Ella Baker: My Civil Rights Generation's 'Fundi'

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a White mother’s son—we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.
--Ella Baker 

During this last week of Women’s History Month, I wanted you to learn about Ella Baker, a transforming but too-little-known woman and overpowering justice warrior for my generation of civil rights activists. The quote above is from Ella Baker 50 years ago, and like so much about this visionary civil rights leader it is still just as relevant today. She was talking about the murders of civil rights movement workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who disappeared together in Mississippi in June 1964, and reacting to the fact that searchers sent to comb local rivers and swamps to find the bodies of Chaney, who was Black, and Goodman and Schwerner, who were White, also found the bodies of other missing Black men for whom authorities had not bothered to search. Ella Baker was an outspoken warrior against injustice and inequality her entire life, and always, always unwilling to rest. Her words continue to be a rallying cry for all of us who believe our nation still does not see and value Black and White children’s lives the same way.  

Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice Johnson Reagon featured these words in the stirring “Ella’s Song.” She was one of hundreds of young people Ella Baker mentored during the civil rights movement. I was one of them who first met Mrs. Baker during my senior year at Spelman College in Atlanta. She was a staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and was often a powerful behind-the-scenes advisor to close colleagues like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ella Baker believed in servant leadership and shared leadership rather than charismatic leadership and encouraged young people like me to find and lift our own voices and join them with others. She was instrumental in founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and fought to make sure we retained our own independent organization as students rather than simply becoming the youth arm of the Dr. King-led SCLC. Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Bob Moses, and many other fellow student activists and young activists were all influenced by her example, counsel and convening and share a special debt of reverence and gratitude. Ella Baker was tough and disciplined and demanded the best of the young and older adults around her. She understood that movement building was about more than protests and meetings and speeches—it was hard, daily, persistent, and sacrificial behind-the-scenes work. She was an institution builder and stressed the importance of strong institutions that could last over time rather than reliance on a single strong leader. 

Ella Baker was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia. She had a strict mother, a warm and caring father, and a large extended family of grandparents, uncles, and aunts who shared what they had with the poor. She was a fighter and as a child beat up White children who called her names. Since there was no schooling for Black children beyond elementary years in her area, she went off to boarding school at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was valedictorian of her high school and college graduating classes. She moved to Harlem, got caught up in its excitement, and went everywhere to hear lectures and speeches and read in libraries to learn everything she could. After working as a domestic and as a waitress, she got a job with the Negro National News published by George Schuyler who later recommended her for a job at the NAACP. She rapidly rose through NAACP ranks. “Wherever she went,” her biographer and friend Joanne Grant wrote in Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, “she created a whirlwind, leaving a scatter of papers, notes, leaflets, church programs, and phone numbers in her wake. . . She never let up her struggle to increase the role of the rank and file.”

Ella Baker pushed for organizational structure and rules in the NAACP just as she did later at SCLC and SNCC. Ella Baker was the one who sat down with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levinson to discuss how to create a continuing movement out of the Montgomery bus boycott, which led to SCLC’s formation. As the first staff member hired for SCLC, it was Ella Baker who tried to put the new organization in operating order so that Dr. King was not just a leader who reacted to and jumped from one event to the next. She worked to give SCLC the capacity to plan and implement action. And Ella Baker convinced Dr. King to bring me and about 200 other Black college students who had been arrested for engaging in sit-in protests to open up lunch counters around the South to a meeting at her alma mater, Shaw University. My first plane ride ever was from Atlanta to Raleigh for that meeting. SNCC was the meeting’s result.      

Ella Baker was fully aware of but unintimidated by the men she worked with who devalued the advice of women and sometimes resented her forcefulness, prodding, and “mothering.” She made no special effort to be ingratiating. She labored at SCLC as she had at the NAACP to raise money, conduct voter registration drives, speak to citizens groups (sometimes ten times a day), and travel to community after community to help people help themselves. She warned against SCLC becoming “a cult of personality” for Dr. King rather than a means of empowering others, and she eventually left SCLC after deciding that movement building was more important than the specific organization and personalities involved—another of her lessons that is so relevant today. 

