The Third Reconstruction Era

Release Date: February 26, 2016 

Many of us have been thrilled by the video of 106-year-old mentor and school volunteer Mrs. Virginia McLaurin visiting the White House during a Black History Month celebration to meet — and dance with — President and Mrs. Obama. Her joy in being there and fulfilling her dream of meeting the first African-American President and First Lady was infectious. Born a child of South Carolina sharecroppers in 1909, this was a day she never dreamed would come: “I didn’t think I’d ever live to see a colored president. I am so happy.”

Moments like these give us a chance to appreciate how much change a citizen like Mrs. McLaurin has seen in her lifetime. When she was born America was firmly in the grip of Jim Crow, segregation, racial violence and political disenfranchisement that characterized the decades following the initial post-Civil War promise of Reconstruction. She moved to Washington, D.C. in 1941, in time to see the activism of A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and others urging the federal government to desegregate our armed forces and provide more economic opportunity for African-Americans. She saw burgeoning civil rights activities like these surge into a transforming movement across the South including the 1963 March on Washington in her new hometown. And she saw the Civil Rights Movement lead to significant changes — enough to allow her to visit President and Mrs. Obama in the White House in 2016.

When we look at arcs of history like this, where are we today? Many scholars see the Civil Rights Movement as a second Reconstruction Era and a second try at rebuilding our nation into one truly committed to liberty and justice for all. But just as the progress of the first Reconstruction was followed by decades of retrenchment and reversal, many of the formidable threats millions of poor children and families of all races but especially children of color face today are very dangerous steps backwards. Unjust racial profiling and killing of Black boys and men by law enforcement officers enjoined to protect them; mass incarceration of people of color — especially Black males; massive attacks on voting rights which especially impact the poor, people of color, the elderly, disabled and the young; and resegregating and substandard schools denying millions of poor Black, Latino and Native American children basic literacy, numeracy and other skills they will need to work in our increasingly competitive globalized economy should be siren calls to wake up and fight back.

Past lessons have led some scholars and observers to believe we may be in a second post-Reconstruction Era, fighting deliberate widespread well-funded regression and backlash against progress made. But Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the head of North Carolina’s NAACP chapter and a leader in the “Moral Mondays” movement, views this historical moment with optimism but urges vigilance. In his new book with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement, Dr. Barber argues that the beginnings of a Third Reconstruction are underway—rooted in “fusion politics” that have changed our nation before and can do it again.

The Third Reconstruction describes how what has become the Forward Together Moral Movement was the outgrowth of several years of theological education and grassroots organizing in North Carolina that coalesced in 2013 with Moral Mondays, a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign of protests, rallies, and arrests that has been adapted in other states, including Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio and New York. The multifaith, multiracial movement is committed to a 14-point People’s Agenda including education, health care, the economy and reforming the justice and electoral systems, and is supported by over 150 coalition partners. The book describes the historical impact that can occur when people are willing to form strong coalitions for change. The coalition in North Carolina includes progressive people of faith, union members, immigrants, Appalachian workers and many more and may be a model for others committed to racial and economic justice.

When Dr. Barber spoke to a group of young leaders at a Children’s Defense Fund event last June, he explained why he believes multiracial, multifaith, nonviolent coalitions are essential right now: “So what many extremists are trying to do is abort the third reconstruction. That’s why they are telling America this myth . . . You want a great America? Deny public education, deny health care, deny living wages, deny labor rights. You really, really want a great America? Deny immigrant rights. Deny LGBTQ rights. Deny women’s rights. You really want a great America? Deny the right to vote. You really want a great America? Turn everybody against everybody. Pit Muslims against Christians and women against men. Call the president everything you can but a child of God . . . And if you really, really, really, really want a great America, make sure that people can get a gun quicker than they can vote. . . . And I stopped by to tell you that in this moment we better know who we are and where we are, and that in this moment of a possible third reconstruction we are called to speak truth in times like these . . . Dr. King said: ‘The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both white and Negro—live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to deal with the issues of injustice.’ And I want you to know it’s your time, and we can learn from the past.”

is our time. We must all learn from the past to end another era of backlash and backsliding and keep moving forward together.

The Other Washington

Release Date: February 19, 2016 

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is in the final stages of construction on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., next to the Washington Monument and near the National Museum of American History. It will be a transformative and long-overdue landmark in the center of the nation’s capital. As the museum’s director, Lonnie G. Bunch III, puts it, “This museum will tell the American story through the lens of African American history and culture. This is America’s Story and this museum is for all Americans.”

One of the most striking pieces visitors to the new museum will see is a slave cabin from Edisto Island, South Carolina that was painstakingly dismantled and brought to Washington to be rebuilt at the museum’s center. It will join artifacts like a child’s slave shackles and Harriet Tubman’s shawl and hymn book in telling the chapter at the foundation of our national story. The slave cabin may have come from hundreds of miles away, but slavery itself was at the heart of our nation’s capital from its very beginning.

