Hometown Library Honors Marian Wright Edelman -- and Her Passion

BENNETTSVILLE, S.C. -- It's impossible to keep up with Marian Wright Edelman when she is talking about her passion. She wants every child to be healthy, well educated and able to fulfill a dream. The words -- focused and strong -- spill out, too fast to write them down, too fast, you swear, for a tape recorder to catch them all.

On Sunday, her admirers talked about Edelman's "charm" and "relentlessness" when she returned to her South Carolina hometown for another honor in her long career of advocacy, one that will benefit the children she cherishes.

The president of the Children's Defense Fund, the nonprofit she founded in 1973, greeted what looked like half the town, most of whom had a story about Edelman or members of her family, especially her late parents, the Rev. Arthur Jerome and Maggie Leola Bowen Wright. "There's nobody here that doesn't know her," one visitor said. "She never forgot where she came from."

Family and friends, politicians and officials came out in the rain to see her cut the ribbon for the Marian Wright Edelman Public Library of Marlboro County. The state-of-the-art facility, built with $4.7 million in public money and private donations, includes 22 computers and a separate children's storytime room. The first thing you notice is the sign above the entrance: "Welcome to Everyone."

That's not what Edelman saw growing up in the 1950s, a bright and inquisitive young girl barred from the library, the pool, and other public facilities because of her race. "We didn't have access to public libraries," she said. "Public school libraries all had hand-me-down books from white schools and they were out of date. But I was very fortunate because I had parents who had books in our home all the time. Many parents in our county couldn't afford to do that."

She added: "Books are more important than a second pair of shoes, more important than a toy. And so I had the blessings of a daddy who had a study who read hours every day, who made us read with him every day."

Edelman left Bennettsville to attend Spelman College in Atlanta and Yale Law School, and was the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar. She ran the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Miss., and founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm. At Harvard, she directed the Center for Law and Education before starting the Children's Defense Fund and becoming Bennettsville's favorite daughter.

One of her interns at CDF, Hillary Clinton, has called Edelman her mentor. The William J. Clinton Foundation donated $100,000 to help build the library, and the Clintons sent a letter to Sunday's opening.

Hugh L. McColl Jr. grew up 100 yards and an impassable racial distance from Edelman in Bennettsville. The retired Bank of America chief executive said he knew of Edelman's father -- "he was well respected" -- but he didn't get to know Edelman until about 25 years ago, he said. ("What a loss," Edelman said of the years of friendship lost to segregation.) McColl, honorary chair of the library effort, worked for more than 10 years on the project and donated $250,000.

"What a long way my town has come," McColl told me on Sunday. "It's a journey of democracy."

It's also true that some things in Marlboro County haven't changed enough. A majority of the public school students in this rural county live in poverty. Unemployment is at 20 percent.

"I thought the Children's Defense Fund would have been out of business by now," Edelman said. "It's unbelievable to me that it's so hard for us to do what's right and sensible. If you don't educate your children, you don't have a future workforce. A majority of all of our children of all races and income groups cannot read at grade level or compute at grade level in 4th, 8th or 12th grade, if they haven't already dropped out of school."

She said: "Children need to learn how to read. If you can't read you're being sentenced to social and economic death. That's why I'm so proud of this library. I hope reading's going to become the thing in Marlboro County."

Even while she was celebrating, though, Edelman's attention was split. She kept checking on the vote for health care legislation, which would pass much later that evening, and keeping a tally on what was or should be in it. "The bill is not a perfect bill but it's a huge groundbreaking bill. It will extend coverage to 32 million Americans, including over 95 percent of all children," she said.

Still, she was worried. "What happened to our early learning fund money, because that was in the health bill and it just disappeared two nights ago?" she said. "I hope it will show back up."

Children's Health Insurance Program "is still alive," she said. "I did not want to see us do away with CHIP programs, which work, until I saw how these [insurance] exchanges were going to work."

"Lord, hurry up and pass this bill," she said impatiently. "It's long overdue. It is clear to me that it's going to be a significant lifesaver; it's clear to me that it's going to be a significant cost saver. It's really dumb not to provide every child prenatal care, and to let them be born healthy and stay out of neonatal intensive care nurseries. It's really dumb not to fully immunize all our children when a quarter of them aren't. It's really dumb not to have primary care available."

But Edelman believes the problems go deeper than a lack of government support. "We've got to reset our moral compass," she said. "If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't continue to build bigger and bigger walls and more and more prisons. You've got to stop and fix the foundation, the children ... their bodies and minds and bones are being formed right now; their spirits are being formed right now. You've got to get first things first."

Edelman is grateful for the foundation that Bennettsville, despite barriers, provided her. "It had many banes and many blessings," she said. "I would never have become a civil rights lawyer or a children's activist had I not seen and felt what it felt to be excluded, and I'm never going to stop until no child is excluded from anything. While the external world said we weren't very valuable, our parents said it wasn't so ... that's the message that too many adults are not telling children today.

"We've got all kinds of children who are in terrible trouble -- white, black, rich, poor -- because they don't have any inner sense, inner strengths, inner values. They think it's about what's on their backs and about things."

She confident, though, that "we're going to get there."

As if to justify that optimism, 3-year-old Victoria Sellers signed up for her first library card. She sat on her aunt's lap, mesmerized by a Dora the Explorer backpack and the rows and rows of books on the colorfully decorated shelves. Karen Sellers, a Bennettsville teacher's assistant whose brother worked with Edelman at the CDF, said she would never forget this day. The new library is "just what our youth need here in Marlboro County."

"We are very, very proud of Marian," she said. "We think the world of her."