will the candidate for honory degree of doctor of humanities please present herself presenting this award will be Pam Brooks Jan and Eric Nord Jaden Eric Nord associate professor of Africana [Applause] studies president klav members of The Faculty graduating students parents and family and distinguished guests is my special pleasure to introduce this country's foremost advocate for children author innovator leader in the creation of sound research-based public policy and the founding director of the children's defense fund Maran Wright Adelman in the spring of 1967 the Young attorney Marian Elizabeth Wright later Edelman accompanied Senator Robert F Kennedy
to the Mississippi Delta so that she could see there he could see there the faces of poverty close up seizing the opportune moment to act boldly on behalf of poor black people whose own persistent voices had too often fallen on deaf ears Adelman made an important political application of her parents personal ethos my belief she says in her wonderful book lanterns and homage to her invaluable mentors and the principles they practiced that I am that I and others can do more than complain ring hands or given in to despair at the wrongs rif in the
world stems from my parents examples through a seamlessly enacted personal witness and professional practice Adelman has worked tirelessly on behalf of poor po families and communities to do nothing less than eradicate child poverty now such a stance takes audacity and respect for struggle her Yale law degree notwithstanding and the difficult cases she defended during her stint in the so-called Mississippi gotdam of 1964 to 1968 no doubt provided the kind of training struggle demands the courage and Persistence of black mississippians who became her movement colleagues those such as Amy Moore Fanny L Hamer Medgar ever Vernon
damer Unita Blackwell and may Bera Carter and a legion of others she says who put a bigger cause ahead of self taught her what she actually needed to know with them she felt empowered to transcend the confines of a small segregated World in order to discover how freedom from the many forms of Social and economic violences could extend to everyone after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy in 1968 Adelman continued the work these two men had purposefully begun to take up in that same tumultous year she founded the Washington research
project of the Southern Center for Public Policy which became the precursor to the children's defense fund begun in 1973 the children's defense fund with adlman at the helm remains committed to ensuring that all children have safe and productive lives Adelman Pressly asked in 1999 quote what does National Security mean to millions of children who witness violence at home and in the streets every year and to the million children who themselves are abused and neglected unquote in 2015 in this historical moment of epidemic murder of black young men and women at the hands of the state's
shielded police forces her question remains particularly pressing Mr President it is my distinct honor to present misss Marian Wright Adelman for the degree of doctor of [Applause] humanities Maran You' got some fans [Applause] Marian Wright Edelman founder and president of the children's defense fund inspirational leader and advocate for the most vulnerable in our society in the name of over College I confer upon you the degree of doctor of humanities with all the rights Privileges and honors there unto appertaining you it is it is now my great honor to ask Marian Wright Edelman to deliver your
class 2015 commencement address thank you I am so honored to sh share this day of accomplishment celebration and transition at this great college with your trustees president and administration faculty families but most importantly with what I am sure is the best graduating class in the history of [Applause] Oberlin obin's great abolitionist history makes me wonder how much closer America's dream would be towards becoming America's reality today if your admissions policies for africanamerican Citizens and women had been adopted by other colleges and universities in their beginning years what a difference principal makes and I greatly appreciate
your stance hundreds of years ago we are living in a time of unbearable dissonance between good politics and good policy between racial Creed and racial deed between calls for community and rampant individualism and greed and between our capacity to prevent and alleviate poverty human deprivation and disease and our political and spiritual spiritual will to do so you and I living at an incredible moral moment and inflection point in history we have been allowed to experience both the beginning of a new century and Millennium how will we say thanks to God for the life and Earth
and Nations and children entrusted to our care what Legacies principles values and deeds will we stand for and send to the Future through our children to their children and to a spiritually confused vulcanized and violent World desperately hungering for moral leadership for peace for justice and for Community how will progress be measured in our time and over the next hundred or thousand years if humankind survives them by the killer power and number of weapons of Destruction we can produce and traffic at home and abroad or by our willingness to shrink indeed destroy the prison of
violence constructed in the name of peace and Security will we be remembered by how many material things we can manufacture advertise sell and consume or by our rediscovery of more lasting non material measures of success a new Dow Jones for the purpose and quality of life in our families neighborhoods cities Nations and World Community will we be remembered by how rapidly technology and corporate mergim Mania and greed can render human beings and human work obsolete or by our search for a better balance between corporate profits and corporate caring for children families and the environment will
we be remembered by how much a few at the top can get at the expense of the many at the bottom and in the middle or by our struggle for a concept of enough for all will we be remembered by the glitz style and venality or too much of our culture in our electronic global vision Village or by the substance of our efforts to rekindle an ethic of caring and sharing and Justice in a world driven far too much by money technology weaponry and quest for power and fame how is it right how can it