At a gathering celebrating Ella Baker’s 75th birthday, Bob Moses called her the “Fundi,” the person in the community who masters a craft with the help of the community and teaches it to other people. Fundi became the title of a film on her extraordinary life and work. Ella Baker died in 1986 on her 83rd birthday. I remember her counsel as I think about sustaining and strengthening the Children's Defense Fund’s mission today and future tomorrow for the long haul struggle to create and maintain a level playing field for every child. I learned from her the crucial importance of training a successor generation of young servant-leaders which has been a strong priority of CDF’s since its inception. Policies are no better than the people who are implementing them and their commitment to just treatment of children and the poor. I am so proud that over 13,000 college students have gone through training at CDF’s Ella Baker Child Policy Institute at the former Alex Haley Farm, that more than 113,000 children have gone through the CDF Freedom Schools® program with a sense of commitment to something beyond themselves, and that many CDF alumni are doing wonderful public service across the country. This is one way CDF honors her legacy along with other great unsung women justice warriors like Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell, and Septima Clark who too few ever hear of but we all owe a great debt of gratitude. 

We also all honor Ella Baker by keeping her belief in freedom and equality alive until it becomes reality for every mother’s child. In a nation where Black children are more than three times as likely to be poor as White children; where Black babies are more than twice as likely as White babies to die before their first birthdays and Black children are twice as likely to die before their 18th birthdays as White children; where more than 80 percent of fourth and eighth grade Black public school students cannot read or compute at grade level and Black children are more than twice as likely to drop out as White children; where gun violence is the leading cause of death among Black children ages 1-19 and Black children and teens are nearly five times more likely to die from gun violence than White children and teens; and where Black mothers’ sons can be seen and treated as lethal threats for wearing hoodies in the rain or refusing to turn their car radios down, we who believe in freedom still cannot rest.

The Invisible Backbone Leaders of Transforming Social Change

Women’s History Month is a reminder that in every major American social reform movement, women have always played a critical role. Women at the forefront, acting as the catalyst for progress when it needs to happen, make the front pages and the history books. But women have also always been the invisible backbone, unseen but strong, of transforming social movements and of all anchor institutions in society -- our families, congregations, schools, and communities -- employing behind the scenes quiet essential leadership and organizational, communication, and fundraising skills to get things done. 

 

Many people know Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. first rose to national prominence as a civil rights leader by serving as a spokesperson in Montgomery, Alabama during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956. Not enough of us recognize that there would not have been a bus boycott that needed a leader without a vigilant community catalyst working behind the scenes looking for the right spark to challenge hated bus segregation. The December 1955 arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks, who refused to move from her seat at the front of the “colored” section of her bus when the White section got too full, was not the first such arrest in Montgomery but it made history because she was the right public face that could mobilize the entire Black community. And behind that bus boycott was an unknown community leader named Jo Ann Robinson who had been pushing for change in Montgomery buses and had been putting the community infrastructure in place long before Rosa Parks was arrested. Robinson was vigilant and ready to spring into action when the right opportunity arose. 

Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College, was president of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a group of Black women civic leaders in Montgomery. She had been thrown off a city bus in 1949 for sitting too close to the front although the bus was nearly empty. This infuriating experience was all too common among Montgomery’s Black residents -- and the WPC had already chosen to make changing the bus system one of their priorities. Their 1954 letter to Montgomery Mayor W.A. Gayle raised the possibility of a city-wide bus boycott: “More and more of our people are already arranging with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers . . . We, the Council, believe that when this matter has been put before you and the Commissioners, that agreeable terms can be met in a quiet and unostensible manner to the satisfaction of all concerned.” But when the women’s requests for “agreeable terms” went unanswered, their plans for a boycott went forward. They just needed the right moment and face -- and when that moment came Jo Ann Robinson knew what to do. 

She and other women did not wait for male leaders to decide on a response before acting. She later wrote about the night after Mrs. Parks was arrested: “Some of the [Women’s Political Council] officers previously had discussed plans for distributing thousands of notices announcing a bus boycott. Now the time had come for me to write just such a notice.” She called her colleague John Cannon, chair of Alabama State College’s business department, and two trusted students, who immediately agreed to meet her at the college where Cannon had access to the copying machines. They worked together until four in the morning making copies of the leaflet Jo Ann Robinson had prepared:

“Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down . . . This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday.”        

