For Marian Wright Edelman, the youngest daughter of a Baptist preacher, from adversity springs strength. From defeat comes inspiration. If her courage ever fails her, she is not about to say so. Life as she lives it day by day is a series of battles fought along starkly moral lines. That is why Edelman--who helped register black voters in the segregated South, who stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and who gave Robert Kennedy a personal tour to see the malnourished children in the Mississippi Delta--is manning the barricades once more.
As the president of the Children's Defense Fund, she has for nearly 25 years been the single loudest voice on behalf of those too young to speak for themselves. But to hear her tell it, the test of her mettle is now. "I knew it would take 20 years, 25 years to seed a movement," she says. "You just have to keep planting and watering and fertilizing. And then, when it is time, you do what you have to do. But you have to stand up--win, lose or draw. And it's time."
Edelman has summoned Americans to a rally at the Lincoln Memorial this Saturday to Stand for Children. Like the Million Man March, the event is less about defining an agenda than it is about evoking a spirit--and filling what organizers see as a terrifying vacuum of leadership and resolve at a time when every premise about what this country owes its children is being challenged. "Children are never going to get what they need until there is a fundamental change in the ethos that says it is not acceptable to cut children first," says Edelman of the current budget battles in Washington. She hopes to use this period of fiscal conflict to mobilize the troops. "God really did put rainbows in the clouds," she says. "Without Newt Gingrich and the incredible threat to everything, we would never have been able to bring folks together in this way. So, in many ways this is the thing that will launch the children's movement."
Unlike the civil rights movement, however--or for that matter the seat-belt, drunk-driving and environmental movements, all of which have changed the way Americans live--the children's movement is more like a series of spasms than a focused, well-coordinated effort. True, when a Polly Klaas or Megan Kanka is abducted and murdered, or when Elisa Izquierdo falls through the gaping holes in New York City's social-services system, outraged parents and community leaders can rear up, roar and carry the day for "three strikes" or Megan's Law. And in the endless wrangle over welfare reform, which hit the headlines again last week, children have proved to be a deal breaker. "I can win any argument by saying we need reform of welfare, but not at the cost of kids," says Senator Edward Kennedy, who derailed Bob Dole's welfare proposal by branding it the "home alone" bill because there was no money specifically targeted for child care.