Extraordinary life. Its as if Marian Wright edelman has this forrest gump life. She was in these places, in extraordinary places, and every page you turn of your life story is like, she was there, too . I guess im not even sure where to start. South carolina, your parents are very hardworking, your mom is an organizer, but even when you were a kid in school in south carolina, you end up crossing paths with langston hughes. Well, ive always felt so lucky to have been born who i was, where i was, with the parents i had. And at the time, i was born in the convergence of great people and great historical events. And so i wouldnt have been anybody else, even though it has not always been an easy life. And in south carolina, in my little, rural, segregated town, the outside world was not very friendly and not very supportive of black children. They told me basically in a segregated small town in the 40s and the 50s that, as a black girl, i wasnt worth very much. Hinojosa and you would hear that . Oh, but that was. Everything was segregated. There were places. And i cant bear to see children excluded from any place. And there were all these places i couldnt go, but even from the time i was able to kind of walk, i couldnt stand being excluded from a water fountain or from a Public Library or from anything, i just. Hinojosa so you knew kind of viscerally. You were like, wait a second, im thirsty, i want to go drink, and you knew that you couldnt go drink from that fountain. Well, i actually went in the local Belks Department store when i was a little girl with one of my Public School teachers, and i went. I was thirsty, i went to drink in the white water fountain i didnt know what a white water fountain was and she was terribly afraid and upset and pulled me away. And i remember going home with my little wounded psyche, but getting reinforced by my parents. But, you know, this woman died when she was about 90, not too long ago, and the thing that i remember most about her is that she somehow was so afraid to protect me as a child. Its amazing. But segregation and apartheid seeps in to every bit of your being, because you know that there are places youre not supposed to be, and theyre. You know, youve got handmedown books in schools, and the white kids are going this way and the black kids are going this way to school, and we always had a place. Ive just come from home this past. You know, recently, and i started pointing out, heres where we always had our fights every day. whos going to get the sidewalk . but these things are. Hinojosa whos going to get the sidewalk . Whos going to get the sidewalk. If youre coming from the white segregated school and im coming from the black segregated school and we meet in between, then the issue was whos going to get to walk on the sidewalk and whos going to get. You know. It seeps into everything in your life, and so children, from the beginning, are sort of sorted and excluded. You dont forget that. So there was never a time when i didnt know i was going to change it, too. I hated it. Hinojosa well, thats the interesting thing. This notion that. You know, you talk about being really appreciative of being born in that moment in history, which is very different than this moment in history, because back then it was like the challenges were so intense, so frontal, and yet there you were, meeting and, in fact, i would say inspiring dr. Martin luther king. Oh, for a minute, please. Right . I mean, you were an inspiration to him, werent you . Well, i was a messenger. Lets just put it that way. I mean, he thought i was an angel that had come to transmit a message from Robert Kennedy to him on my way back to mississippi about the need to bring the poor to washington, because he was. Hinojosa did he actually. He actually believed that you were something of an angel . Well, he was. Well, in the last eight years of his life, which is when i knew him i met him when i was a senior at Spelman College and he was very inspiring in chapel, and i remember it as if it were yesterday when he told us to keep moving and thats something ive internalized. There were two messages if you cant fly, you drive, if you cant drive, you run, if you cant run, you walk, if you cant walk, you crawl, but you keep moving. And the second message, which i had written in my diary after hearing him, was that you dont have to see the whole stairway. Take the first step in faith and let god take you to the rest. And he was the first adult, famous adult, that i got to know who wasnt afraid to say he didnt know what his next step was going to be. He was often very depressed at the end, life got very complicated. And so when i came through, he was very concerned about the vietnam war detracting attention from poor people, and everybody in the Civil Rights Movement moved north, and violence had begun to challenge nonviolence and black power had begun to overshadow the message of the beloved community. He was really quite down, and he had great schisms in his own staff about whether the southern christian Leadership Conference at that time should be focused more on ending war or on ending poverty, and he chose the poor peoples campaign. Hinojosa the challenges were so much for him, and to have seen him at that moment. And yet, he was the one who said, dont ever give up. Dont ever give up, just keep moving, and he was clear that courage is not about not being afraid, it is about not being paralyzed into inaction, and thats. Again, one of the gifts i think ive had in my life is i always grew up with people of deep faith, who didnt say you had to win, but that you had to get up every morning and try to live your faith, and i saw that in my house, with my mother and father. Whenever they saw a need, they tried to respond. There were no black homes for the aged, so they started one across the street from our church and our parsonage. And all the kids had to go over. We had to cook and clean and we sure didnt like it, but thats how we knew that everybody was our neighbor. And when