Birthday of Marian Wright Edelman | Naming the Days

Each 9 seconds of a college day, an American highschool scholar drops out.
Each 47 seconds as we sit right here, an American little one is confirmed as abused or uncared for.
Each 32 seconds an American little one is born into poverty.
Each 70 seconds a child is born with out medical health insurance.
Each three hours and fifteen minutes an American little one or teen is killed by a firearm …

These sobering and scary statistics are quoted by Marian Wright Edelman, founder and head of the Youngsters’s Protection Fund as a voice for poor, minority, and disabled kids. In an inspiring graduation speech given in 2014 at Lewis & Clark Faculty, she challenges us to get up and witness that:

“The bombs poised to explode the American Dream emanate from no enemies with out. They’re ticking away inside ourselves, our households, our communities and our lack of group, and our ethical drift. America’s ethical and financial compass wants resetting.”

Right this moment Edelman crusades for youngsters with the identical hearth and gusto that she did on the damaging civil rights entrance strains in Mississippi a long time in the past. Each then and now, freedom was the purpose — freedom from poverty, abuse, starvation, homelessness, poor education, and lack of well being care.

Born on this present day in 1939, Edelman attended black Spelman Faculty in Atlanta and Yale Regulation College. She is a relentless advocate for youngsters and spends time lobbying Congress on behalf of the younger. If there’s one citation of hers that sums up her life and work it’s the following, from The Measure of Our Success: “Service is the hire we pay for being. It’s the very goal of life and never one thing you do in your spare time.”

To Identify This Day:

Quotes

Let one in every of these quotes be your inspiration for serving others as we speak:

“Be a very good ancestor. Stand for one thing greater than your self. Add worth to the Earth throughout your sojourn.”

” Be actual. Attempt to do what you say, say what you imply, and be what you appear.”

“Use your individual citizen energy, your voting energy, your particular person energy and converse as much as wrest our ships of state from that small group of specialists and highly effective and grasping company pirates who recklessly jeopardize all of our futures and professed values for private achieve and a greed.”

“The best risk to America’s nationwide and financial safety doesn’t come from any enemy with out however from our failure to spend money on and educate all of our youngsters.”

A Prayer to the God of Youngsters