Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors - Softcover

Edelman, Marian Wright

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060958596 ISBN 13: 9780060958596

Publisher: Perennial, 2000

Synopsis

Throughout her life and work, Marian Wright Edelman has been at the heart of this cantury's most dramatic civil rights and child advocacy struggles. In this stirring, heartfelt memoir she pays tribute to the extrordinary mentors who helped light her way including Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, and William Slaone Coffin. She celebrates the lives of her parents and the great Black Women of Bennetsville, South Carolina- Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate-who gave her love and guidance in her youth, as well as the many teachers and figures who inspired her education at Spelman College and empowered her early as an activist in the 1960's.

Illustrated with many of the author's personal photographs, Lanterns also includes a "Parents' Pledge" and "Twenty-Five More Lessons for Life" to guide, protect, and love our children every day so that they will become, in Edelman's moving vision, the healing agents for national transformation.

About this title

About the Author:

Marian Wright Edelman is the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours, and eight other books. She is the winner of many awards for her work, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, a Heinz Award, and a Niebuhr Award. In 2000, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings. Edelman is a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School. She and her husband live in Washington, D.C., and have three children and four grandchildren.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A book that tells the story of a single life and a larger movement through tributes to the people whose faith, courage, imagination, and idealism made progress possible. Beginning with her girlhood in segregated South Carolina, Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, chronicles how ``natural daily mentors'' taught her not ``how to make a living . . . but how to make a life.'' Starting with her first mentors, her father, a Baptist pastor, and mother, who raised nearly a dozen foster children after his death, she recalls a tight-knit community and a circle of women who treated her as if she were their own, offering ``buffers of love and encouragement!' against a hostile world. When Edelman moved on to Spelman, the black women's college, she encountered new mentors, such as Dr. Benjamin Mays, the president of neighboring Morehouse College, and met for the first time several white men who went out of their way to help. Howard Zinn, then a Spelman history professor, participated in student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, and Charles Merrill Jr., scion of the Merrill Lynch fortune, not only provided financial backing, but also became Edelman's close adviser. Upon her graduation from Yale Law School in the early 60s, the author's work as a civil-rights attorney in Mississippi brought her into contact with such notable figures as Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, whose legislative assistant, Peter Edelman, she later married. But her recollections of lesser-known, yet vitally important figures such as Mae Bertha Carter, whose children were the first to integrate the public schools in a small Mississippi town, and Robert Moses, who masterminded Mississippi's Freedom Summer, are at the heart of this book. Edelman ends with a series of challenges intended to inspire the next generation of mentors. By reminding us of those who had the courage to remake the not-too-distant past, Lanterns seeks to shed some light on the future. (30 b&w photos; not seen) (First printing of 150,000, author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Perennial
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0060958596
• ISBN 13: 9780060958596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208