I do not think children can do no wrong. They will do wrong all the time if they are not lovingly cared for, taught right, and disciplined by caring and disciplined adults. I do not think that children’s rude or violent conduct should be ignored or condoned any more than I think the rude and violent adults they often are emulating in real life or on the movie, television, and video screens from whom they learn their values—or lack of them—should be ignored or condoned. I believe youth and adult violence and crime should be swiftly and fairly punished. I also believe as numerous police chiefs do that it is best to prevent crime before it becomes necessary to punish it.
Our children already have served as the transforming catalysts for America’s greatest moral movement of the twentieth century. Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire said at a CDF/BCCC forum on Race, Children, and Poverty at the Memphis Civil Rights Museum where Dr. King was slain thirty years ago: “There is no precedent that I know of in recorded history for the power balance of a great nation turning on the moral witness of schoolchildren. This [civil rights] movement was steeped in the blood and the witness of children up through Selma.” Taylor then said: “A movement that rode through in history on the spirit of children now looks to how we treat our children thirty years later. Now we have adults who, in effect, need to pay back children. I think the adult generation is going to be measured by how we treat it. If you look around, almost every single major American issue that needs to be addressed is around the way we treat our children. Whether it’s schools, whether it’s jails, whether it’s cities, whether it’s even the debt and the deficit, whether it’s health. What are we going to leave our children? It’s the major issue.”
Just as youth demonstrated for civil rights, young people demonstrated against the Vietnam War and helped bring it to an end.
Our children offer the best opportunity to save ourselves, our country, our world, and our souls. Although adults have primary responsibility for safeguarding the lives and hopes of children and youths, young people need to feel and be empowered to advocate for themselves and others with adults as I and so many of my generation were empowered by the mentors in this memoir. Caring committed adult leadership coupled with a healthy respect for and guidance of youthful energy, intelligence, and creativity can empower a young person to act forcefully and successfully on behalf of a principle, others, and themselves. Children learn so much from adults but also have so much to teach us.
CHILDREN HAVE TAUGHT ME TO CONFRONT UNVARNISHED TRUTH AND UNPLEASANT FACTS I’D OFTEN LIKE TO AVOID. The day after Dr. King was shot, I went out into the riot-torn Washington, D.C. streets and into schools in those neighborhoods scorched by flames to talk to children. I went to tell them not to loot and riot so that they would not get arrested and ruin their futures. A young Black boy about twelve or thirteen years old looked squarely at me and said, “Lady, what future? I ain’t got no future. I ain’t got nothing to lose.”
I’ve spent thirty years and will spend the rest of my life trying to prove him wrong. I had no idea how hard it would be. For this child saw and spoke the plain truth for himself and millions like him in our money rich, militarily powerful, but morally anemic, race-, gender-, and income-stratified society. I’m pleased that millions of Black and poor children have received a Head Start, child care, health care, immunizations, and a better education. But millions are still left behind. Despite great progress over the past thirty years, so much peril remains to snuff out the hopes and dreams and lives of millions of children like him. A Black child is still twice as likely as a White child to die in the first year of life, three times as likely to live in extreme poverty, and four times as likely to be a homicide victim as a teenager.
CHILDREN HAVE TAUGHT ME FORGIVENESS. How often I have hurt my children intentionally and unintentionally with harsh words, impatient actions, inattention in times of need, unfair judgments, too much emphasis on their mistakes rather than their achievements, and trying to make them live my dreams rather than helping them live and realize their own dreams. I’ve so appreciated them (often later) telling me when I am or was wrong but loving me still. So many children whose parents abuse and violate them in unspeakable ways still loyally cling to them, giving the parents the love they themselves seek so desperately from those who brought them into the world. Too often we adults cannot forgive ourselves or others or are debilitated by the corrosive weight of old grudges and prejudices.
CHILDREN HAVE TAUGHT ME RESILIENCY. What parent has not marveled at how quickly children can snap back from a high fever or illness and return to his or her active duty of play? I have watched with wonder and gratitude the silent and depressed children, alcohol or cocaine addicted at birth, rise from the dead to life through the love of adoptive and foster parents. As I have watched some of these children adopted by CDF staff and family members blossom, it increases my sense of the urgency of our child advocacy work to grab as much life and hope as possible from the ruins.
Every year the Children’s Defense Fund and local groups honor five youths in about a dozen cities who are “Beating the Odds.” They represent hundreds of thousands of similar youths whom we do not see and hear about but who are getting up every day and climbing over obstacles stacked against them by broken families, homelessness, violence, and drug-ridden homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Children like Marino Angulo, one of our first “Beat the Odds” youths, who kept his whole family together when his mother went to prison and his father, plagued by alcohol, abandoned the family for several years. He kept going to school and kept helping his younger sisters and brothers with their homework while doing his. He worked to help support them and with the help of a caring teacher managed to get into and finish college. Now a teacher himself after graduating from Whittier College, his example has inspired his younger brothers and sisters to try to emulate his success.