Traces of this other Washington are everywhere. As the new capital was rising from former woods and swampland slaves labored on many of its buildings including the White House and the Capitol. As the Architect of the Capitol’s office explains: “When construction of the U.S. Capitol Building began in 1793, Washington, D.C. was little more than a rural landscape with dirt roads and few accommodations beyond a small number of boarding houses. Skilled labor was hard to find or attract to the fledgling city. Enslaved laborers, who were rented from their owners, were involved in almost every stage of construction.” Records showing how much owners were paid for their slaves’ labor tell us a few of these slaves’ names: Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry, and Daniel worked on the White House. Nace, Harry, and Gabe worked on the Capitol. One slave who received special notice was Philip Reid, who helped construct the Statue of Freedom that sits atop the Capitol dome. He was the only person able to solve the puzzle of how to dissect and reassemble the original model of the statue after the sculptor who knew the secret refused to help without being paid more money. Philip Reid’s master said Philip was “of mulatto color, short in stature, in good health, not prepossessing in appearance, but smart in mind, a good work man in a foundry, and has been employed in that capacity by the Government, at one dollar and twenty five cents per-day.”

Slave coffles were a familiar sight in Washington’s streets. Those lines of slaves chained together were horrifying to visitors from other countries and those traveling to the capital of the new country seemingly built on freedom. Slave markets and slave pens existed on a number of city sites including some not far from the spot on the Mall where the new museum will stand and the Tidal Basin now framed by beautiful cherry trees. Others were within yards of the White House. The movie 12 Years a Slave retold the story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who in 1841 was tricked into traveling to Washington with a promise of work as a musician. Instead he was drugged and kidnapped, imprisoned in a slave pen “within the very shadow of the Capitol,” and from there illegally sold into slavery in Louisiana. As a new Congressman from Illinois from 1847-1849, Abraham Lincoln described a slave pen he saw “in view from the windows of the capitol, a sort of Negro livery-stable, where droves of negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to southern markets, precisely like droves of horses.”

Slaves likely helped quarry the distinctive red bricks in the Smithsonian Castle, a familiar landmark in the middle of all the Smithsonian museums. Quarrying was notoriously grueling work. The bricks came from a Maryland quarry owned by John Parke Custis Peter, a great-grandson of Martha Washington; many of the slaves Peter owned had ties to Mount Vernon, and scholars believe several of the adults who may have labored as slaves at the quarry were slaves at Mount Vernon as children.

Some of this history is commemorated in Washington today. Visitors to the U.S. Capitol can see a marker in the building’s Emancipation Hall honoring the slaves and other laborers who helped construct it. Beneath the inscription on a marble platform is a large chunk of sandstone from the Capitol’s original East Front Portico, with chisel marks still visible. In other places new steps are being taken to honor the past. For many years the Treasury Annex building stood on the site of the Freedman’s Bank, built in 1865 to provide an opportunity for wealth-building among newly freed slaves—an attempt to right one of the profound wrongs the Black community is still struggling to overcome. In January the U.S. Treasury Department held a ceremony officially renaming the Treasury Annex the Freedman’s Bank Building and recognizing the Freedman Bank’s legacy.

Even with important steps like these so much more of this other Washington remains hidden and forgotten. It’s time to uncover and remember these parts of our shared history—in Washington and in states and cities and small towns across the country. Each February should remind us all that just as the new museum will tell America’s story, Black history is American history. An honest accounting of the past is the best way to keep moving forward together. Only the truth can make us free.

Winifred Green: An Unsung Warrior for Racial and Economic Justice

Release Date: February 12, 2016

Transforming movements towards social justice depend on the work of a core group of committed and persistent and not always frontline soldiers — women and men who seize the moment and choose to stand up for what is right. My beloved friend and longtime Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) board member Winifred Green, who died February 6, 2016, was one of those unsung heroines. Born White and privileged in Jackson, Mississippi, I first met her during Freedom Summer 1964, when I was a young civil rights lawyer and she was one of a handful of prominent White women who were supporting school desegregation and working tirelessly to keep public schools in Jackson open. Her stance alienated her from many family members and friends. Winifred recounted: “Once my mother said to me, ‘What did we do wrong?’ I remember saying to her, ‘Granny taught me, ‘Red and Yellow, Black and White, they are precious in his sight,’ and I didn’t know that she didn’t really mean Black people.”

Winifred Green’s family worshiped in an all-White church but she reached an early turning point at age fourteen when she was a youth delegate to a national Episcopal convention in Boston. The mixed race conference was her first time interacting with Black people as peers and equals, and she had an epiphany when she suddenly realized the segregation her entire culture in Mississippi was built on was wrong: “It was revolutionary. I knew somebody had not been telling me the truth.” After learning the truth for herself she was unwavering in standing up for racial justice the rest of her life.

