Lanterns Read online

  ALSO BY MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

  The Measure of Our Success:

  A Letter to My Children and Yours

  Guide My Feet:

  Meditations and Prayers on

  Loving and Working for Children

  Stand for Children

  Families in Peril:

  An Agenda for Social Change

  This book is dedicated in loving gratitude

  to three childhood community mentors and elders

  MRS. THERESA KELLY—“MIZ TEE”

  MRS. LUCY MCQUEEN—“MIZ LUCY”

  and

  MISS KATE WINSTON—“MIZ KATE”

  to my wonderful sister, partner, and gifted teacher

  OLIVE WRIGHT COVINGTON

  and to the memories of our parents

  ARTHUR JEROME AND MAGGIE LEOLA BOWEN WRIGHT

  May their faith and family legacies bless and live on

  in their children’s children and in generations to come.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks are due Manette Adams—Mrs. Harry Baker Adams—whose stewardship of my lost and forgotten Spelman College diary provided the impetus for this book. She discovered it in the Yale University chaplain’s house, where I had lived for a year with the William Sloane Coffin, Jr., family; took it with her to Trumbull College; patiently deciphered my indecipherable handwriting as she prepared to move again; and kindly returned this living history of youthful struggle and engagement in the Civil Rights Movement. Its memories have nourished and reminded me of the rich texture of life shared with heroic adults and young people during the exciting civil rights years.

  I am so grateful to family and friends who helped me complete this book. My son, Joshua, a public school teacher and founder and director of a youth development program which includes mentoring, read an early draft and provided wise advice.

  Anne and Guido Calabresi, Laura and Dick Chasin, and Gianna Celli and her colleagues at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference center, the Villa Serbelloni, provided beautiful spaces and silence to write.

  I am deeply grateful for the indispensable help of my colleagues at the Children’s Defense Fund, especially Ivanna Weikert Omeechevarria, Kathy Tindell, Beth Kaufman, Paul Smith, and Janet Simons; and of Deanne Urmy, my editor and friend at Beacon Press.

  And, as always, I thank my husband and partner, Peter Edelman, for patiently being there.

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  1. PARENTS AS MENTORS

  Arthur Jerome and Maggie Leola Bowen Wright

  2. COMMUNITY ELDERS AS CO-PARENTS AND MENTORS

  Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate, and Miz Amie

  3. TEACHERS AND THEIR MESSAGES

  4. SPELMAN COLLEGE——A SAFE HAVEN

  Benjamin Elijah Mays, Howard Zinn, and Charles E. Merrill, Jr.

  5. EUROPE

  6. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND A SPRING OF CHANGE

  7. THE YALE YEARS

  William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Malcolm X, and Getting Ready for Mississippi

  8. THE MISSISSIPPI YEARS

  9. MISSISSIPPI MENTORS

  Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, Mae Bertha Carter, and Unita Blackwell

  10. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND R.F.K.

  A Season of Hope for the Hungry

  11. MOVEMENT TIME

  12. GREAT BLACK WOMEN MENTORS AND MOVEMENT BUILDERS

  Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Septima Clark, and Ella Baker

  13. OUR CHILDREN AS MENTORS

  14. AMERICA AS MENTOR FOR ITS CHILDREN AND THE WORLD

  AFTERWORD

  A Parent’s Pledge and Twenty-Five More Lessons for Life

  LESSON 1: Always remember that you are God’s child. No man or woman can look down on you and you cannot look down on any man or woman or child.

  LESSON 2: Don’t wait for, expect, or rely on favors. Count on earning them by hard work and perseverance.

  LESSON 3: Call things by their right names.

  LESSON 4: Don’t listen to naysayers offering no solutions or take no or but for an answer.

  LESSON 5: Don’t be afraid to stick your neck out, to make mistakes, or to speak up.

  LESSON 6: Keep your word and your commitments.

  LESSON 7: Be strategic, focus, and don’t scatter your energies on many things that don’t add up to a better whole.

  LESSON 8: Watch out for success. It can be more dangerous than failure.

  LESSON 9: You can’t do everything by yourself but you can do a lot.

  LESSON 10: Asking the right questions and measuring the right things may be more important than finding the right answers.

  LESSON 11: Travel lightly through life and resist the tyranny of burdensome or unneeded things.

  LESSON 12: Be a pilgrim and not a tourist in life and don’t confuse heroism with fame or celebrity.

  LESSON 13: God has a job for all of us to do. Open up the envelope of your soul and try to discern the Creator’s orders inside.

  LESSON 14: Follow the Golden Rule rather than the world’s silver, iron, bronze, and copper rules.

  LESSON 15: Bear all or most of the criticism and share all of the credit.

  LESSON 16: Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.

  LESSON 17: Avoid high-maintenance, low-impact people and life in the fast lane.

  LESSON 18: God did not create two classes of children or human beings—only one.

  LESSON 19: Don’t ever give up on life. It is God’s gift. When trouble comes, hang in.