CHILDREN HAVE TAUGHT ME WONDER AND TO SEE THE WORLD AFRESH EACH DAY. I loved traveling with my sons (before adolescence!), when their first reaction to new places and people was look, look, oooh, or that’s neat, or that’s cool. Rachel Carson, author of the great book Silent Spring, said, “A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.”
CHILDREN TEACH US THAT LOVE MATTERS MOST. Anthony Williams was born at Los Angeles General Hospital to a teen mother who was unable to care for him. He was placed in foster care where he was left to lie in his crib for many lonely hours with no one talking, reading, or singing to him or turning him over in his crib. As a result, he later required corrective surgery on his ear and tongue from such long periods of lying on one side. Silent and thought to be retarded, he was on the verge of being placed in an institution.
Someone aware of Anthony’s condition urged the Williams family to consider adopting him before he was institutionalized. Mr. Williams felt his family’s resources were already stretched to the limit with two children and another on the way. Mrs. Williams disagreed and nagged her husband until he relented if she could find the money required by the adoption process. She had trained as an opera singer and got a bit part in “Carmen” to earn enough to adopt.
Anthony, a child who had never spoken until Mrs. Virginia Williams and her husband took him in and loved him back to life, found his voice, confidence, and abilities in the Williams family which eventually grew to eight children including two additional adopted children. After some rough patches, Anthony went on to graduate from Yale College, Harvard Law School, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is now Mayor of the District of Columbia. I believe there are thousands, even millions of children like little Anthony whose great potential is lost to America and the world by parental, community, and societal neglect.
CHILDREN TEACH US TO BE COURAGEOUS AND TO STAND UP AGAINST INJUSTICE. Dr. Robert Coles, in his
children’s book The Story of Ruby Bridges, describes Ruby’s loving forgiveness and courage when faced with the ugly screaming White crowds who jeered and taunted her as she attended alone, only six years old, a previously all-White school in New Orleans boycotted by Whites. Ruby astonished her teacher when she asked Ruby why she had paused and talked to the crowd of White adults one day. “I wasn’t talking,” said Ruby. “I was praying. I was praying for them.” Every morning Ruby said she stopped a few blocks away from school to say a prayer for the people who hated her. This morning she forgot until she was already in the middle of the angry mob. This is the prayer little Ruby told Robert Coles she repeated twice daily—before and after school:
Please, God, try to forgive those people.
Because even if they say those bad things,
They don’t know what they’re doing.
So you could forgive them.
Just like You did those folks a long time ago
When they said terrible things about you.
Taylor Branch in his books chronicling the Civil Rights Movement, and David Halberstam in The Children, recount the incredible courage and determination and grit of the children and youths who constituted many of the frontline soldiers in the often violent and always tough war to end discrimination in the American South. Their names were not just on the court papers filed by their brave parents in Brown v. Board of Education, Cooper v. Aaron, Carter v. Drew Municipal School District, and dozens of other school desegregation cases filed on their behalf by civil rights lawyers. Children like little Ruby were the shock troops who parted the waters of injustice Taylor Branch describes and weathered day after day the hateful isolation and ugly epithets encouraged or ignored by some White adults who taught their children to spurn and insult Black children. Children faced fierce police dogs and fire hoses and filled the jails in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama when so many adults hesitated out of fear for their jobs or personal safety. Children withstood arrests and rough treatment by policemen in Jackson, Mississippi and harsh treatment in southern jails where they were detained. High school and college youths sat down until lunch counters across the South were desegregated. Children suffered physical and emotional injuries when Whites shot indiscriminately through the windows of their homes or threatened them and their parents. Children were sometimes beaten by police for standing up for freedom. Four little girls had to die as a sacrifice in Birmingham before the nation assured Black citizens the right to vote that led to the election of many Black officials and more decent White elected officials from the South. Those officials—and all of us—owe children fair treatment, leadership, and protection today.
14
AMERICA AS MENTOR FOR ITS CHILDREN AND THE WORLD
Might it be that this land with all of its richness, with all of its opportunity for true greatness, its opportunity to present itself before the world as what a nation ought to be, might not be sowing the seeds of its very destruction in abandonment of its children?
Dr. Gardner Taylor, Pastor Emeritus,
Concord Baptist Church,
1996 sermon at Haley Farm
It is not the place we occupy which is important, but the direction in which we move.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
THE UNITED STATES is the sole superpower in the waning twentieth-century world. We stand first among industrialized countries in military technology, in military exports, in Gross Domestic Product, in the number of millionaires and billionaires, in health technology, and in defense expenditures. But we stand tenth in our children’s eighth-grade science scores, sixteenth in living standards among our poorest one-fifth of children, seventeenth in low-birthweight rates, eighteenth in infant mortality, twenty-first in eighth-grade math scores, and last in protecting our children against gun violence.
