A Child Watch Coda

By Marian Wright Edelman

JA Guest Writer

Publisher’s Note: In 1964, Marian Wright Edelman became the first African American female admitted to the Mississippi Bar. While in Mississippi, she worked with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Jackson, MS. In 1973, she established the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), based in Washington, DC. Through its research on and advocacy for children, millions of children have received health care, nutrition, and education. In December 2018, Mrs. Edelman assumed the position of President Emerita in the Office of the Founder. We join CDF in sincerely thanking Mrs. Edelman for her decades of service helping to make this world a better place for all. Her previous columns will remain available on CDF’s website (https://www.childrensdefense.org/news/child-watch- column/).

The original Children’s Defense Fund logo came from a drawing I saw in a gallery window during a walk through Cambridge, Massachusetts, where CDF had its beginning. The artwork was by five-year-old Maria Coté, and shows a bright sun shining on a tiny boat adrift on a very wide sea. Above the boat in Maria’s handwriting is the ancient fisherman’s prayer: “Dear Lord, be good to me. The sea is so wide and my boat is so small.”

In 1974, when CDF completed its first report, I asked permission from Maria’s mother to use the drawing on the cover. A few years later, after someone suggested CDF ought to have a logo, I looked at Maria’s drawing hanging above my desk, and realized it reflected the Children’s Defense Fund mission more truthfully than any abstract piece prepared by the graphic arts firm we’d consulted ever could. Maria’s mother agreed to our trademarking her daughter’s piece.

After 40 years, today’s column will be the last in the weekly Child Watch® series. Today is not yet the conclusion to the reasons this column began, nor to the need to stay vigilant. The call still remains for faithful readers who are willing to stand for children every single day; ready to do their part to ensure every child a healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start, and a moral start in life; and determined to build the bigger boat with stronger oars that will finally leave no child behind.

I share one more time the following grateful prayer for every servant-leader carrying on this good work.

Lord I cannot preach like Martin Luther King Jr. or turn a poetic phrase like Maya Angelou and Robert Frost but I care and am willing to serve. 

I do not have Harriet Tubman’s courage, or Eleanor Roosevelt’s and Wilma Mankiller’s political skills but I care and am willing to serve. 

I cannot sing like Marian Anderson or Fannie Lou Hamer or organize like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin but I care and am willing to serve. 

I am not holy like Archbishop Tutu, forgiving like Nelson Mandela, or disciplined like Mahatma Gandhi but I care and am willing to serve. 

I am not brilliant like Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or as eloquent as Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington but I care and am willing to serve. 

I have not Mother Teresa’s saintliness, The Dalai Lama’s or Dorothy Day’s love, or Cesar Chavez’s gentle tough spirit but I care and am willing to serve. 

God it is not as easy as in the 60’s to frame an issue and forge a solution but I care and am willing to serve. 

My mind and body are not so swift as in youth and my energy comes in spurts but I care and am willing to serve.

I’m so young nobody will listen, I feel invisible and hopeless and I’m not sure what to say or do but I care and am willing to serve. 

I can’t see or hear well or speak good English, I stutter sometimes, am afraid of criticism, and get real scared standing up before others but I care and am willing to serve.

God, use me as You will today and tomorrow to help build a nation and world where every child is valued and protected, where everyone feels welcome and justly treated and no child is left behind.