Latest Marian Wright Edelman Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do. The world wasn't so wonderful back then, with segregated rule in the South. But we were never hopeless and we never despaired because we had adults out there struggling with us, being there for us, and buffering us.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Religious, Struggle, Helping Others

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• You can't tell parents to teach children the value of work when we don't have jobs and the jobs we have don't pay a decent wage. You can't tell children to achieve and then let them go to broken-down schools with teachers who don't care. We need a consistency of values in our public, corporate, and private lives.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Teacher, Children, School

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents. We've got to send messages to our kids about what is important.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Children, Party, School

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• I try to be a person of faith.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Trying, Persons

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• Every day I wear my Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth medallions around my neck. When I think I'm having a bad day, I try to think about their day, and I get up.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Bad Day, Thinking, Trying

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Children, Giving Up, Sacrifice

  Interview with Jurnee Smollett-Bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• We all need to get out of our safety zones too. In addition to voting, we need to embarrass people who don't do the right thing. It's going to take citizen action.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Safety Zone, People, Voting

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• People who don't vote have no call on political leaders!

  Marian Wright Edelman

  People, Leader, Political

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• I'd like to transform the system in very fundamental ways, but you've got to do that in every way that you can. You can't wait for some magic bullet or some magic politician or some magic anything to have that happen. You got to get out there and use your vote.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Waiting, Magic, Use

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• None of the candidates are ever perfect, ok? Then you have to get them in there and you have to hold them accountable. You have to make noises.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Perfect, Noise, Candidates

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• We're a violent nation, and we need to confront it. This gun plague has to stop.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Gun, Needs, Violent

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• The literacy level at Mississippi prisons? Fifth grade. Can't read, what are you going to do? If you've got a conviction rap, what are you going to do? It's a real crisis.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Real, Rap, Levels

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Children, Thinking, Gun

  Interview with Jurnee Smollett-Bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• We're spending, on average, three times more for prison than for public-school pupils. That's the dumbest investment policy. It doesn't make us safer.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  School, Average, Three

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Law, People, Drug

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• As [Martin Luther] King said, it never cost anybody a dime to integrate the lunch counters. When you start talking about trying to deal with jobs and hunger and things that require investment, then that's really the tough stuff, because everybody wants to do right if it doesn't cost them anything.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Kings, Jobs, Talking

• When I started out as an activist, the issues were much clearer. There's advantage to the new media, but on the other hand, you miss the ability to frame an issue that you had when there were just three TV networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. So the whole world could see the same police dogs. The same Bull Connor and his white tank. Now you've got narrow-casting. The media is all fragmented. It's so hard to get people to focus in a sustained way.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Dog, White, Issues

  Interview with Jurnee Smollett-Bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• That's not to say that some of the new media is not advantageous. You can reach lots of folks with what Black Lives Matter is doing, mobilizing people. God bless them.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Media, People, Black

  Interview with Jurnee Smollett-Bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• Our government has to be held accountable for enforcing the law. Tamir Rice, the fact that they could exonerate that police person [who killed him], and Tamir's family was charged for the ambulance to take him [to the hospital]. It's inhumane.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Government, Law, Police

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Men, Law, White

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• You have to have a fundamental change in the culture of policing, and who is the police person. How do they change? How do you learn from England and the other places, or Australia? In England, they don't carry guns on the whole. It's a different kind of mentality that does not demonize, and it's justified on race and income and class.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Gun, Race, Class

  Interview with Jurnee Smollett-Bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• The core of the culture is racism and how black men are viewed. They've always been demonized and seen as threats in our culture. Another holdover from slavery. We've got to deal with that core root of racism and demonization of the upbringing of black men. Black women are not exempt by any means.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Mean, Men, Roots

  "The Lenny Interview: Marian Wright Edelman". Interview with Jurnee Smollett-bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• There were these great women in Montgomery, [Rosa Louise] Parks was among them. Jo Ann Robinson [who organized the bus boycott] was among them. It's always these ordinary women and men of grace who have been waiting and seething and planning to change things that are unjust that bring movement.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Men, Waiting, Grace

• People want to pick the leader, and we are obsessed with celebrity and whoever is on the cover of this or that.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  People, Leader, Want

  Interview with Jurnee Smollett-Bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

• [Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark."She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes].

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Real, Hero, School