MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

Marian Wright Edelman was born in South Carolina, attended Spelman College and Yale Law School, and represented activists during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. She took Senator Robert Kennedy on a tour of the Mississippi delta in 1967, during which she met, and later married, Kennedy’s legislative aide Peter Edelman. With Martin Luther King Jr. she organized the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, and in 1973 she founded the Children’s Defense Fund. She received a MacArthur fellowship in 1985 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000.

I’ve known Marian Wright Edelman for almost fifty years, and her work on children in poverty has made her one of my heroes. As a mother, I often think of something she said to me when I wrote Speak Truth to Power, “I was blessed at a young age to find a cause that was worth dying for, and that has made every day of my life worth living.” My hope for my daughters is that they, too, will find a purpose that makes every day of their lives worth living. We met in Marian’s office at the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, D.C.

Kerry Kennedy: In your memoir, Lanterns, you write that you didn’t think much of Robert Kennedy before you met him. You had an idea he was tough and arrogant.

Marian Wright Edelman: What I knew about him was his connection with the FBI’s wiretapping of Dr. King and his work for the McCarthy subcommittee. I had never met him, but my image of him was not good. I viewed him quite differently by the time I finally did meet him in 1967, and was very impressed by his speech in Cleveland about the plague of violence after Dr. King’s assassination. I thought he was very moving. I met your dad in connection with hunger and antipoverty programs I was involved in in Mississippi.

I had met with President Johnson’s people in the White House, and they thought it was so wonderful what we were doing about hunger and poverty, and there was so much interest, but it was the middle of the Vietnam War and these powerful people wouldn’t do anything to help. A Senate subcommittee was on our side and wanted us to make noise to get attention and called me to testify about how well the poverty program was working.

KK: In March 1967 you testified in Washington before the Senate Labor Subcommittee on Poverty, where Daddy was a member, that thousands of black sharecroppers were out of work, and their families were starving, because of a combination of mechanization and the federal subsidy stipulating that cotton fields lie fallow. Two-parent households were ineligible for benefits, and Mississippi had switched from a free surplus food distribution program to a food stamp program, which required $2 to purchase subsidized food. As many families had no income, there was no money to purchase food stamps. This was all part of an effort by Mississippi political leaders to force poor blacks to join the great migration north. So Daddy joined a handful of senators to visit Mississippi and look at the conditions there. At the time you were a twenty-seven-year-old graduate of Yale Law School, working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

MWE: I came to testify about Head Start, hunger, and the poverty programs, which were very much under attack by Senators [John C.] Stennis and [James] Eastland and other Southern segregationists. The Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM)’s Head Start program had created jobs for about three thousand people. It was based on a new vision of what children could do in early childhood. We saw how excited children were about learning. I loved the program; I’d visit our desegregated school districts and hear complaints from teachers that these CDGM kids were always asking questions, wanting another book. It was a very important program, but Mississippi’s senators came down heavily against it, forcing a long renewal fight after the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenged the Jim Crow Democratic Party in Atlantic City. It was the first time people experienced what it was like to have an independent voice, and they liked it.

KK: At the time, the Democratic Party in Mississippi was whites only, and it effectively prevented people of color from voting. So civil rights activists like Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Robert Moses established the MFDP as an alternative to the Democratic Party.

MWE: When we testified, we were all labeled Communists and subversives. So I asked the senators to come to the state and see for themselves the conditions there, and Senator Joe Clark and your dad agreed along with Republican senators Javits and Murphy. It was a very moving trip for all of us. It got a lot of attention, and put hunger on the national agenda. I had taken lots of people, including congressmen and journalists, to see the need, but none could command the press the way your father could. It was really a huge step forward in bringing visibility to the urgent need that existed and what the poverty programs were doing to address it. Your father was visibly moved by what he saw in the field, and it was terrific for the cause.

