Service: The Rent We Pay for Living

Marian Wright Edelman’s Commencement Speech

President Daniel J. Martin:

Marian Wright Edelman is a lawyer and social activist whose name is synonymous with child advocacy. No one in the nation is more celebrated for being a champion for children as she has endeavored to give all children the public voice they lack, yet so desperately need. Dr. Edelman, a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School, began her career in the mid-’60s as the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar. She directed the NAACP legal defense and educational fund in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1968 she moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel for the Poor People’s Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began organizing before his death. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm, and for two years she served as the director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University. In 1973, she founded the Children’s Defense Fund, an organization that has become the nation’s strongest voice for children and families.

Since then, she and the organization have been at the forefront of overhauling public policy and child poverty, early childhood development, education, and health. They’ve pushed to protect poor and minority children and those with special needs. The Children’s Defense Fund’s Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure that every child has a healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start, and a moral start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. Dr. Edelman has received over 100 honorary degrees and many awards, including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Hines Award, and the McArthur Foundation Genius Award. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. She also received the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings, including the autobiographical New York Times best-seller, The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours.

I read an article recently that noted Dr. Edelman had gained a reputation for being inflexible. It is a characterization she admits is well-deserved. She explained in the article, “I am totally intolerant and inflexible about children going hungry in the richest nation on earth.” She said, “I am inflexible about children being homeless, about children being in schools that don’t teach them how to learn. If that is inflexible, yeah, I’m inflexible.” Dr. Edelman, in a day where great flexibility has led to a deterioration in the moral fabric of our nation, a flexibility that is unfortunately often accompanied by cacophony and dissonance, flexibility that has fostered silos while simultaneously contributing to the noise in our world that drowns out our ability to hear, flexibility that fogs our ability to see suffering and injustice, flexibility that desensitizes our ability to feel and touch those when they need it most. In many ways, our world has become a flexibility of the gray. It is my prayer that we will all follow your path of inflexibility. I pray that God will give us a heart of inflexibility when we see injustice in our world, inflexibility when wrongs are not made right, a heart of inflexibility when we see a neighbor who is hungry, thirsty, needing clothes, or sick, in prison. May our lives, our words, our actions assume a position of inflexibility, one where we are compelled by love, compassion, grace, and mercy. Won’t you please join me in welcoming our commencement speaker, the intelligent, interesting, incomparable, the seemingly inexhaustible and indisputable, and inflexible champion of children, Marian Wright Edelman.

Marian Wright Edelman:

Thank you. I’m really so happy to be here and I thank you for that wonderful introduction. It’s a great honor to share this day of accomplishment and celebration and transition with your trustees and your president, with your administration, faculty, families, and most importantly and without doubt, the best graduating class in the history of Seattle Pacific University.

Let me just begin by saying that I am so much in our — so many people in our nation have been moved deeply by and inspired by your extraordinary mission, sense of mission, and your faith and action at a time of great trial. You have taught us how important it is to be very clear about your faith and about your courage and about who you are as a college community. I am so grateful and was very moved by Mr. Meis and his courage and his action when he stopped a 26-year-old mentally ill man who had no business with a gun. But thank God he was stopped by a courageous student building monitor, yielding pepper spray, and with others who came in and did what needed to be done. It’s moved the whole nation to see how we can deal with these and some of the words from your community have been an inspiration and I hope that the whole nation is listening.

But I want to just quote Mr. Meis for a moment. He said, “When I came face-to-face with the attacker, God gave me the eyes to see that he was not a faceless monster, but a very sad and troubled young man. And while I cannot at this time find it within me to forgive his crime, I only desire that he will find the grace of God and the forgiveness of our community.” It is the sense of forgiveness, it’s the sense of seeing the face of God in someone who has hurt you deeply. It has been the spirit of prayer that has come from other words of your students and the struggle never to be despairing, but to think through how you can respond in a manner in which Christ would respond that I want to just thank you from the bottom of my heart. You’ve taught us a lesson about the inflexibility of trying to be nonviolent and to live like Christ.