  LESSON 20: Strive hard to be a good parent.

  LESSON 21: Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.

  LESSON 22: Don’t let anything or anybody get between you and your education.

  LESSON 23: Never judge the contents of a box by its wrappings.

  LESSON 24: Take responsibility for your behavior. Don’t make excuses, blame, or point fingers at others or hide behind “everybody’s doing it.”

  LESSON 25: Possessions and power don’t make the man or woman: principles, character, and love do.

  A GLOSSARY OF MENTORS AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

  WORKS CITED

  PREFACE

  O God, I thank You for the lanterns in my life who illumined dark and uncertain paths calmed and stilled debilitating doubts and fears with encouraging words, wise lessons, gentle touches, firm nudges, and faithful actions along my journey of life and back to You.

  IT IS MY GREAT JOY to share some of the great lives and spirits of mentors who have enriched, informed, and helped shape my life. Many of them helped shape our times and national life.

  I was born in the sturdy white wood parsonage at 119 Cheraw Street in Bennettsville, South Carolina, as the last of five children of Rev. Arthur Jerome and Maggie Leola Bowen Wright. My birth house is now a Children’s Defense Fund office.

  I have always felt blessed to be born who I was, where I was, when I was, and with the parents I had. As a Black girl child growing up in a small segregated southern town, I could never take anything for granted and never for a moment lacked a purpose worth fighting, living, and dying for, or an opportunity to make a difference if I wanted to. I was richly blessed with parents and community elders who nurtured me and other children and tried to live what they preached. They believed in God, in family, in education, and in helping others.

  I did not come into or get through life alone. Neither did you. Our mothers had to push to get us here. And our fathers had to help too. My parents needed and got help in raising me and my sister and three brothers from our neighbors and friends in their church and community, some of whom you will meet here. They tried unceasingly to protect children from the unfair assaults of southern raci
al segregation and injustice by weaving a tight family and community fabric of love around us.

  This book is not about professional or volunteer mentoring programs for children and youths or about career mentoring for those seeking to move up corporate or other professional ladders. I applaud these important efforts that help children and young adults, especially women and minority group members, get a secure foot in the job door and penetrate the invisible but often still impenetrable glass ceilings constructed by centuries of White male privilege and power. However necessary, these programs are not the answer to the daily needs all children have for consistent, caring, and responsible adults at every stage of life.

  This book is about the crucial influences of the natural daily mentors in my life—my parents, community co-parents and elders, preachers, teachers, civic and civil rights leaders. It is about the impact of cultural, social, economic, and political forces that created the external context within which my family and Black community elders lived, and about how they influenced and shaped my perceptions and life choices. The challenge faced by Black parents when I was growing up was daunting. They had to affirm and help us children internalize our sanctity as children of God, as valued members of our family, of the Black community, of the American community, and of the entire human community, while simultaneously preparing us to understand, survive in, and challenge the prevailing values of a legally segregated nation, with a history of slavery, that did not value or affirm us as equal citizens or practice the self-evident belief that “all men are created equal” as its founding fathers professed.

  Black parents—and all parents—face these same challenges today to help children define who they are and what to value in a culture that assigns worth more by extrinsic than intrinsic measures; by racial, gender, and class rather than human values; by material rather than spiritual values; by power rather than principle; by money rather than morality; by greed rather than goodness; by consumerism rather than conscience; by rugged individualism rather than community; and that glorifies violence above nonviolence.

  I cannot recall a single one of the mentors I share with you in this book ever talking to me just about how to make a living or to get a job—worthy and necessary goals. They all stressed how to make a life and to find a purpose worth living for and to leave the world better than I found it. Their emphasis was on education, excellence, and service—not just on career. Their message was that if I were excellent I’d have less trouble securing a job—even as a young Black person. I can’t remember the clothes a single one of them wore or the kind of car they drove or whether they drove a car at all. What I do remember is their integrity, courage in the face of adversity, perseverance, and shared passion for justice and a better life for children—their own and other people’s—and for education as a means to the end of helping others. With one exception, Charles E. Merrill, Jr., son of the scion of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm, none had much money. Some of them had none and lived hand-to-mouth by the grace of God and friends. And Charles Merrill knew that money was a means to help others and not an end. He used his to give dozens of young women and men like me and Alice Walker a chance to travel and study abroad and to experience the world he had been privileged to see.

  Many of my mentors were well educated but many did not have much or any formal education. However they valued education for their children and were very astute about life. Some of the wisest words I have heard and most important lessons I have learned did not come from Harvard or Yale or Princeton or law school or Ph.D. trained mouths. They came from poor women and men educated in the school of life. Their books were struggle. Their pencils and pens were sharpened by poverty. Their mother wit was created by the daily battle for survival. Their inner faith was nourished by their outer losses. Their eyes were riveted on searching for and doing God’s will rather than human ways, and their standards were divine rather than human justice.