we could not go and sit down on drugstore lunch counters and have a cocacola and couldnt swim in the white public Swimming Pool and could not sort of have recreation in the white parks, daddy and mama built one behind the church. And we. Whenever they saw a need, they tried to respond. And that was. And he had a message to us because every day hed ask us when we came home from school, did the teacher assign you any homework . And if we said, no, he said, well, assign yourself some. Hinojosa i love that. Im giving that one to my children. Do you not have any homework tonight . Assign yourself some. And so all these people who are not, you know, happy with the way things are going in our society, i keep saying, assign yourself. Dr. Kings not coming back; each of us has to kind of get there and do this work ourselves. Hinojosa i love this notion, though, of you being a strong black woman in a segregated america, and your sense of fearlessness. And im just like, where. Because if you went out of the bounds there, clearly there were real repercussions. There was violence, there were dogs, there was jail. Where did you get that fearlessness, though . I cant stand injustice. I cant stand seeing any child being excluded from anything. And i guess i saw outrages from the very beginning. When i was a little girl, there was an accident in front of our church out on the highway, and we ran out to see what had happened, and there was a truck driver, big truck, white driver, and a car of Migrant Workers. And the ambulance came and found that the white truck driver was not injured and the black Migrant Workers were out on the highway, were injured, but they drove away. I have never forgotten that. I dont know if i was six or seven years old, in the middle of the night. You know, ive seen. I saw children, my little classmates die because they were. Henry munlun, i was walking by his house not too long ago. You know, he went to swim in the local creek because we couldnt swim in the Swimming Pools, and he jumped off the bridge and broke his neck. Hinojosa oh, my goodness. Little johnny harrington, who lived two houses away from my church, lived with his grandmother, stepped on a nail and got tetanus. She didnt know anything about tetanus shots, but he died. And these things etch themselves into ones childhood memory, and there was never a time when i didnt know that i would fight segregation. And it didnt occur to me to be. You know, if you were thirsty, you drank. I went to the Public Library, and thats a good story. When i was a child, and they didnt let me in, well, last year they dedicated the new Public Library to me, and across the top is, everyone is welcome. So change is possible. Hinojosa i want to give you a high five on that one. Ah, how about that . Its wonderful. And its the new center of the community where kids go and everybodys going and its wonderful. Hinojosa but take me back to one other person who was an Extraordinary Part of your life, and again, the fact that you sat down and had conversations, coffee, with malcolm x. Those conversations. Ive had a serendipitous life. I was at yale law school, and malcolm, even though i was a king follower. But he was so feisty and so outrageously funny that he reflected all the bitterness that we all had, but he made us laugh it all out. Hinojosa are you saying that malcolm x was bitterly funny . Oh, he was bitterly funny, but he would say outrageous things about white people that satisfied a part of all of us, because theres nobody that didnt have great outrage or rage within. And when he came to speak at yale law school, and i was sitting in the law school auditorium, reading my little book, waiting for him to come in, had never seen him before, and all of a sudden i looked up and somebody was saying, miss wright, and he was introducing himself, and i could not believe it. And he said, im malcolm x. And he knew everything about my life. I couldnt believe it. And i then found out someone from my hometown was one of his followers who had. From the bridgeport, connecticut, mosque. But anyway, we became friends. And i went down to have lunch with him a number of times in his restaurant, and he would be very funny. Whenever i ordered white bread, hed say, dont eat that. Thats got no nutrition in that. Hinojosa laughs but the fact is that even though you were a follower of Martin Luther king, you were. And malcolm x was clearly wanting to engage with you and you were clearly open to having broad conversations. Of course, i mean, theres no one way to anything. In fact, malcolm xs brother, who was the social Services Commissioner in michigan, became a lifelong friend. But you know, he reflected a great part of the longings of our community and was able to get out a lot of the bitterness and allow us to sort of function in constructive ways. And so i think that this one leader mode. Now i knew, just because as a woman, that i would never be able to have a subservient relationship, but i was very lucky to have, again, parents who were partners, and they did not raise their girls to be any different in terms of aspirations than their boys. I always knew i was as smart as my brothers, and i now know how unusual that was. But my parents were real partners, and my dad called my mom pal, and she was the organizer, but he couldnt have made it without her, so it was a great partnership. But i knew that oftentimes. I was in the Muslim Community and i had one boyfriend for a very short time from jamaica who. First time i got taken there, the women went in one room and the men went in another and i said, oh, this is not for me. Hinojosa laughs not going to work. Not going to work. Hinojosa now, you actually also had another extraordinary experience because you met your future husband through somebody who Everybody Knows robert f. Kennedy. And at that point, you decided that you really liked this man who was a white jewish man. Well, i just liked this man. You know, people dont marry colors or religions, they marry individuals. I had an