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If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans and the very dream that is America.

Marian Wright Edelman

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Marian Wright Edelman
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 6
Activist
Lawyer
Writer
Bennettsville
South Carolina
America
Rather
Fabric
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Peace
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Social
Solutions
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Helping
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Think
Left
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More quotes by Marian Wright Edelman

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I don't care what my children choose to do professionally, just as long as within their choices they understand they've got to give something back.
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So often we think we have got to make a difference and be a big dog. Let us just try to be little fleas biting. Enough fleas biting strategically can make a big dog very uncomfortable.
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No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
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So much of America's tragic and costly failure to care for all its children stems from our tendency to distinguish between our own children and other people's children--as if justice were divisible.
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People want to pick the leader, and we are obsessed with celebrity and whoever is on the cover of this or that.
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It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.
Marian Wright Edelman
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You have to have a fundamental change in the culture of policing, and who is the police person. How do they change? How do you learn from England and the other places, or Australia? In England, they don't carry guns on the whole. It's a different kind of mentality that does not demonize, and it's justified on race and income and class.
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Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don't count on them.
Marian Wright Edelman
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If parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Luckily, I had incredible parents who, when they saw a problem, didn't say, Why doesn't somebody do something? They would say, Why don't we do something?.
Marian Wright Edelman
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It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.
Marian Wright Edelman
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As I contemplate the kind of future I want for children-my own and other people's-I believe we must look inward to God for guidance and strength and backward to draw on the values and legacies of our families, ancestors, and communities.
Marian Wright Edelman
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I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.
Marian Wright Edelman
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To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.
Marian Wright Edelman
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I get very upset with all of the crowd seekers today, and people out there trying to get on TV. It ain't about you. It's about trying to make the world more just for everybody.
Marian Wright Edelman
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In my generation, we learned how to be leaders by being exposed to and involved with adults who empowered us and gave us a sense that we could choose things. We've let down the generations coming behind us and we are trying to re- establish that connection.
Marian Wright Edelman
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That's not to say that some of the new media is not advantageous. You can reach lots of folks with what Black Lives Matter is doing, mobilizing people. God bless them.
Marian Wright Edelman
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The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.
Marian Wright Edelman
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History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.
Marian Wright Edelman
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We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep a kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.
Marian Wright Edelman