Your father went through the houses we took him to visit, and what I loved about him was his ability to say so much through touch. He went into one house and saw the now famous baby who—someone told me recently had survived and is all grown up—but this baby was sitting on the dirt floor with his very depressed mother washing clothes in a tin tub. There were no cameras inside as your father tried hard to get a response from this child, who just didn’t respond. When he went outside, there were children standing around in front of the house, and he asked them what they’d had for breakfast and lunch, and they said they hadn’t had lunch or breakfast yet. It was noon, and they’d had no breakfast. Your father had a way of gently touching the cheek with the back of his hand that was worth ten thousand words. I will never forget that.

We went to a number of different houses. In one there were three of the dirtiest little girls which just broke me up. The kids were so out of it, dirty and hungry, and you could not help but be moved. Your dad was so tender to them.

The other incident that consolidated my feelings about your father in a profound way was when we were going through a delta city with sirens blaring in this big motorcade speeding through. The kids came out to see the commotion, and a dog ran out in front of the police car and was killed. Your dad was very angry. He stopped the cars and got out to comfort the child whose dog it was and told the drivers not to drive so fast and make all this noise going through small towns. What he did was so very human; it moved me that he stopped to comfort a suffering boy.

Your father said he was shocked because he’d been to West Virginia and places of poverty all over the world, but hadn’t seen anything like these children with bloated bellies and dead eyes and dirty clothes, and had no idea conditions like that existed in America.

The next day he ordered Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman to get some food down there. Freeman said there were no people in America without any income, but your dad responded: “Yes there are; I just saw them.” That was the first time the secretary of agriculture was forced to take the hunger issue seriously. Freeman said, “I’ll send my staff back and document what you say you saw.” Your dad said, “I’ll send Peter back to show you the same families we saw.” So they did; they came back the next day, and saw them. But Agriculture officials dragged their feet because the Vietnam War was going on and nobody wanted to jeopardize the war’s financing for poverty programs.

The struggle dragged on, and I got completely frustrated because there was still so much hunger. Mississippi was trying to starve them out, and force these poor people to join the migration north. So in August I went to Washington to see Peter and I talked to your dad. I told him nothing had changed, Agriculture was dragging its feet, and still hadn’t waived the $2 for families to have access to food. When I told your father I was stopping through Atlanta to visit with Dr. King, he told me to tell Dr. King to bring the poor to Washington.

The next day I headed for Atlanta to see Dr. King like I always did on my way back or forth to Mississippi. That was in August of ’67. Dr. King at that time was totally depressed. He had given his Riverside Church speech opposing the Vietnam war, and a lot of people including friends turned against him after the antiwar speech. He didn’t know where to go next, and, bless his heart, he had the patience of Job, but it was a very difficult time for him. I kept him up to date on our antipoverty and hunger efforts. He had been to Marks, a little city in Quitman County, Mississippi, still one of the poorest places in the country. Dr. King had been there for a funeral and he had seen a teacher carve an apple into six slices and give it to six hungry kids. It was the first time he almost burst into tears publicly; he went running out of the building. That was his experience in Marks from which the Mule Train for the later Poor People’s Campaign began.

At any rate, when I went by to see him in his very modest office, I sat right down and told him how frustrated I was that food still wasn’t going to Mississippi’s hungry children, and told him what your dad had said, which was: “Tell him to bring the poor to Washington.” Dr. King just absolutely lit up. He went home and told Coretta, who wrote about it in her book, and Coretta said he smiled for the first time in a long while. And he called his staff together and talked about what he said was going to be the next big step for us all. The Poor People’s Campaign started in Marks. And it started with Robert Kennedy’s passion and willingness to push. It was important, though it never had the impact we hoped for; it wasn’t helped by the deaths of Dr. King and your father, and it wasn’t helped much by Richard Nixon.

