By Marian Wright Edelman
President, Children’s Defense Fund via George Curry Media
“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. . . . I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word[.]”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
December 10, 1964
Marian Wright Edelman
The start of 2016 finds the U.S. at an inflection point as wars and terrorism abroad are echoed in violence, suspicion, and fear at home. How will we meet the moment? Hundreds of organizations and individuals have signed on to the urgent message of the campaign We Are Better Than This: “We grieve the many lives that have been lost or painfully transformed in recent weeks through extreme acts of violence. We are appalled by the surge of divisive rhetoric that sows the seeds of more violence to come. A dangerous tide of hatred, violence, and suspicion is rising in America, whether aimed at Arab and Muslim Americans, women and places we seek health care, black people, immigrants and refugees, or people just going about their daily lives. This tide is made more dangerous by easy access to guns. When has hate ever led to progress? Is this really what we want America to be? We are better than this.”
We are better than this. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Protestant theologian who died opposing Hitler’s holocaust, believed the test of the morality of society is how it treats its children. We flunk Bonhoeffer’s test every hour and every day in America, as we let the violence of guns and the violence of poverty relentlessly sap countless child lives. A child or teenager is killed by a gun every three and a half hours, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week.
More than 15.5 million children are poor and children are the poorest age group in America – the world’s largest economy, and the younger the children are, the poorer they are. Children of color, already the majority of our youngest children, will be the majority of our children in 2020.
Millions lack their basic needs for enough food, decent housing, health care and quality early childhood supports during their years of greatest brain development. More than six decades after Brown v. Board of Education, a majority of children of color are still waiting for a fair and equal chance to learn.
A majority of all fourth and eighth grade public school students and more than 80 percent of African- American and 73 percent of Hispanic students in these grades cannot read or compute at grade level and face dim futures as a jobless landscape looms. They also lack assurance that their lives matter and are at great risk of being sucked into a prison pipeline.
Those of us who remember McCarthyism see familiar signs in the hateful rhetoric and hatred aimed at Muslims, refugees, and immigrants. Even children report being bullied and attacked and hearing hateful words. The pervasive and relentless threat of violence and terror continues to attack and frighten children and adults from Syria to Paris to California and in our cities and rural areas.
There is another way. Again, Dr. King’s words lead us there – through a world that often can feel suffocated by “starless midnight,” to belief in a new day. He warned us that excessive materialism, militarism, racism, and poverty could be America’s undoing but that it was up to us to act and combat these evils.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dr. King also told us he had “the audacity to believe peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” He said: “Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts…sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
Let’s hear and decide this is the voice we will follow into this New Year. Let us pray and act for an end to preventable poverty and violence in our nation beginning with our children. Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund 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. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org]