In the United States we are reaping what we have sown in child neglect. A child is born into poverty every forty seconds, is reported abused or neglected every eleven seconds, runs away from home every twenty-four seconds, drops out of school every nine seconds of the school day. A child bears a child every minute. Our seeds of cultural violence, militarism, and senseless trafficking in guns have produced an alarming crop of firearm deaths and violence that stalks our children at school, at home, and in their neighborhoods and leaves no American safe.
God has blessed America with enormous wealth and power but how wisely are we using them? President Clinton is proposing to invest $1.5 trillion over the next five years to protect our children against purported enemies lurking outside our borders and Congress will try to spend far more. Yet not a single American child has been killed by guns at the hands of a Russian, Chinese, North Korean, African, Syrian, or Cuban citizen outside our borders, while thousands die from the guns in their own homes, schools, and neighborhoods every year.
President Clinton has proposed to splurge another $10.5 billion over the next five years for the so-called “Star Wars” national defense system that has flunked every test after ten years and $40 billion of taxpayer investment. “Star Wars” is over and above the $36.6 billion in planned costs for an alphabet-soup bowlful of defense systems (Patriot PAC3, THAAD, MEADS, AEGIS, two different laser beam weapons). Our children don’t need protection in the stars; they need protection in their schools and communities from bullets and drugs and from the ignorance, sickness, poverty, hunger, and homelessness that are killing them more slowly but as surely. Political analyst William Greider estimated recently that it costs $2,000 an hour to operate an M-1 tank. That’s $48,000 a day. That money would serve about 5,800 more children in after-school programs or provide 2,900 more women and babies adequate nutrition through the effective WIC program. Which do you feel is a better investment for a more secure America?
Although the United States is getting richer its children are remaining poor. Between 1969 and 1997 the number of poor children grew by 46 percent (more than 4 million). Seventy percent of all poor American children live in a household where someone works. And more White children are poor than Black or Brown children. While our economy was changing, rising economic inequality drove up the percentage of workers below poverty level and the already meager safety net for children lost more ground in the 1980s. The elderly saw their poverty rate plunge in half. If the safety net was as effective at lifting low-income children as low-income elderly out of poverty, three out of four of today’s poor children would not be poor. If the safety net for American children was as effective as it is in Great Britain, three out of five of our poor children would not be poor.
Demographics show that by 2030 non-White children will constitute a majority of American children. Their fate will help shape America’s future as much as White children. Yet racism, hate crimes, police brutality, and backlash against equitable measures to help inner-city schools and minorities overcome past and present inequality are resurging across America. Painful past lessons about the high social and human costs of racial inequality are forgotten as some political leaders, more interested in sound bites than sound policy and in appealing to our worst rather than our better natures, lead us to oppose measures that work for children and that will benefit all Americans and ensure a productive future work force. The wonderful southern writer Lillian Smith believed that
Delinquency is tied up so closely with the hate talk and with racial arrogance and racial shame. If we could convince the people of Georgia that Talmadge is waging warfare against the emotional growth of children, we could get new allies on our side. Most white people do not think they and their children are harmed by racial discrimination. They think if they work for racial democracy, that they are working for Negroes. Our job is to convince them that they are working for themselves and their children’s future.
Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin told 1998 Harvard Business School graduates that a respected European magazine interviewer predicted that although the U.S. economy was currently very strong, in fifteen or twenty years it would be a second-tier economy for two reasons: our public schools
and our inner cities. Rubin told the graduates: “In many ways he was right. These are the challenges that we must meet if we are going to be productive and competitive in the global economy in the years and decades ahead.”
If I could be granted one wish and pass one universal law, I would dramatically decrease the arsenals of nuclear and conventional weapons of death in the world and invest the hundreds of billions of saved resources in tools of life for the hungry, homeless, sick, and uneducated children and people at home and around the globe. It would cost an estimated $62 billion to lift every American child out of poverty by providing jobs, child care, and supplementing below-poverty parental earnings. That is how much we spend every eighty-two days on the military and less than a third of the estimated increase in our Gross Domestic Product in 2000.
It would take between $7,000 and $10,000 a year to provide quality child care and a Head Start to help get every child ready for school. That’s what we spend an hour on long-range military flights to foreign countries and what we spend every two seconds on federal welfare for wealthy corporations.
What can each of us do to change our nation’s priorities and build decent and safe communities for every child?
FIRST: EVERY ADULT can take responsibility for protecting children and for discouraging violence and racial and any intolerance as family and national values. I believe strongly that all adults have a responsibility to do no harm and to protect children. I believe parents ought to teach children right from wrong, to keep them as physically, mentally, emotionally, and morally secure as possible, and to set limits (which every child and teen sees as his or her job to test). However, no parent raises a child alone. No parent can control the violence so embedded in our psyches and culture waiting to burst forth at any time from the ubiquitous rage lethalized by over 200 million guns in circulation all over America. No parent alone can protect children from polluted food, air, airwaves, water, and a depleted ozone layer. No parent alone can protect a child completely from the relentless and addictive materialistic messages of our consumer society or from the smut on the Internet, television, or movie screens.
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