We just returned to Marks to do a child hunger watch. Although we have a 100 percent federally funded program for summer months, many states and localities don’t use it. I don’t know what we’re going to find, but I think the issue will probably be obesity. We have school lunches and school breakfast during the school year, and then we have a summer food program that’s 100 percent federally funded too, but many of the Southern states won’t take the money, so there’s a 90 percent drop in participation during the summer. Although there’s money, there are states that won’t take Medicaid money. I keep a Mississippi office, and I get reports about how “the kids come in on Monday mornings and they’ve gone without breakfast or lunch over the weekends. If the bus driver’s late getting them to school, that means they miss breakfast.” We also have the kids who have nothing or practically nothing at all to eat on the weekend; these kids figure out what other kids don’t like and they stand behind them and wait until they finish and then ask if they can finish the leftovers. It’s horrible, these feeding programs mean jobs for bus drivers and cafeteria workers and food for hungry children. That’s not 1968. That’s 2017.

Your father’s legacy is that he brought food to hungry children by giving a public face to the situation in Mississippi and other places in America. His presence and doggedness made it possible to marshal resources to attack the problem. He got the CBS special that showed a mother with a baby dying on TV. For all our struggles in ’64, ’65, ’66, and ’67, it was only when he came that the press showed up. He never gave up. He stuck with it. He was moved by it, and he knew what was happening in Mississippi was wrong. He said he had never experienced anything like it, even in Third World countries. His determination and compassion and persistence were really quite extraordinary.

The single most moving moment of the Poor People’s Campaign for me was when your father’s funeral train arrived in DC and the hearse stopped in front of Resurrection City.

KK: That was the fifteen acres near the Reflecting Pool occupied by three thousand poor people to demonstrate against hunger and poverty.

MWE: And they began to sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

People thought it was all over then, but it wasn’t. Your father had planted new seeds and things grew and we and others pushed and pushed. There were the McGovern hearings on hunger in the Senate and around the country and the White House conference on hunger. Today there are millions of people on food stamps—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program; all school lunches have expanded, and we have school breakfasts and after-school programs; and the whole hunger lobby remains a significant force inspired by the Poor People’s Campaign beginning. All the progress we made happened incrementally.

When we returned to Washington in 1969, President Nixon was not going to let us go from agency to agency and had us come to the White House to meet with him and the whole cabinet. We reported that not enough progress had been made. President Nixon’s response was that he was bringing peace in Vietnam. That was not what we wanted to hear. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King’s successor at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, attacked the president for not being responsive on the hunger issue. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, his domestic policy adviser and later senator from New York, was furious that we were not grateful just to meet. But within a year he had a national conference on hunger and we were beginning to see expansion of the food programs. By the end of the Nixon years, hunger was virtually on the run. Then President Reagan came in and tried to destroy the entire safety net. But new voices kept the laws on the books, and although we lost billions of dollars, we saved the laws and eventually got much of the money back. And the fight goes on today as the Trump administration seeks to eviscerate the safety net again. He must not and will not succeed.

KK: I’m interested in what it was like for you, doing all the things you were doing for children, to be a woman at that time fighting against an establishment dominated by men.

MWE: I had great parents, and they always made it clear that I was as smart as my three older brothers and my older sister. They made no distinctions; they had high expectations of all of us. That attitude was instilled in me. So I do exactly what my parents did: that’s all I do. My dad was a great minister, a great preacher, and my mother was the church organist. She was absolutely the best organizer; she took in children after all of us left home. There was always the sense that I could do anything anybody else could do. The great benefit of segregation was that we were all exposed to [black] role models. When they came to town they had no place to stay except in people’s homes. I saw Mary McLeod Bethune when I was eight or nine years old. I will never forget when she spoke at Benedict College; I had never seen a woman command a bunch of men in a room the way she did. She talked about “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” I was exposed to so many strong women, starting with my mother, and I always knew I was as smart as my brothers.

There was always misogyny. I went to Spelman College in Atlanta, and that was terrific. I love the notion—I didn’t at the time—of an all-black women’s college. We had to be in at five thirty, and it was a ladies’ tea party school, but there were many strong, smart, women professors, which was terrific, and Howard Zinn, who wrote The People’s History of the United States, was the chair of the social sciences department. When I went to Yale Law School, I think they had nine women in that class. You would have thought Attila the Hun invaded Yale Law School. I hated law school. I saw all these people who had terrible complaints and had no lawyers, and I wondered what in the world I was doing at Yale.