I hope many of you — and I am encouraged to know that many of you, having come to this campus and gotten to know you better in the last day — I hope many of you are going to wander off the beaten career path and help redefine success in 21st century America; asking not how much can I get but how much can I do without and share; asking not how can I find myself but asking how can I use myself and lose myself in service to others, and in pursuing justice to build a more just world and nation. When I was growing up, service was an as essential part of my upbringing as eating and sleeping and going to school and to church. Caring black adults were buffers against the external segregated vision of the prison of the outside world that told me as a black girl that I wasn’t important, but I didn’t believe it because my parents and community elders and teachers and preachers said it wasn’t so.

So the childhood message I internalized was that as God’s child, no man or woman could look down on me and I could look down on no man or woman. I couldn’t play in segregated public playgrounds or sit at a drugstore lunch counter, so my daddy, a Baptist minister, and my mother built a playground and canteen behind our church. Whenever they saw a need they tried to respond. There were no black homes for the aged back then and so my parents began one across the street and our whole family had to help out. We children sure didn’t like it at the moment, but that’s how I learned that it was my responsibility to take care of elderly, needy family members and neighbors, and that everyone was my neighbor. My church and community members were watchful, extended parents who reported on me when I did wrong and applauded when I did well, and they were very clear about what doing well meant. It meant being helpful to others, achieving in school and reading. It meant making sure that we were busy in helping others and knowing right from wrong, and the only time my daddy — we all figured out very early on as young children that the only time daddy — wouldn’t give us a job or chore was when we were reading, so we all read a lot.

Children were taught by example that nothing was too lowly to do and that the work of our heads and of our hands were both valuable. My church and my family and community elders made children feel useful and important, and while life was often hard and resources scarce, we always knew who we were, and that the measure of our success and worth was inside our heads and hearts, and not outside in personal possessions or ambition. I was taught that we, the world, had a lot of problems, but that I could struggle and change them; that intellectual and material gifts brought the privilege and responsibility of sharing with those less fortunate; and that service is the rent that each of us pays for living, the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time or after you’ve reached your personal goals. I’m grateful for these childhood legacies of a living faith reflected in daily service, a commitment to building a more just and safe world for every child and human being, the discipline of hard work and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.

Giving up was not a part of my childhood lexicon. You got up every morning and you did what you had to do, and you got up every time you fell down and tried as many times as you had to until it was done right. My elders had grit. They valued family life and family rituals, tried to live the Christian Gospel they preached, as you have tried to do here at Seattle Pacific. They tried to be and to expose us to good role models, and role models were of two kinds, those who had achieved in the outside world, but also those who didn’t have much formal education or money, but who taught us by the special grace of their lives Christ’s and Tolstoy’s and Gandhi’s message that the Kingdom of God is within; every day I still try to be half as good as those ordinary people of grace who shared whatever they had with others and tried to live their faith everyday. I was 14 the night daddy died. He had holes in his shoes, but he had two children who had graduated from college, one child in college, another in Divinity school, and a vision that he was able to convey to me, dying in an ambulance; that I, a young black girl, could be and do anything, that race and gender are shadows, and that character, self-discipline, determination, attitude, service, and commitment to building a better world and struggling are the substance of life.

And I want to convey that same vision to you, but I’m sure that’s the vision you’ve gotten here in your four years at this wonderful college, as you graduate into an ethically polluted nation where instant sex without responsibility, instant gratification without effort, instant solutions without sacrifice, getting rather than giving, and hoarding rather than sharing is the norm of our culture too often. We see too much talk about vengeance rather than forgiveness, about violence rather than nonviolence, which are the two frequent signals of our mass median popular culture, economic and political life, and I just would repeat that your example this past week has sent a powerful moral lesson. The standard for success for too many Americans has become personal greed rather than common good. The standard for striving and achievement has become getting by, rather than making an extra effort or helping others. Truth telling and moral example have become devalued commodities and nowhere is the paralysis of public and private conscience more evident than in the neglect and abandonment of millions of children whose futures will determine this nation’s ability to compete and lead in the new era. The greatest threat to America’s present and future economic military and national security does not come from any enemy without. It comes from our failure to invest in and protect all of our children and to create a fair and safe playing field for every child.