She became politically active at Millsaps College and shortly after graduating in 1963 organized Mississippians for Public Education, a group of women who effectively protested the Mississippi legislature’s attempts to close the public schools to avoid integration. She soon became a participant along with her good friend Patt Derian in the Wednesdays in Mississippi movement, a moral witness of prominent White and Black northern women who traveled to Mississippi on Wednesdays to create bridges of understanding between northern and southern women across racial and class lines in Mississippi’s closed society. Wednesdays in Mississippi, organized by Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women and her friend Polly Cowan, wife of the former president of CBS television network, recognized the need for privileged women to speak up for and with less privileged ones.

Working with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Winifred Green traveled throughout the South to recruit civil rights activists, including Black families willing to enroll their children in White schools. She was one of the few homegrown, grassroots White activists in the Mississippi movement. She spoke up and marched and did whatever it took working with her Black sisters in the movement including Unita Blackwell, who became the first Black woman mayor in Mississippi after a life of cotton picking, Fannie Lou Hamer, and lesser known but equally courageous women like Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter, who with her husband Matthew Carter enrolled seven of their thirteen children in local White schools in Sunflower County, Mississippi in the fall of 1965. I was privileged to be their attorney. The owner of the local plantation where the Carters lived and worked as sharecroppers ordered the Carters to withdraw their children or be evicted. The Carters did not back down and were evicted and harassed and shot at. Winifred Green stood with Mrs. Carter to give those children support to achieve a better future. Eight of the Carter children graduated from what had been all-White schools in Sunflower County. Eleven of them graduated from college—seven from the once rigidly segregated University of Mississippi.

Winifred never hesitated to do whatever task was needed however challenging. In a vivid example of unsung servant leadership she was the person charged with finding and purchasing the mules for the Mule Train that left Marks, Mississippi in May 1968 to be part of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was planning at his death. She remembered she had to travel to Alabama to buy mules as she couldn’t find any for sale in Mississippi. When she arrived the mule seller had his Confederate flag prominently displayed. On the advice of a Black farmer Winifred studied the mules’ teeth to see if they were strong and as if she knew something about mules, bought them and brought them to Mississippi. She always took care of business—willing to do whatever was needed.

Winifred Green served many years on CDF’s Board of Directors and I relied on her sound historic context for current problems and strategic leadership to make progress for poor children, especially children of color and their families. Before CDF began Winifred helped our parent organization, the Washington Research Project (WRP), which grew out of the Poor People’s Campaign after Dr. King’s death, research and expose widespread illegal diversion of federal money designed to close educational inequities across the South for WRP’s and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s 1969 report Title I: Is It Helping Poor Children? She went with Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, longtime Director of CDF’s Southern Regional Office, door to door to find out why children were out of school in Georgia for our groundbreaking 1974 report Children Out of School in America. And in 1980 she started her non-profit organization, the Southern Coalition for Educational Equity. Our partnership with her and others led to the founding of the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice to pursue solutions to poverty and injustice in the poorest counties in southern rural America.

Throughout it all she mentored many next generation leaders, especially young women. Anat Kelman Shaw, CDF-Texas’s communications director, met and was impacted by Winifred at a training session for young leaders where she encouraged young people “not to be afraid to speak up about how we felt: She left a lasting impression on me… as a woman with a lot of heart, compassion, integrity, earthy humility, and strength. She seemed to possess that rare combination of being both young and old at the same time.” In her last two and half years despite severe health problems, she was always on the other end of the phone to offer ideas, insights and support to me and many others.

Making our nation and world fit for our children and grandchildren is a task for marathoners – not sprinters or dabblers or showboaters who are here today and gone tomorrow. Transforming change is a complex, long-term and never-ending struggle that must be pursued with urgency and persistence. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote: “There are those who struggle for a day and they are good. There are those who struggle for a year and they are better. There are those who struggle all their lives. These are the indispensable ones.” Winifred Green was an indispensable one and all the lives she touched and our nation are the better because she lived.

LEADING THE MARCH TOWARDS CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Release Date: February 5, 2016 

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. . . . I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”

--Bryan Stevenson, Author of Just Mercy and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative

Bryan Stevenson’s inspiring and best-selling book Just Mercy shares some of the fruits of his lifelong fight to push our nation closer to true justice. In January our nation took two more steps forward in the ongoing struggle to treat children like children and ensure a fairer justice system for all, especially for our poor and those of color.

