Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors - Hardcover

Edelman, Marian Wright

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807072141 ISBN 13: 9780807072141

Publisher: Beacon Press, 1999

Synopsis

I am grateful beyond words for the example of the lanterns shared in this memoir whose lives I hope will illuminate my children's, your children's, and the paths of countless others coming behind.--Marian Wright Edelman, from the Preface

Marian Wright Edelman, "the most influential children's advocate in the country" (The Washington Post), shares stories from her life at the center of this century's most dramatic civil rights struggles. She pays tribute to the extraordinary personal mentors who helped light her way: Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, William Sloane Coffin, Ella Baker, Mae Bertha Carter, and many others.

She celebrates the lives of the great Black women of Bennettsville, South Carolina-Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate-who along with her parents formed a formidable and loving network of community support for the young Marian Wright as a Black girl growing up in the segregated South. We follow the author to Spelman College in the late 1950s, when the school was a hotbed of civil rights activism, and where, through excerpts from her honest and passionate college journal, we witness a national leader in the making and meet the people who inspired and empowered her, including Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Zinn, and Charles E. Merrill, Jr.

Lanterns takes us to Mississippi in the 1960s, where Edelman was the first and only Black woman lawyer. Her account of those years is a riveting first-hand addition to the literature of civil rights: "The only person I recognized in the menacing crowd as I walked towards the front courthouse steps was [a] veteran New York Times reporter. He neither acknowledged me nor met my eyes. I knew then what it was like to be a poor Black person in Mississippi: alone." And we follow Edelman as she leads Bobby Kennedy on his fateful trip to see Mississippi poverty and hunger for himself, a powerful personal experience for the young RFK that helped awaken a nation's conscience to child hunger and poverty.

Lanterns is illustrated with thirty of the author's personal photographs and includes "A Parent's Pledge" and "Twenty-five More Lessons for Life," an inspiration to all of us-parents, grandparents, teachers, religious and civic leaders-to guide, protect, and love our children every day so that they will become, in Marian Wright Edelman's moving vision, the healing agents for national transformation.

About this title

About the Author:

Marian Wright Edelman, civil rights activist, lawyer and author, is the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund which has sought to bring the plight of children to the attention of policy mkers and the public, and has been a vigorous advocate for the creation and funding of programs to improve children’s lives for over twenty years.

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: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0807072141
• ISBN 13: 9780807072141
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208