PROVIDENCE -- Marian Wright Edelman is fearless in her crusade to save children from poverty, homelessness, neglect and violence.
She is willing to take on the big boys on behalf of her beliefs, even if she runs the risk of alienating the very politicians who have supported her pledge to leave no child behind.
In an open letter published in The Washington Post in 1996, Edelman, president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund, urged President Bill Clinton to oppose a Senate bill that would have given states much greater control over federal welfare dollars.
"Do you think the Old Testament prophets, Isaiah, Micah and Amos -- or Jesus Christ -- would support such policies?" she wrote in the Post. "For me, this is a defining moral litmus test for your presidency."
Clinton eventually withdrew his support for the bill.
Edelman was the keynote speaker at yesterday's annual Rhode Island Kids Count breakfast, where the latest Kids Count factbook, a compendium of statistics on the status of children, was released.
Edelman is that rarity in contemporary politics: an unabashed liberal who believes that government has an obligation to solve social problems.
The youngest daughter of a Baptist preacher, Edelman is not afraid to preach, to browbeat if necessary. In a cynical era, she remains a moralist who approaches the plight of America's children with missionary zeal.
While other old-fashioned liberals have fallen by the wayside, Edelman has not forgotten her activist roots, registering black voters in the South, marching with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and leading Robert Kennedy on a personal tour to witness the impoverished children of Mississippi.
Yesterday, Edelman, a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School, began her speech with a quote from Albert Camus and wrapped it up with a rousing prayer asking God's forgiveness.
"The state of millions of children in the richest, most powerful, democratic nation in the world is morally shameful, economically costly and politically hypocritical," she told several hundred people at the Marriott.
Then, she recited a litany of disturbing statistics:
An American child is born into poverty every 44 seconds.
An American child is born without health insurance every minute; 9 million children are uninsured.
It is safer to be an on-duty police officer than a child under 10 in America.
"These facts are not the acts of God," Edelman said. "They are our moral and political choices as Americans. We can change them. We have the money. We have the power. We have the know-how. We have the vision."
What we lack, she said, is the civic and spiritual engagement to pierce the ideological agendas that believe government should help the rich and the powerful at the expense of the poor.
In America, Edelman said, many parents must choose between finding work and caring for their children.
Nearly 20 years ago, two young children in Dade County, Fla., died after climbing into a clothes dryer while their working mother was waiting for child-care assistance.
Today, there are over 46,000 children on Florida's waiting list for child-care aid, 200,000 in California and 16,398 in Massachusetts.
With a preacher's sense of timing, Edelman turned it up a notch.
"The war on terrorism is not an excuse not to prevent and stop the domestic terrors of child hunger and homelessness and neglect right now."
Charity, Edelman said, cannot replace the role of government in creating equity for all children, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.
"I hope we practice the highest form of patriotism," she said. "We can keep justice alive by insisting that our leaders redefine national security as strong, healthy communities."
The preacher's daughter ended with a prayer, a call to moral action.
"I ask God to please forgive our rich nation, where school children die from guns. I ask God to forgive our rich nation that lets the rich get richer at the expense of the poor."