In 2012 Bryan Stevenson won the landmark United States Supreme Court case Miller v. Alabama banning mandatory sentences of life in prison without parole for children 17-years-old and younger. Until then the United States was the only country in the world that routinely condemned children convicted of crimes as young as 13 and 14 to die in prison. After that ruling most states that had sentenced youths to mandatory life sentences gave them the opportunity to argue for reduced sentences or apply for parole. Seven did not: Alabama, Colorado, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana and Pennsylvania. Three of these, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Michigan, accounted for more than 1,100 of the 1,200-1,500 inmates still imprisoned for crimes committed as children. A January 25 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Montgomery v. Louisiana made clear that the Miller decision must be applied retroactively in every state. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the decision, “The opportunity for release will be afforded to those who demonstrate the truth of Miller’s central intuition — that children who commit even heinous crimes are capable of change.”

One of Bryan Stevenson’s searing stories in Just Mercy is about a child sentenced to life in prison without parole. Ian Manuel pled guilty to armed robbery and attempted murder for a crime he committed with two older boys when he was thirteen. He was incarcerated at Apalachee Correctional Institution in Florida, an adult prison, and sent to solitary confinement: “Solitary confinement at Apalachee means living in a concrete box the size of a walk-in closet . . . If you shout or scream, your time in solitary is extended; if you hurt yourself by refusing to eat or mutilating your body, your time in solitary is extended . . . In solitary Ian became a self-described ‘cutter’; he would take anything sharp on his food tray to cut his wrists and arms just to watch himself bleed. His mental health unraveled, and he attempted suicide several times. Each time he hurt himself or acted out, his time in isolation was extended. Ian spent 18 years in uninterrupted solitary confinement”—despite calls from even his victim about his inhumane confinement.

Tragically Ian Manuel’s story is not unique. The same day the U.S. Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Louisiana, President Obama announced a ban on solitary confinement in the federal prison system for all children and youths, and for adults incarcerated for “low-level infractions” in an executive action that should serve as a model for all states and local jurisdictions. The President wrote solitary confinement “has been linked to depression, alienation, withdrawal, a reduced ability to interact with others and the potential for violent behavior. Some studies indicate that it can worsen existing mental illnesses and even trigger new ones. Prisoners in solitary are more likely to commit suicide, especially juveniles and people with mental illnesses. The United States is a nation of second chances, but the experience of solitary confinement too often undercuts that second chance. . . . In America, we believe in redemption. We believe, in the words of Pope Francis, that ‘every human person is endowed with an inalienable dignity, and society can only benefit from the rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes.’ We believe that when people make mistakes, they deserve the opportunity to remake their lives. And if we can give them the hope of a better future, and a way to get back on their feet, then we will leave our children with a country that is safer, stronger and worthy of our highest ideals.”

Reaching that vision of America—the one that believes in redemption and hope and equal justice for all—is the goal Bryan Stevenson has been striving for throughout his life. His critical victories over 30 years exonerating innocent death row prisoners and helping ensure fairer treatment for others, along with his earlier success before the U.S. Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons that banned the execution of children have convinced him you cannot make a difference and create justice until you get close to the people who are struggling. He has said, “All of my clients are broken. They’ve been broken by poverty. They’ve been broken by racism. They’ve been broken by inequality. They’ve been broken by injustice. . . . When you’re broken you need grace. When you’re broken you need love. When you’re broken you need fellowship. When you’re broken you need understanding. When you’re broken you need vision.” Bryan Stevenson is unwavering in that vision and in lifting his voice of great moral clarity at the forefront of the struggle. Every new hard-earned and overdue victory should remind us all that we must keep moving towards greater justice for all.

Hungry Children In Rich America

Release Date: January 29, 2016 

Sarah is three years old. She and her six-year-old brother, Bryce, are inseparable except when it’s time for him to visit the summer food program that provides meals at a school near his Ohio home for children who otherwise would go hungry. Sarah’s too young to make the trip. One morning after Bryce had his fill of food for the day he made a detour before heading home. He walked to the trash cans and began rummaging through food others threw away. Winnie Brewer, the Food Services Supervisor in Marion City Schools, noticed the little boy and tapped him on the shoulder to ask why he was sifting through the garbage. “My little sister,” he explained. “She’s hungry.” Bringing her leftover food was the only way he knew to help.

 “We run into a lot of situations where kids will come and say they have younger siblings at home,” Brewer says. “They always want to know if they can take something back.” After Brewer spoke with Bryce, staff members followed him home with a care package for little Sarah. This was a temporary solution to a huge problem Brewer worries about every day. “Until we see that child digging food out of a trash can, it doesn’t hit home,” Brewer says. “Once it does, you know you have to do something.”