All my SNCC friends had gone down to the South to organize for voter registration, and I got some money together so I could go down to Mississippi on spring break. I just felt like I was the luckiest person in the world to have been born at the intersection of great leaders and great events. In Greenwood, where the SNCC office was, there had been a shooting that night, and I went to the SNCC office the next morning, and that was the first time they brought dogs out against demonstrators in the South. I had promised my mother I wouldn’t get arrested. But I knew I would get through law school and come back to Mississippi.

KK: You were the first African American woman to pass the bar in Mississippi. Were you the first woman?

MWE: I’ve never checked. I know I never saw another woman lawyer down there while I was there. There were four black lawyers, three of whom took civil rights cases, none of whom had gone to formal law school. I remember my first day in federal court with the notorious Judge [William H.] Cox. I walked into the chambers and they were all struck dumb—all the white men sitting around the judge’s conference room. I went and I tried to shake every hand around the table, and not a man would shake my hand. It was like being a Martian. Eventually they tried to be friendly, and we worked out relationships. I got away with things as a woman that I probably could not have if I’d been a man. I probably would have gotten killed if I’d been a man.

One thing I learned is: You take no guff. I have my job to do. They learned after a very short period of time: Don’t mess with her. I simply didn’t tolerate it. They test you, and that doesn’t last long with me, OK? The word gets out to leave her alone. I had zero tolerance, and that reputation got around very quickly. Besides, I had to get up in the morning and get people out of jail, and I had briefs to write. I guess because I had these three older brothers with whom I had to compete, I learned how to be a survivor. When I’m focused on something, don’t get in the way.

I took a case for Ebony magazine because they had been sued by a young white man who claimed he’d been wrongly named as having been at a party at Ole Miss where there were blacks at the table. He was suing the magazine for libel. Another time I went down to Meridian, Mississippi, for a case before Judge Cox. He had a motion for [Neshoba County] Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, and this was after the murder of the civil rights workers, [Andrew] Goodman, [James] Chaney, and [Michael] Schwerner [in Neshoba County], and he sat those two murderers down at the table. And, I got so enraged, but I also realized that all of us are capable of terrible things. So much hatred came up in me.

KK: How did you deal with that hatred?

MWE: You swallow it. We knew what had happened to those boys. I never forgave Judge Cox. I also had to examine myself. It was horrible. You keep fighting.

KK: You need allies; no one can do it alone.

MWE: There are no friends in politics, and now we’re facing another huge threat. The key is always to hold on to the infrastructure, no matter how radical the opposition. It’s always about redefining the role of government, which means they want to take more money from the poor to give more tax breaks to people who don’t need it, and to the military. It’s an unbelievable time. I just keep saying we have to focus; we have to fight and be strategic. We’ve been here before. I just don’t want my grandchildren fighting the same battles again.

Today it’s going to have to be women and grandmothers and young people in the front lines of resistance. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’re not going to go backward. You just have to go to the mat. You cannot lose the food safety net. There are twenty-five big issues, and we’ll just have to figure out from our point of view. How far are we prepared to go? Which three things for children do we have to hold on to at any cost? We can’t have hungry children again.

The point is, women’s voices matter, children’s voices matter. We need to create a new kind of theater. They cannot have this country, and they cannot have our children’s future. It’s a difficult period, but I hope women will step up to the plate. We’ve been in very difficult periods before.

I’ll never forget the first time they brought police dogs and tried them out on SNCC kids. There were no lawyers, they were all in Jackson; and I tried to get down to the courthouse. I thought they were going to kill me, but there was a New York Times reporter there, and I thought, “He will tell the world what happens here.” The media changes have made it much more complicated to develop issues to build a movement; there’s so much stuff in the air. Movements don’t happen overnight, they don’t happen by sitting down, and it’s not going to happen from the top. You really have to eat and sleep and cry with people; you have to get back to that basic stuff. Things are very scary right now, but they can’t have this country.