She and her two students worked for three more hours mapping out distribution routes, and as soon as she finished teaching her 8 o’clock class that morning Jo Ann Robinson began calling other members of the WPC and driving around the city to meet them at strategic drop-off locations with bundles of leaflets. She said:

“By 2 o’clock, thousands of the mimeographed handbills had changed hands many times. Practically every black man, woman, and child in Montgomery knew the plan and was passing the word along. No one knew where the notices had come from or who had arranged for their circulation, and no one cared. Those who passed them on did so efficiently, quietly, and without comment. But deep within the heart of every black person was a joy he or she dared not reveal.”

Under Jo Ann Robinson’s direction, more than 50,000 leaflets were produced and distributed that day. The boycott was an enormous success, and as the day-long boycott became a year-long crusade, women remained its backbone. When a public spokesperson was needed at the very start of the boycott, behind the scenes Robinson, who was an active member of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, recommended her congregation’s new 26-year-old pastor Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association. The WPC continued to be instrumental in organizing the carpools that made the boycott possible. Women formed fundraising clubs to sell sweet potato pies and other baked goods and competed every week to see which club could earn the most money to support the Montgomery Improvement Association. The federal lawsuit that was filed and successfully struck down bus segregation, Browder v. Gayle, had four Black women plaintiffs. Black women were the unrecognized faceless leaders of change aided by some prominent White women like Virginia Durr. 

Jo Ann Robinson continued to work quietly behind the scenes, but was known well enough to become a target of violence like Dr. King and many others: one police officer threw a rock through her home’s window and another poured acid on her car. That did not stop her. As Dr. King put it, “Apparently indefatigable, she, perhaps more than any other person, was active on every level of the protest.” Meanwhile the boycott she and other women began sparked a movement that changed our nation and world. Jo Ann Robinson and other unsung heroines of the civil rights movement remain role models for the tireless indispensable behind-the-scenes leaders whose strength and determination we desperately need right now. Our children are waiting every day for strong black female leaders and their allies to break up the cradle to prison pipeline crisis and get them the quality early childhood education and schools that will prepare them for the future.

Make Hard Work Pay -- Again

One of our country’s most cherished values is the idea that if you work hard you can get ahead, be part of the middle class, raise a family comfortably, and ensure your children will do better than you did. But this is a hollow promise to countless families today. The sad truth is you can work full time in America and not be able to meet your family’s basic needs. A parent working full time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour earns $15,080 a year before taxes. That’s $4,700 below the poverty level for a parent with two children. Two-thirds of the 16.1 million poor children in America live with an adult who works, and 30 percent live with an adult who works full time year-round.

 

As CDF’s recently released The State of America’s Children 2014 report highlights, in no state can a parent working full time at the minimum wage afford a fair-market rent two-bedroom apartment and have enough left over to pay for food, utilities, and other necessities. Child care costs alone can eat up more than half of a parent’s paycheck: The average cost of center-based child care for an infant is $9,500 a year. Most experts agree that families need to earn twice the poverty level to be able to begin to provide adequately for their children.

Today we have an opportunity to begin to realign our values by enacting the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 which would raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour, the first increase since 2009, and raise the minimum wage for tipped workers for the first time since 1991. The current federal minimum wage is worth 32 percent less in inflation-adjusted terms than at its peak in 1968. If it had grown at the same rate as wages for a typical worker in America since 1968 it would already be $10.65 an hour. But if it had grown at the same rate as productivity of the economy during that period it would be $18.30 today. So increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would restore the minimum wage closer to what it would have been if it had kept up with average wages but still leave it far below what it should be, given productivity and economic growth since the late 1960s.

Nationwide, increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 would increase a full-time worker’s salary to $21,008 and put $31 billion additional dollars in the pockets of as many as 24.5 million low-wage workers according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congress’ official budget arbiter. It would lift 900,000 people above the official poverty threshold. Nearly 90 percent of those benefiting would be 20 years or older and over half would be working full time. According to the Economic Policy Institute those affected by the minimum wage increase earn on average half of their family’s total income. The Economic Policy Institute has also found more than a quarter of those benefiting would be parents. 

Most importantly, the increase to $10.10 an hour would improve the lives of an estimated 14 million children — nearly one in five children in America — by helping their parents put nutritious food on the table, keep a roof over their families’ heads, and make sure their children get the health care they need to ensure they can develop to their full potential. And an increase in the minimum wage would not cost the government anything — as the CBO acknowledged, it might even save money in the short term as people with increased incomes need fewer government benefits and pay more in taxes.