Nearly 220,000 Ohio children under six are poor and young children of color are more likely to be poor. More than half (55.5 percent) of Black children, 40.3 percent of Hispanic, and 19.1 percent of White children under six in Ohio are poor; 21 percent of them live in families where at least one parent works full-time year-round; 47 percent have at least one parent working part of the year or part-time; and 32 percent have no employed parent. Nearly one in four Ohio children lacks consistent access to adequate food—that’s 653,410 Ohio children of all ages in every corner of the state. Nationally, 15.3 million children were food insecure in 2014. The majority live in families with one or more working adults—but are still unable to consistently afford enough food to keep the wolves of hunger from their door.

There is no excuse for any child in America to go hungry and malnourished in the richest nation on Earth. Yet child hunger is a widespread, urgent and shameful problem that cannot wait. We all have to do something—now. Bryce and Sarah (names were changed to protect their identities) are far from alone as shown in a new Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio searing report calling to end the childhood hunger many thousands of Ohio’s youngest children suffer every day. Babies, toddlers, and preschoolers suffering hunger and malnutrition face increased odds of negative health outcomes during their years of greatest brain development. Food insecure children under age five are:

• Nearly two times more likely to be in “fair or poor health”;
• Nearly two times more likely to experience developmental delays;
• Two times as likely to have behavioral problems;
• More than twice as likely to be hospitalized;
• Two and a half times more likely to have headaches, and
• Three times more likely to have stomach aches.

Food insecure children are more likely to be behind in social skills and reading performance in kindergarten. By elementary school they are four times more likely to need mental health counseling. Risks keep accumulating: malnutrition from childhood food insecurity has been linked to adult diseases including diabetes, hyperlipidemia and cardiovascular disease. The stress and anxiety of early childhood hunger also make it harder to learn skills that help later relationship development, school success and workplace productivity.

Babies born to food insecure mothers face tragic odds: they are more likely to be born pre-term and at low birthweight and to struggle with breastfeeding which contributes to increased infant mortality rates. Babies who survive are more likely to struggle with disabilities during childhood and adolescence and face higher risks of chronic disease as adults. School-age food supports of free and reduced price breakfast and lunch are critically important to the health and academic success of older children but young children should not be forced to suffer from lack of food. Not a single parent or grandparent would want our young children or grandchildren rummaging through trash cans seeking food for younger brothers and sisters.

It’s long past time for political leaders at every level and all of us to end child hunger. Mrs. Coretta Scott King once said, “I must remind you that starving a child is violence.” Continuing to condone the pain of hunger and malnutrition in America is unforgivable. Please demand our political leaders act right now.

A Single Spark

Release Date: January 22, 2016 

"As we marched down the street, I felt inspired that our scholars pulled together with pride and courage fighting for what they know to be true. I saw big smiles filled with pride. I also felt angry because of the disregard for scholars but motivated by their willingness to fight.” 

- Tyra Griffith, Urban Impact's CDF Freedom Schools® student-teacher

Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. should sharply remind us that the Civil Rights Movement should never just be chapters in history books. I was so proud of high school students from Seattle, Washington who learned how they could make a difference in the world around them. They took lessons from the Civil Rights Movement’s 1961 Freedom Rides when Blacks and Whites put their lives on the line to ride interstate buses into the segregated South. This bold student-led nonviolent action inspired a student-led action in 2015 that turned into a victory for many low-income Seattle students who need to ride city buses to get to school. This is the power of learning history and learning from history – the truth can set us free.

Seattle students, many from Rainier Beach High School, took part in the 2015 Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools® program at two sites sponsored by Urban Impact, a local community-based organization. As part of a national day of social action, the students learned how they can use their voices to make policy change. Like the Freedom Riders, they realized they couldn’t count on riding the bus to get where they needed to go—most of all, to school—because they couldn’t afford it.

Rainier Beach High School students marching

Over 80 percent of children at Rainier Beach High School qualify for free or reduced price lunch. The city only provided transportation for middle and high school students who lived more than two miles away from school, which disproportionately impacted students at Rainier Beach and other high poverty schools. The hardships for students like sophomore Mariam Bayo dramatically illustrated the challenges. Mariam’s family couldn’t afford the $1.50 bus fare each way and her asthma made the nearly two mile walk to school especially difficult. She often got chest pains while walking and didn’t always have access to medicine. Often late for school, her grades suffered and by the end of her 9th grade year she was failing several classes.

Other students were concerned about walking through unsafe neighborhoods, especially following after-school activities after dark. So for their day of social action, 130 students marched to City Hall where Mariam and others testified to city leaders about why more children needed transit passes to get to school. The Seattle Transit Riders Union supported the children; one leader told the Seattle Times, “Fifteen dollars per week, or $54 for a monthly pass, is too much for low-income families to pay just to get their kids to school. For many low-income students, public transit means freedom.”