How can we think about a strong America … think about what America is going to be like at a time when 60 percent of all of our children in all racial and income groups cannot read or compute at grade level, and 80 percent of our black children and 75 percent of our Latino children — who will be a majority of all of our children in five years — cannot read or compute at grade level in fourth or eighth grade, and most of them, or a high percentage of them, are going to drop out of school before they graduate. What is a child going to do in this globalizing economy if they cannot read or compute at the most basic levels? How can we not see the dangers of what I call, or the Children’s Defense Fund calls, the cradle-to-prison pipeline that ascending one in three black boys who is 13 years old today and one in six Latino boys to prison in their lifetime unless we break it up and replace it with a pipeline to college. It’s becoming the new American apartheid that’s called mass incarceration, and our states are spending on average two and a half times more per prisoner than per public school pupil. I can’t think of a dumber investment policy than that.

And what does it say about us that we have 13-and-a-half-million children living in poverty in the world’s biggest, richest economy, half of them living in extreme poverty and the younger they are, the poorer they are, during those years of greatest brain development. Who’s going to be ready for school and who’s going to be helping us lead this nation in the new era, and what must God think that we stand by and let a child be killed or injured by guns every half-hour. Why are children in America 17 times more likely to die from gun violence than children in 25 other high-income countries? We have got to stop the killing of children and of all of us and to make this a safe place for everybody to grow up.

I believe we have lost our sense of what’s important as a people. So many young people of all races and classes are growing up unable to handle life in hard places without hope, without steady compasses to navigate the world that is reinventing itself at an unpredictable pace, both technologically and politically. My generation learned that to accomplish anything we had to get off the dime. Your generation must learn to get off the paradigm over and over and to be very flexible, quick, and smart about it. But I do hope that you will remember some of the core values that you’ve learned in this college and some of the things that are very clear in the Gospel and the prophets and all great faiths. Despite all the dazzling changes in this digital age, I believe there are some enduring values that we must hold onto, and since I think it is the responsibility of every adult to share what we think is important and to make sure that you learn from our mistakes and from our experience, I want to just make sure that you know some of the lessons of life I found useful. I conveyed them in a letter to my own three wonderful sons and you can take them or leave them like they did, however you will, but I wanted to share a few with you today.

First one is there’s no free lunch in life. Don’t feel entitled to anything you don’t sweat and struggle for, and help our nation understand it’s not entitled to world leadership based on the past or on what we say rather than how well we perform and meet changing world needs. For those of you in this graduating class who are African-American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American, make sure that you remember that you can never take anything for granted in America even with a college degree, and you better not start now as racial intolerance resurges over our land. It may be wrapped up in new euphemisms and in better etiquette, but as Frederick Douglass warned us earlier, it’s the same old snake. We’ve got to root it out and be very mindful of it. If there are any graduates who feel entitled to leadership by accident of birth, let me remind you that the world you live in is already two-thirds, non-white and poor, and that our nation is becoming a mosaic of greater diversity you’re going to have to understand, respect, work and live with. The majority of all children in America will soon be non-white in about five years. The majority of our under-twos — we may not like these children whom we think are different, though they’re all God’s children — God did not make two classes of children, and we’d better stop trying to do that in the United States of America.

We need to live our creed and really make America, America. The dream was right, but we have struggled not with total success despite the enormous progress of the last decades to make it a reality for everyone. I hope all of you will struggle to achieve and not think for a moment that you’ve got it made. Your degree may get you in the door, but it won’t get you to the top of the career ladder or keep you there. You’ve got to work your way up hard and continuously, and while I know I don’t have to tell you this, I will just remind you don’t ever be lazy. Do your homework. Pay attention to detail. Take care and pride in your work. Proof everything, maybe twice. Take the initiative in creating your own opportunity and don’t wait around for other people to discover you or to do you a favor. Don’t assume a door is closed. Push on it. Don’t assume if it was closed yesterday that it’s going to be closed today, and don’t ever stop learning and improving your mind, because if you do, you and America are going to be left behind.