The increase also would help spur the economy. Recent research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that raising the minimum wage to $10 could increase U.S. gross domestic product by up to 0.3 percentage points in the short term. Some resist a minimum wage increase because of fears it would lead to job losses, but after extensive research the latest consensus in the field is that this is not the case. This is why more than 600 economists, including seven Nobel Laureates, have endorsed the increase to $10.10, saying in a joint letter to President Obama and congressional leaders: “In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of the evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effects on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weaknesses in the labor market.” And even if you don’t believe the newest research is the most valid, and look instead at all the research combined, as the Congressional Budget Office conservatively did in its February 18^th report, CBO’s best estimate was that this change would reduce employment by 0.3 percent. Should we really deny a certain income boost to 24.5 million workers to spare a much smaller number uncertain job loss? Of course not. If Congress is worried about uncertain job losses from a minimum wage increase, they could offset them through complementary policies like changes to the Earned Income Tax Credit, which boosts employment among low- and mid-income earners, or private or public sector jobs programs.

Increasing the minimum wage would give an immediate pay raise to millions of workers in America who are still waiting for the country’s economic recovery to reach them. No one in rich America should be working full time and be forced to live in poverty. That’s why nearly three-quarters of Americans support raising the minimum wage, including a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. There is no reason for Congress to continue to deny hard-working Americans, many of them parents, a long overdue and needed pay raise. It’s long past time to begin to make work pay again.

Struggling to Change What You're Given

I feel like a lot of people when they encounter adversity—a lot will just say, “Oh, well, I guess I can’t do that. I’m going to sit here and not do anything,” or, “I’m going to throw myself a pity party.” But beat the odds. I feel like it’s an opening, and it shows you that whatever you face in life, that there is a way out, and that you can change what you’re given. You don’t have to accept what happens to you. You’re fully capable of doing whatever it takes to change whatever has happened to you, to change your future—maybe not your past but your future.

Seventeen-year-old Theresa Tran is one of this year’s winners of the Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio’s Beat the Odds® scholarships after overcoming tough odds including physical disability, the death of a beloved sibling, and a father who suddenly abandoned the family and left her mother to raise four children alone. Theresa says she had to be a survivor right from the start:

The odds were against me from the moment I was born. The chances of my survival were very slim, since I was born three-months premature and weighed only 1 lb. and 10 oz. The doctors just looked at my mom and said, “She won’t make it until tomorrow.” My dad refused to come see me and instead argued with my mom, saying that there wasn’t a point to my living, because I was already messed up. My mom didn’t give up on me, though, and I began to fight for my life, unaware that this was the first of many times where I’d be a fighter.

Soon after birth Theresa was diagnosed with spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy. Her closest brother Daniel, only eight months older because Theresa had been born so prematurely, and their older brother David helped protect Theresa from other children’s teasing and stares. Five days before her fourth birthday, Theresa underwent corrective surgery to allow her to walk more easily. It's a date that should have been a happy milestone, but as family and friends were picking up balloons and flowers later that day to celebrate, they were in a car accident, and 5-year-old Daniel was killed.
Theresa says:

After Daniel passed away, I wasn’t the same, because he was my best friend, confidant, and protector. During elementary school, I was mourning, but that didn’t stop kids from viciously teasing me and humiliating me constantly because of my limp and an unusual gait. I didn’t want to go to school, because I was defenseless, so going to school was a daily nightmare. Yet because of the constant torment, I became emotionally strong. I figured if I were strong, if my tormentors couldn’t see me cry, then I’d be OK.

By middle school Theresa had finally started to believe the worst of the hard times were behind her when her world fell apart again. Her father left one day without mentioning where he was headed and never returned. After filing a missing person report her frantic mother eventually learned that he had paid a coworker to drive him to the airport and boarded a flight to his native Vietnam, leaving his family behind with no warning and no way to contact him.
As her mother continued working several jobs to keep the family afloat, Theresa quickly took on much of the responsibility for caring for herself and her two younger siblings, and she began to look at school in a new way—as a refuge. “School is the place I can get away from all the stress and troubles going on around me,” she says. “I have no control over many things in my life, but my academics are up to me.” Theresa loved the feeling of being able to see all the hard work she put into a project or test immediately pay off, and good grades were an even greater incentive for her to “focus on what you’re good at and what you can do and not what you can’t.”
Theresa is now a high school senior and president of her class, with a grade point average above 4.0. She hopes to major in biochemistry pre-med and become an orthopedic surgeon. “I’ve always felt the compelling obligation to help others, and that I must give back to all the doctors who’ve helped me,” she explains. She also says:

I hope [my story] can help others going through adversity and show those people that they’re not alone. ... Despite these challenges, I’ve gotten back up and faced each day with an optimistic attitude. My past does not define me or my future, but all of these hardships have molded me into the person I am today.