Mariam became part of the Seattle School District-approved pilot program at the start of the school year giving transit passes to 50 low-income students. With the bus pass in hand, Mariam was getting to school on time and her grades soared to all As and Bs. She and other students shared the impact the transit passes had made in their lives at a Town Hall style meeting they organized. The City Council then approved the 2016 budget including $1 million for bus passes for middle and high school students who are eligible for the federal free- or reduced-price lunch program and live one to two miles from their school. Mariam says, “Freedom Schools was the most amazing thing that happened to me ever.”

Communities and children across the country need to believe they can stay on the march towards justice, just as Mariam Bayo is doing. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be proud of the Seattle students’ actions to break down a barrier to children getting to school.

Keeping Children Healthy, In School, and Learning

Release Date: January 15, 2016 

Brandon, a six-year-old in the Houston Independent School District, had two working parents until his father was laid off. Brandon lost his health insurance when his father lost his job. Brandon’s mother quickly scrambled to try to enroll her son who has asthma in new coverage, but met some obstacles and didn’t know where to turn. Then the school district, which had been working with the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) and AASA (The School Superintendents Association), through a partnership supported by The Atlantic Philanthropies, stepped in and helped her find coverage for Brandon under the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). With his new health coverage, doctors discovered Brandon also had high blood pressure and prescribed medicine to control it. Now the school nurse monitors his blood pressure every day and Brandon is healthy and happy to be in school learning.

Watch Brandon's Story

This morning, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Acting Deputy Secretary Mary Wakefield on behalf of HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell and Acting U.S. Department of Education Secretary John King spoke from Brandon’s school district to encourage other districts across our country to take important steps to ensure children everywhere are in school each day healthy and ready to learn. They called on school districts to recognize the strong link between children’s health and academic performance and to forge deeper connections between health and education for students and families by increasing access to health insurance coverage and health care, creating school environments with physical and mental health supports to help students succeed, and strengthening coordination between health and education systems at the local and state levels. The Secretaries urged state and local health and education entities to collaborate around five action items:

1. Helping eligible students and family members enroll in health insurance;
2.  Providing and expanding Medicaid reimbursable health services in schools, including immunizations, health screenings and others;
3. Providing or expanding services that support at-risk students, including through Medicaid-funded case management;
4. Promoting healthy school practices through nutrition, physical activity, and health education; and
5. Building local partnerships and participating in hospital community needs assessments.
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The Departments of Health and Human Services and Education have created a toolkit of existing resources to support real action in states and communities to strengthen the link between health and education. CDF and AASA’s school-based child health outreach and enrollment model that links health enrollment to school enrollment is one the Secretaries highlight as a best practice to increase enrollment in health coverage for students and their families. After five years of piloting school-based child health outreach and enrollment in Texas, in 2007 CDF began working in partnership with AASA to introduce and expand health enrollment as a routine and ongoing part of school district operations. The model provides a basic question for districts to add to their school registration materials: “What type of medical insurance do you have for this child?” Parents who answer “none” are noted and able to receive information from school district staff on Medicaid, CHIP or other health coverage options. But it doesn’t stop there. Parents can receive help applying for or renewing coverage for their children and for themselves and are introduced to community partners who can help them successfully navigate the process.

CDF and AASA over the years have partnered with school districts in Texas, California, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi including urban, rural and suburban school systems serving elementary through high schools and hundreds of thousands of Black, Latino, Asian and White students. This work has gotten many children health coverage and led to an increased awareness among school superintendents, staff and parents about the important and positive connection between health and academic success. Many now see a link between chronic absences, poor health and lack of health coverage. When children with chronic conditions like asthma have health insurance allowing them regular access to doctors and needed treatment, they come back to school healthier just as Brandon has.

In one of these districts, the Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District (ECISD) in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, health coverage screening has been built into the daily operations of Parental Involvement Assistants, or PIAs. Each of the district’s 41 school campuses has a PIA who, among other responsibilities, calls absent students’ homes every morning to ask why students are missing school. The PIAs make a home visit that same day if they don’t reach anyone, about 80 visits each day. If a child is home sick, the PIA asks about their insurance status and, if the student lacks coverage, offers the parent assistance filling out the application. During a recent phone call, a mother told the PIA all three of her children were previously enrolled in Medicaid but were no longer covered. The mother, whose native language was not English, had received three notices about renewing coverage but hadn’t understood them, and had not been able to renew. The PIA helped her navigate the process to reenroll the children in Medicaid.

Sandra Rodriguez, the district’s PIA Coordinator, is especially excited they have a new school-based health center attached to the district headquarters to refer families to through a partnership with the Doctors Hospital at Renaissance. The clinic serves all students regardless of ability to pay and served about 2,000 children, parents, and school district staff in its first four months of operation. For many Edinburg families this is the first time they can receive care near their home, school, and work, and regardless of their immigration status. Thanks to additional support from another local health system, the 945-square-mile district will soon have two mobile clinics making scheduled visits to school campuses farther from the clinic site.

