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Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.

Marian Wright Edelman

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Marian Wright Edelman
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 6
Activist
Lawyer
Writer
Bennettsville
South Carolina
Really
Parents
Parent
Education
Forget
Family
Educators
Become
Educator
Best
Experts
Children
Convinced

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I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.
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Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.
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Black women rock the cradle, and whoever rocks the cradle rocks the future.
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I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do.
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Children under five are the poorest age group in America, and one in four infants, toddlers and preschoolers are poor during the years of greatest brain development.
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It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.
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You can't tell parents to teach children the value of work when we don't have jobs and the jobs we have don't pay a decent wage. You can't tell children to achieve and then let them go to broken-down schools with teachers who don't care. We need a consistency of values in our public, corporate, and private lives.
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Somehow we are going to have to develop a concept of enough for those at the top and at the bottom so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few.
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Every day I wear my Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth medallions around my neck. When I think I'm having a bad day, I try to think about their day, and I get up.
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Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.
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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.
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If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.
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There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage.
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We must serve consciously as caring role models, emphasizing the ethic of service, not consumption.
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Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don't count on them.
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It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.
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No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion.
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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.
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Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right. Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right.
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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.
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