Theresa and her 15 fellow Beat the Odds scholarship winners the Children’s Defense Fund is honoring in Ohio, Minnesota, and New York in March are a genuine inspiration for other young people and all of us who face steep odds. How many children are we losing who lack Theresa’s resilience and grit? How do we instill and nurture the same sense of hope and perseverance in their ability to struggle to make the future different despite the odds stacked against millions of them by poverty, disabilities, and inadequate school and community support? And how do we all struggle together to change unjust policies and practices, structural poverty, racial disparities, violence, and disabilities children can’t control while we lend a helping hand and encouragement to help as many individual children as possible? Every child deserves a level playing field on which to grow and contribute. That is America’s dream.

Honoring Septima Clark

During this Black History Month I was deeply honored to be inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame at the same time as Mrs. Septima Clark -- the woman Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “Mother of the Movement.” Readers familiar with Brian Lanker’s marvelous book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America will recognize Mrs. Clark as the proud, strong, and beautiful woman with silver braids whose portrait graces the front cover. Brian captured her indomitable spirit a few weeks before her death in 1987 at age 89 and called me with excitement saying he knew after a very few moments and a few shots that he had found his cover. Throughout much of her long life Mrs. Clark was often at odds with South Carolina leaders and made other enemies as she traveled throughout the Deep South pioneering literacy and citizenship education for Black Americans. Yet her richly deserved Hall of Fame induction symbolizes just how far South Carolina and the nation have come -- in part thanks to the work of citizen heroines like Mrs. Clark.

Mrs. Clark was born in Charleston in 1898, the second of eight children born to a former slave father and laundrywoman mother. She graduated from Avery Normal Institute in 1916 with a teaching certificate, but because the city of Charleston would not hire Black teachers, she found a job in a rural community on Johns Island, South Carolina. The White teacher in that community had only three White students but was paid $85 a month, while the Black school had two teachers for 132 children and the two Black teachers were paid a combined salary of $60. It was the first of many injustices throughout her long career. But as time went on she started speaking out even when others around her would not. As she put it simply years later: “They were afraid, but I wasn’t.” 

In 1919 Mrs. Clark returned to Charleston, where she volunteered for a NAACP petition effort that ultimately changed the local law prohibiting Black teachers. For the next several decades she taught primarily in Charleston and Columbia while continuing her own education in the summers -- at Columbia University in New York; at Atlanta University, where W.E.B. DuBois was one of her professors; at Benedict College, where she finally received a bachelor’s degree; and at Hampton Institute; where she earned her master’s. She fought for equalization of salaries for Black and White teachers in South Carolina. After Federal District Court Judge J. Waties Waring, following the law rather than White southern mores, ordered equal pay for teachers and also ruled that Black citizens must be permitted to vote in primary elections, he and his wife and Septima became friends and social pariahs in their communities. But after forty years her career as a South Carolina public school teacher came to an abrupt halt in 1956 when the state legislature ruled that state employees could not belong to the NAACP. Mrs. Clark refused to resign or lie about her membership, and was dismissed.

Mrs. Clark signed her name to a letter to 726 other Black teachers asking them to protest the law, but only 11 of them agreed to attend a meeting with her and the superintendent, and on the day of the meeting only four showed up. She later said that effort was the big failure of her life, and she believed it failed because she tried to push the other teachers into something they weren’t ready for. The lesson she learned was that people needed to be trained first so that they would be prepared to act -- and the trainings she went on to develop helped shape the course of the civil rights movement.