More students and families need these kinds of supports. It is critically important that school districts and community partners across the country respond to Acting Secretary King’s and Secretary Burwell’s call to action to connect children to needed health coverage and ensure they’re in school and ready to learn. As Superintendent Lillian Maldonado French of the Mountain View School District in El Monte, California puts it, “Being in school matters and if we can do something to make sure our kids are in school every day, then that’s what we need to do.”

Guns Leathalize Anger and Despair

Release Date: January 8, 2016 

“Every single year, more than 30,000 Americans have their lives cut short by guns—30,000. Suicides. Domestic violence. Gang shootouts. Accidents. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost brothers and sisters, or buried their own children. Many have had to learn to live with a disability, or learned to live without the love of their life.”

President Obama spoke movingly about the lives shattered by America’s gun violence epidemic on January 5 as he announced a series of new executive actions to reduce gun violence. These new measures will not prevent every shooting that snuffs out the lives of nearly seven children to gun violence daily; they will save many lives and help staunch the relentless plague of gun violence that terrorizes our nation’s homes, schools and communities.

The President’s executive actions clarify that for purposes of requiring background checks a person does not need to sell guns in a traditional storefront to be “engaged in the business” of selling guns. Some of those who conduct sales over the Internet or at gun shows will now be required to obtain a license and run background checks on potential purchasers or face stiff penalties. These steps, coupled with greater efficiency and effectiveness in our background check system, enforcement of existing gun laws, and new investments in mental health treatment and research into gun safety technologies, are long overdue. Legislative action to strengthen huge weaknesses in our nation’s gun laws is still required but the President's common-sense executive actions move us in the right direction.

Several measures highlight one of the key components of our gun violence crisis: that much gun violence begins at home. So many wrongly believe that gun violence happens mostly “out on the streets” and others believe owning a gun will protect their family from gun violence. The opposite is true: A gun in the home increases the risk of homicide, suicide, and accidental death.

Guns lethalize anger, domestic disputes, mental illness and despair. A gun in the home makes the likelihood of homicide three times higher, suicide three to five times higher, and accidental death four times higher. The pro-gun lobby has created the fantasy of a gun as a homeowner’s perfect protection against a mythical intruder. In reality, each time a gun in the home injures or kills in self-defense, there are four unintentional shooting deaths or injuries, seven criminal assaults and homicides with a gun, and 11 completed or attempted gun suicides.

Suicides are the leading cause of gun deaths in America. In 2014, 21,334 adults, children and teens committed suicide with a gun compared to 10,945 gun homicides. Whites are most likely to die by gun suicide followed by American Indians and Alaska Natives. Whites were more than three times as likely as Blacks and nearly five times as likely as Hispanics to commit suicide by guns. In 2014, 929 children and teens committed suicide with a gun and 1,455 children and teens died in gun homicides.

Guns lethalize suicide attempts. Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Means Matter suicide prevention campaign explains, “Every study that has examined the issue to date has found that within the U.S., access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk.” People who die by suicide are more likely to live in homes with guns. States with high gun ownership levels have higher suicide rates because they have more gun suicides while the non-firearm suicide rate is about equal across states. They sum it up simply: “What is it about guns? Guns are more lethal than other suicide means. They’re quick. And they’re irreversible. About 85 percent of attempts with a firearm are fatal: that’s a much higher case fatality rate than for nearly every other method.” Nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive do not go on to die of suicide later—but most people who use a gun for their first try do not get a second chance.

Guns can lethalize domestic violence. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence notes the presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide 500 percent. CDF noted in its Amicus Brief with the American Academy of Pediatrics in the U.S. Supreme Court case U.S. v. Castleman, that even when it is not used to kill, a gun wielded by a domestic abuser increases the frequency of ongoing, nonfatal domestic abuse by increasing the abuser’s ability to control a victim; the ever-present threat of gun violence makes it more difficult for victims to leave their abusers. Children are severely impacted. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Castleman that domestic violence abusers are prohibited from possessing guns regardless of whether “violent force” is an element of the underlying offense.

In August 2015, Texas mother Valerie Jackson, her husband, and her six children, ages six through 13, were killed by a gun inside their home by her ex-partner, the oldest child’s father. The FBI defines a “mass murder” as an event in which four or more people are killed. By that definition the majority of “mass shootings” are cases of domestic violence and the majority of mass shooting victims are women and children. Valerie Jackson’s shooter was an ex-felon who had been arrested and charged for domestic violence against her in the past, and there was a warrant out for his arrest for a new charge of violence against her when he killed her and her entire family. He would not have been able to pass a background check to purchase the gun he used in the murders—but he avoided one by buying the gun online, one of the loopholes President Obama’s executive actions aim to help close.

