . . we are coming to Washington in a Poor People’s Campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives. We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government...

MomsRising Together

Main menu

Blog Topics Nav

Marian Wright Edelman

Badges

Blog Post List

Vote for Children Who Cannot Vote for Themselves

Reclaiming Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Lessons from Ruby Bridges

The Land of the Free

Who Will We Welcome? Will We Welcome the Children?

Setting the Example in This Moment

End Cruelty to Immigrant Families and Children

Children on the Front Lines

Our Children Are Saying “We Are Afraid”

The Test of Our Progress

We Must Stop Destroying our Children

Prayers for Our School Children

Children Fighting for Freedom

Our Children Are Crying Out

Childhoods Ended by Guns

The Census Citizenship Question and Children

Senator Robert Kennedy

California’s Chance to Lead for Poor Children

Remembering the Very Courageous Dovey Johnson Roundtree

Help Us Keep Dr. King’s Promise