Mrs. Clark had already attended several meetings at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the legendary grassroots education center devoted to social justice. In the summer of 1955 she led a workshop at Highlander on developing leadership whose participants included a shy, quiet NAACP member from Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs. Rosa Parks. After Mrs. Clark was fired from her teaching job in 1956, Highlander’s extraordinary director, Myles Horton, invited her to be Highlander’s full-time director of workshops, where she pioneered innovative programs that combined literacy education for adults with citizenship and voter education. When the state of Tennessee forced Highlander to close in 1961 Mrs. Clark continued the same work as director of education and teaching for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)’s new Citizen Education Program. Her workshops formed the basis for the Citizenship School movement she helped establish across the South.

In addition to teaching basic reading skills using familiar materials like the Sears catalog and covering practical topics like how to write checks, these “schools” taught basic civics and citizenship rights and focused on the arcane voting requirements specific to each local community that were being used to disenfranchise Black voters. Classes met on evenings and weekends in churches, store backrooms, and other available spaces. Lessons were written on dry-cleaning bags in place of blackboards. They relied on training local citizens to teach other community members; Fannie Lou Hamer was among the local leaders who volunteered. Mrs. Clark eventually helped establish and recruit and train teachers for hundreds of Citizenship Schools: “They were in people’s kitchens, in beauty parlors, and under trees in the summertime. I went all over the South, sometimes visiting three Citizenship Schools in one day…One time I heard Andy Young say that the Citizenship Schools were the base on which the whole civil rights movement was built. And that’s probably very much true.” Rosa Parks also said that while she may have sat down once, Mrs. Clark kept on working and building: “I am always very respectful and very much in awe of the presence of Septima Clark because her life story makes the effort that I have made very minute. I only hope that there is a possible chance that some of her great courage and dignity and wisdom has rubbed off on me.”

As a woman in the movement, Mrs. Clark said she felt the men around her often did not do a good job of listening to or including her or other women. Yet she observed that it was largely women who got things done: “In stories about the civil rights movement you hear mostly about the black ministers. But if you talk to the women who were there, you’ll hear another story. I think the civil rights movement would never have taken off if some women hadn’t started to speak up.” Even later in life Mrs. Clark was never hesitant to speak up. One of the injustices after her 1956 firing was that South Carolina refused to pay the pension she had earned for her forty years of teaching or the pay she would have earned in the few years before her retirement if she had not been dismissed. She did not give up on waiting for those wrongs to be righted, and in 1976 the governor reinstated her pension and in 1981 the legislature approved paying her back pay.

Although her signature accomplishment may be the programs she established for Black adults, she never lost her original and enduring passion for educating children. She celebrated her 78^th birthday by becoming the first Black woman elected to the Charleston School Board. Near the end of her life she said:

“Education is my big priority right now. I want people to see children as human beings and not to think of the money that it costs nor to think of the amount of time that it will take, but to think of the lives that can be developed into Americans who will redeem the soul of America and will really make America a great country.”

Let’s honor Septima Clark’s legacy right now by making this priority our own with urgency and perseverance.

Killed by a Gun

The headlines in the case were sadly familiar. An angry adult armed with a gun used it to shoot and kill an unarmed black teenager he thought seemed “bad”—this time, because the teenager and his friends were sitting in a car listening to music the grownup didn’t like. In this outrageous Florida case, a middle-aged white man, Michael Dunn, was convicted of three counts of attempted murder and one count of shooting a gun into an occupied car. Jurors agreed he faced no threat after he was annoyed by loud music -- coming from a car he had deliberately chosen to park next to -- and then started an argument, pulled a gun on the car’s black teens, and fired three shots at the young men inside the car as they tried to drive away from him.

But the jury could not agree on the most serious charge of first-degree murder for shooting the first seven bullets at the stationary car and hitting 17-year-old Jordan Davis in his lung, liver, and aorta. Florida’s notorious “Stand Your Ground” law, which gives gun owners a license to kill if they feel threatened, was allegedly enough for three jurors to vote against conviction. At least one juror said she believed Michael Dunn did get away with murder: “There is no longer a Jordan Davis, and there is only one reason why that is. The boy was shot and killed for reasons that should not have happened.”

In an interview with Good Morning America Jordan’s mother, Lucia McBath, said she believed the jurors in her son’s case did the best they could with the laws they had, but also made it clear she believes our nation’s existing laws did not protect Jordan or millions of other victims of gun violence in America. When asked what justice for her son would look like she answered:

“Justice for Jordan will be, ultimately, really when we change the laws. Because that will be not just justice for Jordan, and justice for Trayvon, and justice for all the children at Sandy Hook, and justice for Aurora, and justice for Virginia Tech, and the Navy Yard -- it will be justice for everyone that has suffered because of these laws, and will continue to suffer. So once the laws are changed, that’s the ultimate justice for all.”