I want you to listen to lesson two, which is to set thoughtful goals and to work quietly and prayerfully and systematically towards them. Don’t feel you have to talk if you don’t have something that matters to say. Resist quick-fix simplistic answers and easy gains. They often disappear as quickly as they come. So many of us talk big and act small, so often we get bogged down in our ego needs and lose sight of deeper needs. It’s all right to want to feel important if it’s not at the expense of doing important deeds, even if you don’t get the credit. You can get a lot done and achieved in life if you don’t mind doing the work and letting other people get the credit. You know what you do, God knows what you do, and that’s all that should matter.

Lesson three, assign yourself. Daddy used to ask us whether the teacher gave us any homework, and if we said no he’d say, well, assign yourself some. Don’t wait around for your boss or your friends or your spouse to direct you to do what you’re able to figure out and do for yourself, and don’t do just as little as you can to get by. Don’t be a political bystander and grumbler. Get out and vote. Democracy is not a spectator sport and just make sure that you hold our leaders accountable for what they do and not for what they say. Bottom line is that hard work, initiative, and persistence are still the non-magic carpets to success for most of us.
   
The fourth lesson is never work just for money. Money won’t save your soul by itself or build a decent family or help you sleep at night. We are the richest nation on earth with one of the highest incarceration, drug addiction, and child poverty rates in the world. Don’t confuse wealth or fame with character and don’t tolerate or condone moral corruption, whether it’s bound in the high or lowest places, whatever its color or class. It is not okay to push or use drugs, even if every person in America is doing it. It is not okay to lie or to cheat. Be honest and demand that those who represent you be honest. And don’t confuse morality with legality. Dr. King once noted that everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal. Don’t give anyone else the proxy for your conscience. God is not going to hold you accountable for what somebody does. He’s going to hold you accountable and she’s going to hold us all accountable what each of us does.

Fifth lesson, don’t be afraid of taking risks or being criticized. If you don’t want to be criticized, don’t do anything, don’t say anything, and don’t be anything. Don’t be afraid of failing, it’s the way you learn to do things right. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, what matters is how many times you keep getting up. And you don’t wait for everybody to come along or to get something done. It’s always a few people who get things done and keep things going, and this country and this world needs more wise and courageous shepherds and fewer sheep who borrow from integrity to fund expediency.

Sixth lesson, please take parenting and family life seriously, and insist that those you work for and who represent you do so. Our nation mouths family values we do not practice. Over half of the mothers of infant are in the labor force and our leaders have not yet established a safe, quality, affordable early care system and pre-kindergarten system and universal kindergarten system so that every child can have a good chance of getting ready for school. This is our top priority of the Children’s Defense Fund and I really sit there in Washington and I hear everybody say you really cannot afford to talk about funding as the president has proposed a $90 billion, 10-year program from home visiting through universal pre-K — we don’t have the money. And these same people who say we can’t afford it, a couple of months ago — a couple of weeks ago — in the House Ways and Means Committee, somehow found $300 billion dollars that they could extend and tax-extend us for the top 1 percent without an offset. We are all so concerned about the budget deficit and at the same time they did this they actually voted not to fund — because we couldn’t afford a $12 million dollar program — to give foster children identification cards so that they could get things like driver’s licenses. Something is wrong with this and we must stop this obscenity of the more and more that’s going to the top 1 percent while we have all of these poor children in America. It’s not right. I hope your generation will also raise your sons to be fair to other people’s daughters and to share and not just help with parenting responsibilities. I hope you’ll stress family rituals and be moral examples for your children. If you cut corners, they will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all of your money on yourself and tithe no portion of it for your college or church or civic causes or for the poor, they won’t either. And if you tell, acquiesce, or snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison that my generation still has not had the courage to snuff out.