image. This came up during the 1967 period when the Head Start Program and the Poverty Program was under attack in mississippi, the state had turned it down, and i had been summoned to testify in washington. But then i told them to come down and see for themselves, because its one thing to have somebody like me coming up to talk about the poor. Its another thing to go down and to actually see the poor. And i was supposed to testify on head start because senators stennis and eastland, very powerful senators, had threatened to hold up the entire Poverty Programs appropriations if they didnt defund this Community Race program where parents and children were having the time of their lives. But then, for whatever reason, peter came down to. My husband now, came down to advance this hearing. But i had an image. I was very busy, i had a brief to write. And he called up to see if he could see me, and i said, no, im too busy. And i had this image of peter being like pierre salinger. I had not been a great Bobby Kennedy fan in the early days because when the president. His brother was president , they had appointed a lot of segregationist jobs, judges, in the south, and secondly, they had wiretapped dr. King. And i had remembered him as well from the mccarthy hearings. Hinojosa you were kind of angry. I was kind of angry, and i thought this was a nice, arrogant, cigarchomping man who was coming down, so i didnt have time for him, and he turned out to be this really nice man, just as Robert Kennedy turned out to be this very nice, open, funny, caring man who was transformed by his brothers death. And the thing that i remember most about Robert Kennedy is he could transmit so much just through a touch. I would watch him just touch the cheeks of children or to, you know, try to get feelings out of them or when he liked something, he would just give you a pat. But at any rate, he came, and i dont know where it came from that i would not talk about head start. I would talk about hunger because people were starving in mississippi and malnourished, and there were babies with bloated bodies, and for whatever reason i started talking about the problems that were going on in the delta. The mississippi officials were changing over from free food commodities to food stamps and charging two dollars per person and people had no income and they were being pushed off the plantation. Hinojosa right. But im still stuck on the fact that you, as a young black woman, just were saying, im going to. I like this man, and i think i might even marry this man, which you ended up doing. And then you ended up giving birth to three boys. Three wonderful boys. Hinojosa who are jewish africanamerican from the south. Thats right. Hinojosa and for you, this relationship as a mother to impart to them that you are products of a jewish background and of an africanamerican background, and youve written about this, the fact that these are oppressed people. Talk a little bit about how you manage that, you know, being in the center of the public eye and, at the same time, being a mom whos trying manage. I mean, just before we came in, you said, oh, im always known as my kids mom, and im like, no, no, no, youre Marian Wright edelman. And youre like, no. Youre known as ezras mom. Joshuas mom and jonahs mom, and thats really fantastic. And now i have four grandchildren and i just recently, in fact yesterday, celebrated our 43rd wedding anniversary. Hinojosa congratulations. Thank you very much. But you know, its. You marry people, you dont marry races, and again, it never occurred to me not to. Hes a nice man and i dont know anybody who could put up with me for 43 years. And we often laughed that we got together over hungry children, but we shared a very deep bond for justice, we tried to raise the children in both traditions, though i am far more religious than my husband is. But we wanted them to know through what i would call. He doesnt like when i call it baptist bar mitzvahs in the backyard. Hinojosa laughs baptist bar mitzvahs. Thats so american. Thats so american, but we. I went to church every sunday and the kids had to go to church with me every sunday until they were in their senior year in high school, but we all went through this ritual of them getting their bar mitzvahs. But the 139th psalm was the last sermon that my father preached when i knew he was telling us he was going to go away, but that there was nowhere he could go that god was not. And we always opened all three ceremonies with lots of friends together on all sides of the aisle anall racewith tha psalm. And so his family wahappy, my family was happy, and the kids know both aditions aheyre all good human beings and i dont care whether theyre jewish or christian as long as they care about other people, and they do. Hinojosa so you were the one who brought up the issue of hunger, and getting together with your husband over hunger. And i have a couple of statistics to talk to you about because honestly, when you think about where we are right now, youve actually said this more than once. Youre concerned that the chle wceow could be, in fact, worse than what we faced at the time of segregation in our country. So a statistic, you know these. Every 32 seconds in our country, a baby is born into poverty. I mean, there are extraordinary ones, but that every 18 minutes in our country, a baby dies before his or her first birthday . We have an infant mortality rate and a low birth weight rate in the richest nation on earth that spends more money on Health Expenditures than anybody elses. That of a thirdworld country that is an underdeveloped nation. It is outrageous. Hinojosa how can it be so. If Childrens Defense Fund has been doing this for 40 years and pointing to problems, where is the lapse . Weve made a lot of progress since we started and weve, you know, we wiped out hunger for a period after Robert Kennedy and dr. King and we spent a lot of time and other people joined in. And then with the expansion of the food programs and things that beca