Researchers at Texas A&M University studied the impact of Stand Your Ground laws, like the one enacted in Florida in 2005, across the country and concluded in a 2012 study that “the laws do not deter burglary, robbery, or aggravated assault” but do “lead to a statistically significant 8 percent net increase in the number of reported murders and non-negligent manslaughters.” Evidence is also clear that these laws have a disparate racial impact. Researchers from the Urban Institute found that when White shooters kill Black victims, 34 percent of the homicides are deemed justifiable, while only 3.3 percent are ruled justifiable when the situation is reversed.

Now researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research have released the results of a new study on the effectiveness of another crucial segment of our nation’s gun laws: those requiring background checks before purchasing a gun. For this study the scholars took a close look at the state of Missouri’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase law. Before it was repealed this law required all handgun purchasers in Missouri to obtain a license verifying that they had passed a background check. The researchers wanted to know what happened when this requirement was taken away -- and they learned that repealing that law has led to a 16 percent increase in Missouri’s murder rate. The study showed between 2008 and 2012 there were an additional 55 to 63 murders in Missouri each year associated with the law’s repeal. During those same years, the national murder rate dropped by over 5 percent.

The research controlled for changes in policing, incarceration, burglaries, unemployment, poverty, and other laws adopted during the study period that could affect violent crime. The spike in murders only occurred for murders committed with a gun and happened statewide, while bordering states showed no increase. The number of handguns recovered from scenes of crimes or from criminals quickly doubled after the repeal. In a press release, lead author Daniel Webster, ScD, MPH, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said: “This study provides compelling confirmation that weaknesses in firearm laws lead to deaths from gun violence.” Co-author Jon Vernick, JD, MPH, deputy director for the Center for Gun Policy and Research, added:

“Because many perpetrators of homicide have backgrounds that would prohibit them from possessing firearms under federal law, they seek out private sellers to acquire their weapons. Requiring a background check on all gun sales is a commonsense approach to reducing gun violence that does not infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners.”

Requiring a background check seems like common sense to most Americans -- and yet some lawmakers refuse to make it happen. Others, like those in Missouri, are actually moving backwards. The same press release noted:

“Only fifteen states require individuals purchasing handguns from unlicensed sellers to pass background checks, with ten of these states requiring all purchasers to acquire a permit-to-purchase license. A 2013 public opinion survey from Johns Hopkins found the majority of Americans (89 percent) and gun owners (84 percent) support requiring a background check system for all gun sales. The majority of Americans (77 percent) and gun owners (59 percent) also reported supporting requiring people to obtain a license from a local law-enforcement agency before buying a gun to verify their identity and ensure that they are not legally prohibited from having a gun.”

This latest Johns Hopkins study is another key step in finding out what works to reduce gun violence. The available evidence is clear: Stand Your Ground laws do not reduce gun violence. Background checks do -- just one part of a network of solutions that can help. We need a robust commitment to much more research on the epidemic public health threat of gun violence to identify all of them. And when we know what works, we need leaders who will listen to and act on the research and public opinion to preserve lives. We do not need any more suffering families. Jordan Davis’s father Ron said:

“All the other 17-year-olds out there -- they shouldn’t have to fear the adults with the guns that are running around here shooting them at will. If you throw popcorn in someone’s face, they want to shoot you because you threw popcorn in their face. That’s what we’ve come to. But we have to stop.”

We really do have to stop!

The Hungry Child

We were homeless. 
My mom. My big sister and me.
We slept in the car. . .
We went to IHOP and we only got one pancake and we shared it.
That was our breakfast...
When I was tired of sitting in the car, I would talk to my mom. 
She would always say a prayer so we could have a better life. 
We should buy kids good food when they are homeless. 
We should help them out.

-- Jasmine, age 7

There are six people in our family.
But only five sit down to dinner.
That’s because my mom doesn’t eat.
She wants to make sure we have enough food.

