Advocate shines harsh light on plight of black children
The devastation is plain to see, in nearly every city and community across America. Less apparent is the outrage.
As many black children slide deeper into poverty, dysfunction and despair — nearly 46 percent of those younger than 5 are now poor — child-welfare advocates question whether the nation has gone numb to the problems.
“How is it that ordinary people of faith are not up in arms?” asked Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Washington-based Children’s Defense Fund.
“Something’s come loose,” she said. “We are normalizing poverty.”
Edelman, one of the nation’s foremost voices for the disadvantaged, was in Columbus yesterday to brief a handful of invited civic, school and church leaders on the Defense Fund’s Black Community Crusade for Children, a research-based push to draw attention to the plight of black children.
The recession has only made matters worse. “The child is not to blame,” Edelman said in an interview before the meetings.
The Defense Fund’s recent report on child inequality says U.S. census data show black children are three times as likely as white children to be poor and four times as likely to live in extreme poverty.
In the city of Columbus, black children younger than 6 are the poorest group, with 54 percent living in poverty in 2010. That’s twice the percentage of young white children in city households at or below the poverty line, defined as about $22,300 a year for a family of four.
Extreme poverty is half that, or about $11,160, and about 20 percent of Columbus children younger than 6 — of all races — live in households at that income level.
“It is staggering, just staggering,” said Adrienne Corbett, executive director of the Homeless Families Foundation, where more than half of the families served are black.
She said the challenges often seem overwhelming. “I think the problem, in some respects, is that people don’t know where to start.”
Poverty’s attendant issues are legion: out-of-wedlock births, underachievement in school, poorer health, high rates of unemployment and incarceration and crime victimization.
Edelman said there aren’t enough community members — including the poor themselves — fighting for change. The Defense Fund is working to train a new generation of young people to take up causes, bringing many of them together at the organization’s CDF-Haley Farm near Knoxville, Tenn.
The leadership void is there to be filled, she said.
“Tell me five leaders in America today,” Edelman said. “Any color. Who do you listen to in Congress? Where are our moral voices? Where are the corporate leaders who will say it’s not about us, it’s about the country?
“I think the very notion of America is on the line.”
Jobs, decent wages and education are the obvious needs, she said. Young people, for example, are less likely to become parents too soon if they envision bright futures.
“I always said hope is the best contraceptive,” Edelman said. “If people have a sense of what their lives will be at 21, they won’t want to be mothers at 17.”
Maria Goss, Head Start director at the Columbus Urban League, often wonders about the future of her preschoolers.
“Where are the adults rallying around these children?” said Goss, who attended Edelman’s program. “The adults have to stand up, too, but sometimes they’re so beaten down.”
Communities can’t afford to throw up their hands, said Ellen Moss Williams, executive director at the Godman Guild, a settlement house in the Weinland Park area.
“I like to ask people around here, ‘What part of the elephant are we going to eat today? It’s big, but small bites matter.’ ”
Edelman praises such efforts. But she still worries that the nation is on the verge of losing much of the civil-rights progress amassed over the past 60 years.
“It’s a very dangerous time,” she said. “And this is a time for real debate.”
Dispatch reporter Bill Bush contributed to this story.
rprice@dispatch.com
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