  I have always wanted to be half as good, half as brave, and half as faithful as the great women of my childhood and young adulthood like Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter, whom I introduce here. They represent countless unsung lives of grace, women who carry on day-in and day-out trying to keep their families, churches, and communities together and to instill by example the enduring values of love, hard work, discipline, and courage.

  When Miss Osceola McCarthy, an elderly Mississippi woman who washed and ironed White folks’ clothes all her life, gained national prominence after giving a large portion ($150,000) of her life’s savings to the University of Southern Mississippi to provide scholarships for young Blacks to enter the doors that had been closed to her, many people were amazed. I was not. In less dramatic ways, I have seen many such role models who worked hard, earned more than they thought they needed to live on, and saved the rest to share with others.

  I think about them when I read about young Wall Street executives complaining about the difficulties of maintaining a “decent lifestyle” on their million-dollar salaries and bonuses. I think about Mrs. Hamer and Mrs. Carter when I hear young Black, Brown, and White people whine about how hard life is. They don’t know from hard as they excuse themselves from trying and decide to give up after the first, second, fifth, or tenth failure, or dissolve into despair or lash out at others when somebody hurts their feelings or insults them. Every time I am tempted (as is often) to give up or excuse myself from “doing one more thing,” I think of Miz Mae Bertha or Miz Fannie Lou who until they died called up regularly to discuss how to solve some problem they could have conveniently ignored. Their examples make me stand up when I want to sit down, try one more time when I want to stop, and go out the door when I want to stay home and relax.

  From the beginning, I was surrounded by strong Black female role models from my mother to Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, and Miz Kate and other community women, to Ella Baker during my college years, to the great women of Mississippi. Black women were steady anchors who helped me navigate every step of my way through childhood, college, law school, and as I tested adult professional wings. All of my mentors encouraged me by word or example to think and act outside the box and to ignore the low expectations many have for Black girls and women.

  My mentors came in both genders, and in different colors, faiths, and persuasions. Three Black men, my daddy, Morehouse College president Benjamin E. Mays, and his mentee Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and three White men, Morehouse College board chair Charles E. Merrill, Jr., my college professor, historian Howard Zinn, and former Yale chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., played pivotal roles at key points in my life. What they all had in common was their respectful treatment of me as an important, thinking individual human being. They expressed no sense of limits on my potential or on who they thought I could become, and they engaged me as a fellow wayfarer and struggler. They saw me inside and not just outside and affirmed the strengths I had because I was blessed to be born a Black girl child.

  All of my mentors, men and women of different faiths and colors, in their own way personified excellence and courage, shared and instilled a vision and hope of what could be, not what was, in our racially, gender, class, and caste constricted country; kept America’s promise of becoming a country free of discrimination, poverty, and ignorance ever before me; put the foundations of education, discipline, hard work, and perseverance needed to help build it beneath me; and instilled a sense of the here and now and forever faithful presence of God inside me.

  In the Odyssey, Homer used the name Mentor for an old and faithful friend of King Odysseus. The goddess Athena impersonates Mentor to inspire and impart wisdom and encouragement to prepare Odysseus’ son Telemachus for his journey in search of his father, saying: “You will not lack either courage or sense in the future.” Neither the king nor his son knew where their quests would lead them or what they would find.

  I look back in wonder and gratitude at my rich uncharted journey from my small hometown of Bennettsville, South Carolina, to cloistered S
pelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in a segregated South, through Europe and the Soviet Union for fifteen months, back to Spelman and a changing South, into the southern Civil Rights Movement, through Yale Law School and into the north of America with its subtler but persistent racial codes, to Mississippi as a civil rights lawyer, to Washington, D.C. to help prepare for Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, and around the world with my new husband, Peter Edelman, including the war zones of Vietnam with John Paul Vann after Dr. King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. This journey brought me to the founding of the Washington Research Project (WRP), a public interest law group, and the beginning of the Children’s Defense Fund into which it evolved in 1973. I am grateful beyond words for the example of the lanterns shared in this memoir whose lives I hope will illuminate my children’s, your children’s, and the paths of countless others coming behind.

  In many ways, the labyrinth of my life is leading back to where I began and to many of the lessons learned but too easily lost in the cacophony of noise and clutter and triviality and depersonalization afflicting so much of modern American life and culture. With others, I seek to reweave the frayed remnants of family, community, and spiritual values rent asunder in the name of progress. That much racial, social, and scientific progress has taken place over my lifetime is evident. Millions of Black children and poor children of all races have moved into the American mainstream and are better off materially. But something important has been lost as we have thrown away or traded so much of our Black spiritual heritage for a false sense of economic security and inclusion. We are at risk of letting our children drown in the bathwater of American materialism, greed, and violence. We must regain our moral bearings and roots and help America recover hers before millions more children—Black, Brown, and White, poor, middle-class, and rich—self-destruct or grow up thinking life is about acquiring rather than sharing, selfishness rather than sacrifice, and material rather than spiritual wealth.