be right that the world's 80 wealthiest people has combined wealth equivalent to the poorest 50 nations in the world how can it be just in the United States where the richest 1% of Americans own more of the nation's wealth than the bottom 90% And when the highest paid American CEO took home in 2013 more than the combined annual salaries of 6600 child care workers how can it be right when those who Ed educate and care for our children who constitute 100% of our future are so devalued in our society if we measure it by our
chief values money and power when teachers are paid nearly 270 times less than a corporate CEO of one of the top 350 firms whose average compensation was $15 plus million compared to to an elementary teacher average yearly salary a little over $56,000 a high school teacher however intelligent skilled and hardworking earned less than a year a little more than 58,000 than the nearly 164,000 one basketball player earned in one day and all of our kindergarten teachers combined earn less Les in a year than 25 hedge fund managers what does that say about who we are
as Americans leoka Le coka former chairman and CEO of Chrysler Corporation said some time ago in a completely rational Society the best of of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less I believe our values need resetting and we need to find a new measure of success now both houses of Congress didn't think we were doing enough for the wealthiest Americans and the Republican majority voted in April to repeal the estate tax of 5400 people in the top 210 of 1% at a taxpayer cost of $269 billion
dollar without a way to pay for it while leaving in place budget cuts over 35 billion that are that we're going to are going to hit unless we speak up and say no from safety net programs to keep away hunger and homelessness and provide child care assistance for parents working and Head Start that so many children desperately need at a time when we have the moral obscenity of 14.7 million poor poor children sometimes I wonder what Bibles some members of Congress read many of us and Congressional budget Cutters were so worried that our military whose
budget is nearly three times larger than the next spender about $610 billion dollar a year and that next spender is China needed more money so that to defend us from exter enemies they gave another $38 billion in war funding that the Pentagon didn't ask for and want through an off-budget War fund requiring no budget offset we have got to change course and hold our leaders accountable for having better values and protecting our future I often site Dietrich bonfa the great German Protestant Theologian who died opposing hitless Holocaust who said the test of the morality of
a society is how it treats its children the United States flunks Bon hoice test every hour of every day by permitting a child to drop out of school every nine seconds to be abused or neglected every 47 seconds to be born into poverty every 35 seconds to be killed or injured by guns every half hour we have lost more than 174,00 children to gunfire in America since 1963 more than all US military killed in action since World War II is that what we believe being an American would permit more preschool children died from guns than
law enforcement offices in the most recent data we can do better why are American children 17 time is more likely to die from Guns than children in all other IND most other industrialized nations High income Nations we need to do better after a transforming Civil Rights Movement sparked by the courage of Ordinary People of Grace who wanted their children to have a better education in life and after sacrificial deaths by some for the right to vote and fully participate in our democracy and 47 years after Dr King called for a Poor People's campaign to eliminate
poverty in the richest nation on Earth and who was assassinated while siding with garbage workers in Memphis who demanded that they be seen as men and be blowed a decent wage for their dirty and indispensable work here we are though a half century after the great speech here about sleeping under a new Revol sleeping through a revolution we must make sure we don't sleep through this new Revolution we are facing which is teetering on the border of a second post Reconstruction Era by people who want to take us back run worried about changing demographics an
African-American president in the White House whom we are very proud of money saturated politics still separate but unequal schools and a majority of our school districts massive illiteracy among children of color like a majority of all children in all colors cannot read a computed grade level in fourth or eighth grade over 70% of our latino children cannot read a compute at grade level in fourth or eighth grade and 80% of black and black children cannot read or compute at grade level in fourth or eighth grade what is a child going to do in this globalizing
world if they can't read and write and compute we need to redefine who what is important and we have got to stand up and fight that Cradle to prison pipeline that traps one in three black boys one in six Latino boys born in 2001 mass incarceration has become the new American apartheid undergirded by a criminal justice system that criminalizes black men and boys for their color and criminalizes the poor for their poverty we have got to change course and it is morally obscene and unacceptable and it's going to be our undoing that the richest nation
on Earth allows almost 15 million children to go poor and I am so sad every time I remind myself that the black child after this transforming movement and all the sacrifices of the 60s and 70s by so many is still the poorest child in America with 51.3% of our children we can and must do better it's time for another transforming movement on his last day Dr King called his mother to give her his sermon title for the next Sunday sermon and it was why America may go to hell and he said America may go to
hell because we're not going to use all the rich blessings that we have um to make sure that everybody has enough in his last year he repeatedly told the parable of the rich man Daves who ignored the poor and sick man Lazarus and reminded us that Daves went to hell not because he was rich but because he did not realize his wealth was his opportunity to bridge the gulf separating him from his brother and allowed Lazarus to continue to languish without being seen to become invisible and he warned that this could happen to Rich America
if we don't use her vast resources to in poverty and to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessity at his life the day after Dr King was assassinated and Riots of heartbreak despair rage and hopelessness broke out Across America I went out into the schools in Washington DC and into the streets and neighborhoods to talk to children and to tell them not to loot and get arrested and ruin their Futures and a little boy young black boy about 12 looked me squarely in the eye and said lady what future