-- Vanessa, age 6

Some children cheer when schools close for winter storms, but there are hungry children in America right now for whom another snow day this week meant another day without access to school breakfast or lunch. Despite criticism, some big-city mayors have kept schools open on snowy days this winter so their children would not go without food. These same children suffer over the weekends. While some schools have food pantries and send children home on the weekends with backpacks filled with food, it is still far, far from enough and only a drop in the bucket of need. Schools report students who arrive hungry on Monday morning or cry when they miss the bus or it’s late because that means they’ve missed breakfast.

The record 16.1 million children living in poverty, including more than 7 million living in extreme poverty, leaves millions of children suffering from hunger in our nation with the world’s largest GDP. In 2012 more than one in nine children in the United States lived in households where children were food insecure, meaning they lacked consistent access to adequate food; more than one in five children -- 15.9 million -- lived in households where either children or adults or both were food insecure. In some families, like Jasmine’s, hunger compounds other crises like homelessness, making them even worse. In many others hunger is almost hidden -- a quiet secret of parents struggling to recover from the recession and no longer able to stay afloat. Food pantries have reported that some of the same community members who were once regular donors helping to fill the shelves are now regular visitors in need of help themselves.

Black and Hispanic households with children were more than twice as likely as White households to have food insecure children, but White households comprised the largest group of households (43 percent) with food insecure children. In 2010 and 2011, three-quarters of households with food insecure children had one or more working adults, 80 percent of whom worked full-time. 

Children’s physical health and brain development depend on access to nutritious food, especially in the earliest years of life. Hunger and malnutrition have devastating consequences for children. Federal nutrition programs continue to be a critical support to ensure children’s daily nutritional needs are met: they put food on children’s plates, help build healthy minds and bodies, and help lift families out of poverty. A recent study found that needy children who received food assistance before age five were in better health as adults. Food programs are particularly crucial for younger children, as they are more likely to be in poor health, experience developmental delays, and be food insecure when their families’ food benefits are reduced or ended. These programs work. Yet they are not reaching every child in need.

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, which serve over 22 million children — more than one in four children in America — were cut in the recent farm bill by $8.6 billion over 10 years. An estimated 850,000 households, including 1.7 million people, will see a reduction on average of $90 a month in their food assistance. This cut comes on top of the substantial across-the-board benefit reduction that took effect in November 2013 and affected all SNAP households.  These cuts are morally offensive and economically indefensible, especially when so many non-needy farmers and others will continue to get agricultural welfare subsidies. SNAP is the only defense against the wolves of hunger for 1.2 million households with children who had no cash income other than SNAP in an average month in FY 2011; FY 2012 is expected to show an increase. It is shameful that Congress continues to treat poor Americans like second class citizens by cutting supports they desperately need.

Like SNAP, the school lunch, breakfast, and summer feeding programs, which provide meals to children in school and during the long hot summer months, are crucial and effective anti-poverty investments that help combat child hunger. They also play a vital role in ensuring children are fed and able to succeed in the classroom. In one study, children who were food insecure in kindergarten saw a 13 percent drop in their reading and math test scores by the third grade compared to their food-secure peers. In FY2012, more than 21 million children received free or reduced-price lunch through the National School Lunch Program and nearly 11 million children received free and reduced price breakfast. When school is out, though, it’s a different story.

The long summer break can be the worst time of all for our young as hunger does not take a summer vacation. The Children’s Defense Fund’s latest report shows only 10 percent of the number of children who relied on free or reduced-price lunch during the school year received meals through the Summer Food Service Program. Despite the fact that it is 100 percent federally-funded and has the potential to create local jobs for cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and others, too many states and communities drag their feet, create mindless bureaucratic hurdles, and make it as difficult as possible to get resources to serve meals to hungry children during the summer. I have never understood why and it should be stopped. Click here to see the 10 best and 10 worst states for child enrollment in Summer Food Service Programs.

It is crucial to start asking about and planning right now for summer feeding programs in your community to make sure there is no child hunger crisis in your area this summer. Encourage local congregations, organizations, community centers, parks and recreation departments, and others to open their doors and feed hungry children this summer. These entities are eligible to become summer feeding sponsors and sites. If you have a connection to a local service or civic program discuss this issue with them and encourage them to take advantage of the opportunity to help hungry children get food. Adults and older children can volunteer to help prepare or serve meals at local sites and learn how to serve others and get to know who their neighbors are. Visit the USDA’s website to learn more.

There should be no hungry people—especially no hungry children—in any community in rich America. Jasmine, Vanessa, and millions of children like them deserve better.