Seventh lesson, please remember, and help America remember, that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race, and class, and gender in a democratic society. Please be decent and fair, and insist that others be so in your presence. Don’t tell, laugh at, or tolerate racial, ethnic, religious, or gender jokes or any practices intended to demean rather than enhance another human being who has the same Creator. Walk away from them. Stare them down. Make them unacceptable in your presence. Through daily moral consciousness, counter the proliferating voices of racial and ethnic and religious intolerance that threaten to gain respectability over our land again.

Lesson eight, don’t confuse style for substance, political charm with decency or sound policy. It’s wonderful to go to the White House or to the State House or into Congress for a chat, but words alone will not meet children’s or the nation’s needs. Don’t confuse access with outcome. Political and moral leadership and different budget priorities is what matters, and you need to be a strong voice for them, and for fairness.

Ninth lesson — and I’m almost done — listen for the genuine within yourself. “Small,” Einstein said, “is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.” Try to be one of them.  “There is,” Howard Thurman, the great black theologian said, “something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in ourselves and it is the only true god you’ll ever have and if you cannot hear it you will spend all of your life and days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.” There are so many noises and competing demands in our lives that many of us never find out who we are. Learn to be quiet enough and prayerful enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people.

Last lesson — never think that life is not worth living or that you cannot make a difference. Never, never give up. I don’t care how hard it gets, and it will get very hard sometimes. There’s an old proverb that says that when you get to your wits end, that’s where God lives. Harriet Beecher Stowe said that when you get into a tight place and everything goes against you and it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and the time that the tide will turn. Always hang in with life and hang in with God; you are never alone. The night that my daddy died he made so clear that do not be afraid, you are not alone, and he quoted the 139th Psalm: there’s no where you can go that God is not, and so just remember you are never, ever alone.

And finally, don’t think you have to win immediately when you get discouraged about how hard things are, or even at all to make a difference. Sometimes it’s very important to lose for things that matter. And don’t think you have to be a big dog to make a big difference. I have a wonderful role model and I wear her pendant around my neck every day to remind me of her. Her name is Sojourner Truth and she, like Harriet Tubman, was an illiterate slave woman, but they hated slavery and they never lost an opportunity to speak out and they never waited for anybody to free them. They both spoke up for their own freedom and who they were as God’s children. And one day Sojourner was speaking out against slavery and she got heckled by an old white man in the audience who said he didn’t care any more about her anti-slavery talk than for an old flea bite. She snapped back at him and said, “That’s all right, but the Lord willing I’m going to keep you scratching.”

We all want, always, to make a big difference and we need to have big and transforming changes in a nation that lets its children be the poorest American be killed by guns or injured by guns every half hour. But we should remember that enough strategic fleas biting constantly, if they knock some of us off and others of us keep coming in, we can make the biggest dog uncomfortable. And we, if we decide that we’re going to be fleas for justice, for children, I’ll tell you we can get an early childhood system in place. You have to be a flea. Don’t let your congressperson come back, anybody come back, and say they haven’t voted or they’re not in favor of making sure that every child gets a quality education and gets ready for school. We have got, in this 21st century, to transform our nation and to make it un-American for any child to be poor. I don’t begrudge anybody their first billion or their second billion, maybe more, unless as long as we have no hungry children, no homeless children, no uneducated children, no unsafe children. We’ve got to learn how to share. And we as fleas who make our own minds up that we’re going to change the priorities of this nation, we can build that movement and I urge you to join us because everything that matters in America depends on it. I’m going to give Shel Silverstein, the children’s book writer, my last word.  He said, “Listen to the mustn’ts child, listen to the don’ts, listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, and listen close to me. Anything can happen, child, anything can be.” If you dream it, if you believe it, if you have faith in it, if you have faith in God, if you struggle, and if you never give up. I wish you Godspeed as you go out to transform the world. Thank you.