Marian Wright Edelman

American activist for children's rights (born 1939)

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.

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.

Quotes

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  • 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."

Attributed

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  • 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

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  • 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.
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