I ain't got no future I ain't got nothing to lose and I've spent the last 47 years and will spend the rest of my life trying to prove that boy's truth wrong in our moneyrich militarily powerful but spiritually anemic race gender wealth and income stratified Society still despite great progress great Peril remains to Snuff out the hopes and dreams of millions of children like him and I think that we are really at a very dangerous intersection that intersection of race and poverty where if we don't break it up we going to move us backwards and
we must move forward at all cost and we must at some point come to grips with our extraordinarily serious birth defects our Founders had the right dream but they tarnished it with Native American genocide with slavery with the exclusion of all women and nonprofit men of all colors from our electoral process and we keep having these flareups from these birth defects every half century or so and it's time for us to confront that through a thoughtful Truth and Reconciliation process that we can really we can't you can't cure what you can't identify and honestly say
di diagnose and so I think we really do need a new Truth and Reconciliation process and we need to then learn from that and not repeat the mistakes of the past Dr King believe that our only hope lies in our ability to recapture the Revolutionary Spirit of America and to go out into a sometimes hostile World declaring Eternal hostility to Poverty racism and militarism he was very depressed in the last year or two of his life and he feared that we were burning in we were integrating into a burning house and ex riddled by excessive
materialism and militarism and greed and when people heard him they were quite shocked he said he would do it all over again but when we said what should we do about that he says we've all got become fireman and sound the alarm of danger and fight back with all of our might I first heard him and he keeps me going many days when I was in Spelman College as compulsory Chapel for which I'm grateful in retrospect I wasn't so much at the time but the first time I heard him I was a senior at Spelman
in in the middle of the C in movement and he came and he told us about the importance of moving forward and never moving backwards he said if you can't fly drive if you can't drive run if you can't run walk if you can't walk crawl but keep moving forward and I want us to remember that we must let no one move this country backwards again to the old habits of slavery and poverty and inequality under another name we all also said another thing in that same speech and I remembered he says don't be afraid
to step out in faith take the first step even if you can't see the whole stairway leave The Stairway to God and we must not want to have that plan before us all the time we should have the right principle and the right determination to be inclusive for all and make sure that those Left Behind get be a part of our communities and our families but step out in faith and trust God to do the rest and look at the Miracles that have been wrought from Ordinary People of Grace with no resources who wanted their
children to have better lives and they with nothing transformed the nation's landscape let me just end with a couple of other things as I try to think about we have got to become well we have a wonderful opportunity let's just put it this way to be a Beacon of Hope and justice for a world that is hungering for leadership who is hungering for vision we're living in a world that is majority nonwhite and poor we are in a nation now where we are becoming majority nonwhite and still too poor based on our resources but what
an opportunity we have to show what democratic capitalism can be and to be a Beacon of Hope for a world so desperately in need of Hope and I love something I read from um Archbishop 22 who talked about God's dream which is Martin Luther King's dream which is America's dream and I hope will be our dream and he said that God says tutu says I have a dream I have a dream that all of my children will discover that they belong to one family my family the Human family a family in which there are no
Outsiders all are held in the Embrace of the one whose love will never let us go the one who says that each one of us is of incredible worth that each one of us is precious to God because each of us has their name written on the palms of God's hands and God says there are no Outsiders black white red yellow short tall young old Rich poor gay lesbian straight everyone all belong and God says I have only you to help me realize my dream help me I want to leave you with my one of
my favorite Role Models I wear Harriet Tubman and soj of Truth around my neck every day so when I think I'm having a bad day I think about their days and I get up and I try again but so Jour of Truth could not stand second class treatment of women and she could not stand slavery and she never lost an opportunity to speak up against it and one day my favorite so journalism occurred when she was speaking out against slavery and she got heckled by an old white man in the audience who said old slave
woman I don't care any more about your anti-slavery talk than for an old flea bite and she snapped back at him and said that's all right the Lord willing I'm going to keep you scratching we all want to make big differences and we need to make big and transforming differences if we're going to break the gridlock of those who want to take us back and move America towards being America but enough fleas for justice can make the very biggest dog uncomfortable and if there are a number of us who are fleas with our votes and
free with our voices and fleas and running for com for office as the first lady told us to do and when you get an office remember it's not about you it's about something bigger than you and we've got to have the sense of responsibility to make sure that we use our power to make life better for other people so let's go away from o from this wonderful colle College to help start that next transforming movement to finish Dr King's dream of an America without poverty and without racism at a time when those enjoined to uphold
the law are violating the law let us make sure that America does not lose its Soul let us make sure through our efforts that America can become America what an enormously Wonder ful opportunity you have to move us forward to build a new America where the measure of success is in our sense of justice our sense of equity and our sense of love for one another God's speed to all of you [Applause]