We can do better. We must do better. President Obama said: “We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one . . .” He echoes Nobel Literature Laureate Albert Camus’ words while speaking at a Dominican Monastery in 1948: “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.” Camus described our responsibility as human beings “if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it” and “to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents.”  “I continue,” he said “to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die." And so must every one of us in our gun saturated nation which takes the life of a child or teen every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 every day, 48 every week, and more than 2,500 a year.

Whither America

Release Date: January 1, 2016 

"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. . . . I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word[.]”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1964

The start of this New Year finds America at an inflection point as wars and terrorism abroad are echoed in violence, suspicion, and fear at home. How will we meet the moment? Hundreds of organizations and individuals have signed on to the urgent message of the campaign We Are Better Than This: “We grieve the many lives that have been lost or painfully transformed in recent weeks through extreme acts of violence. And we are appalled by the surge of divisive rhetoric that sows the seeds of more violence to come. A dangerous tide of hatred, violence, and suspicion is rising in America—whether aimed at Arab and Muslim Americans, women and the places we seek health care, Black people, immigrants and refugees, or people just going about their daily lives. This tide is made more dangerous by easy access to guns. When has hate ever led to progress? Is this really what we want America to be? We are better than this.”

We are better than this. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Protestant theologian who died opposing Hitler’s holocaust, believed that the test of the morality of a society is how it treats its children. We flunk Bonhoeffer’s test every hour of every day in America as we let the violence of guns and the violence of poverty relentlessly stalk and sap countless child lives. A child or teen is killed by a gun every three and a half hours, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week. More than 15.5 million children are poor and children are the poorest age group in America—the world’s largest economy. And the younger children are the poorer they are. Children of color, already the majority of our youngest children, soon will be the majority of our children in 2020. Millions of them lack their basic needs for enough food, decent housing, health care and quality early childhood supports during their years of greatest brain development. And over six decades after Brown v. Board of Education, a majority of children of color are still waiting for a fair and equal chance to learn. A majority of all fourth and eighth grade public school students and more than 80 percent of Black and 73 percent of Hispanic students in these grades cannot read or compute at grade level and face dim futures as a jobless landscape looms. They also lack assurance that their lives matter and are at great risk of being sucked into a prison pipeline. Those of us who remember McCarthyism see familiar signs in the hateful rhetoric and hatred aimed at Muslims, refugees, and immigrants. Even children report being bullied and attacked and hearing hateful words. And the pervasive and relentless threat of violence and terror continues to attack and frighten children and adults from Syria to Paris to California and in our cities and rural areas.

There is another way. Once again, Dr. King’s words lead us there—through a world that often can feel suffocated by “starless midnight” to belief in a new day. He warned us that excessive materialism, militarism, racism, and poverty could be America’s undoing but that it was up to us to act and combat these evils. The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, introducing Dr. King to a Rabbinical Assembly shortly before he was assassinated, said: “Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States. God has sent him to us.” Heschel continued, “His mission is sacred…The situation of the poor in America is our plight, our sickness. To be deaf to their cry is to condemn ourselves.” Heschel believed, “Martin Luther King, Jr., is a voice, a vision, and a way. I call upon every Jew,” and I would add, every person of faith, “to harken to his voice, to share his vision, to follow his way. The whole future of America will depend on the impact and influence of Dr. King.” I would add the world.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Dr. King also told us he had “the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” And he said: “Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. . . . Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

Let’s hear and decide that this is the voice we will follow into this New Year. And let us pray and act for an end to preventable poverty and violence in our nation beginning with our children.

A Christmas Prayer

Release Date: December 23, 2015 

This holy season as Christians honor and celebrate the birth of the world’s most famous poor baby born in a manger, I hope we all will pause to remember the 15.5 million invisible poor babies and children in our rich country who need our help to survive and thrive and reach their God-given potential. Together let us recommit ourselves to ending child poverty now. If we love America we must all stand tall against the excessive greed that tramples millions of the children entrusted to our care. Every child is a sacred gift and deserves just treatment in our nation and world.

Praying and Standing for Children

We pray and stand for children blessed by parents who care and for children without a parent or anyone who cares at all.

We pray and stand for children filled with joy and for children whose days and nights are joyless.

We pray and stand for children with hope and for children whose spirits have been dimmed and dashed.

We pray and stand for children high on play and study and laughter and for children high on pot, glue, cocaine, and ecstasy.

We pray and stand for our children for whom we pray every day and for children who have no one to pray them along life’s way.

We pray and stand for children poised by circumstance to soar and conquer life’s challenges and for children bogged down by the pain of survival.

We pray and stand for children who love to read and for children who can’t read at all, for children who learn with excitement and for children told by adults that they cannot achieve.

We pray and stand for children who expect and are helped to succeed and for children whom no one believes in or helps to succeed.

We pray that we will be a help and not a hindrance to children we call our own and to all the children You created who are part of our family too.