Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors

I adored Daddy's affectionate nickname for me--"Booster. I first learned God's caring by watching them care for me and my sister and three brothers and for others Within our family and community. When Daddy's sister Ira got sick, he moved her and her five children to our hometown of Bennettsville, South Carolina, where she later died. Daddy and Mama helped raise Aunt Ira's five children all of whom went on to college. When Daddy's Aunts Cora and Alice got too old to live alone in the red hills of Gaffney, South Carolina, Daddy's birthplace, they came to Bennettsville, where my parents tended to them.

When dignified old Reverend Riddick became homeless and others in the community could not care for him, my parents began the first Black home for the aged in our town. Mama ran it after Daddy died. My brother Julian ran it after Mama died. His daughters, Stephanie and Crystal, have run it since he died. Many of my childhood elders have found a caring haven in Bennettsville when they could no longer care for themselves.

I learned to speak the truth because it was expected and enforced in my house. I learned profanity was unacceptable after violating this tenet on more than one occasion and having my mouth washed out with Octagon soap. I learned to stand up when an older person entered the room and to give him or her my seat and to say please and thank you and yes ma'am and no sir to adults. Rosa Parks "Rosa" or Dr. Maya Angelou "Maya" or Dr.

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John Hope Franklin "John Hope" if they are not personal friends. We need to reinstill respect for elders at all levels of our society and elders need to deserve it. I learned from my parents that marriage is a struggle and a sacred partnership between two people and a covenant with God and with the children the union brings into the world. I learned that girls are as valuable as boys and that I could go around, under, and over--or knock down--the extra hurdles girls, especially Black girls, face.

His expectation that she would go to graduate school first to enable herself to contribute even more to others before she married stuck with me as I attempted to give back in service the interest on my own education. My sister, a gifted teacher and teacher trainer, has more than paid her interest, and Daddy would be very proud of her as our whole family is. But I never once considered marrying in my early or middle twenties; I was too busy trying to make a difference as Daddy expected. The American society outside my home did not share my parents' egalitarian expectations.

During my childhood it was the custom of many Black parents with incomes too limited to educate all their children to send their daughters to school before their sons to make their girls less vulnerable to sexual and other humiliations in the segregated South. This led to many educated women marrying less well-educated men. In my hometown, a core of the pacesetters and mentors were refined, college-educated women.

But they befriended and respected their many less formally educated women friends, who often possessed enormous mother wit, integrity, love, strength of will, and spirit that no degree could confer. This book is dedicated to three of these unlettered but kind and wise souls. I always knew deep in my soul that Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer's eloquence, intelligence, spirit, and courage, like Mayor Unita Blackwell's brilliance, unhemmed in by the King's English that I was taught to speak and write at home and in school, were as worthy as the words uttered by those with college and professional degrees.

My parents and community co-parents taught me not to put on airs or to look down on others who had had less opportunity. They understood the difference between being able to test well on paper in school and to live and serve well every day. My parents taught us to make sound choices and to focus on the truly important. My brother Harry tells about coming home from Morehouse College for Christmas and gently chastising Daddy for allowing the family car to deteriorate.

He had a heavy social agenda planned and needed the car. He also noticed that Daddy's clothes were not up to their usual standards and that his shoes needed to be replaced. Harry called all these things to his attention. Daddy smiled and quietly replied: I can replace my suits and I can buy new shoes, but your tuition is due in January.

I cannot do both. So I have decided to tune up the car, clean the suits, and have my shoes repaired. But he had three children who had graduated from college, my brother Harry enrolled in divinity school, my brother Julian enrolled in college and me, at fourteen years of age, dreaming about what college I'd attend. Daddy believed in God, in serving others, and in education.

He constantly tried to be and to expose us to good role models. Mays, Morehouse College's great scholar-president, to come speak at our church and to stay in our home. That visit prompted my brother Harry to decide to attend Morehouse. Mays promised him a job, which was provided in the Morehouse College kitchen when Harry enrolled several years later. Daddy would pile us children into our old Dodge and drive us to hear and meet great Black achievers whenever they came near our area. Daddy also would drive us to Columbia to hear Dr. Mordecai Johnson, then president of Howard University, every time he came to speak--usually for several hours--at the city auditorium.

I was born a few months after Marian Anderson sang before 75, people, including Eleanor Roosevelt, at the Lincoln Memorial, after she'd been barred from performing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D. As a brash Yale law student caught up in the throes of the Civil Rights Movement, I asked her why she had sung before some segregated audiences.

She graciously and patiently explained that sometimes one has to do things one does not like to do in the short term to achieve greater gains in the long term. It's a lesson that I have experienced repeatedly over the years.

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The great Black poet Langston Hughes came to my hometown twice during my childhood. The first time he did not mean to come. He was traveling through South Carolina on his way to Atlanta University in Georgia and stopped at the home of a White Presbyterian minister in nearby Cheraw, South Carolina seeking a place to spend the night. The minister, no doubt terrified at the thought of putting up or being seen with a Black man in his racially segregated small town, and with no hotels or guest houses where Black folk could stay, drove to Bennettsville, asked where the Black high school was, walked Mr.

Hughes into the principal's office, said Mr. Hughes needed a place to stay, and left. Walker, the principal's wife and my English teacher, told me she wandered into her husband's office, saw this familiar-looking stranger sitting there and thought, "It can't be. She said, "You can't possibly be who you look like. He said he couldn't but that he would come back. And he did return and read his poems to the whole school. That he took time to come back to Bennettsville to read to children and that a teacher made sure her students could meet him gave me a special connection to the poet I called in my college diary "marvelous Langston Hughes' poetry and books with his wise character "Simple" and Booker T.

Washington's autobiography Up from Slavery were in Daddy's home library. I never met Booker T. Washington, but Daddy greatly admired his teachings about self-reliance, individual initiative, community uplift, hard work, education, and service. Thanks to Daddy, I learned how Booker T. Illustrated with the author's personal photographs, and including her now famous "Parents' Pledge" and "Twenty Five More Lessons for Life", this stirring memoir is not only a vital addition to the literature of civil rights and child advocacy, but a powerful testament to the value and rewards of serving our nation and its families.

Hardcover , 0 pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Lanterns , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Jul 25, Daniel L.

For centuries sailors have relied on the constellations of heavenly lanterns to guide their way. In crisp, vivid prose, Marian Wright Edelman tells us about the heroes who provided beacons of hope and inspiration, helping her find her way through the many moral dillemas of life and stay on course.

What is interesting is the sheer variety of backgrounds Dr. Nevertheless, they all share the author's passion for human rights and social justice. As a bonus, Dr. Edelman gives a brief history of the civil rights era, a nice complement to two other fine books on that fascinating topic, Taylor Branch's "Parting the Waters" and David Halberstam's "The Children.

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It is a call of action and an inspiration for all of us to act for the common good, to serve the community. It is up to the current generations to act as a positive role model for the next, much as Dr. Edelman's mentors did for her. Mentors, lanterns, are important at all times, during the economic boom of the late s, when this book was written, as well as in the troubled initial years of the 21st century.

Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors - Marian Wright Edelman - Google Книги

Edelman currently writes an excellent column in the Huffington Post. There are already too many ships out there lacking a sailor to read the stars. Return to Book Page. Preview — Lanterns by Marian Wright Edelman.

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Throughout her life and work, Marian Wright Edelman has been at the heart of this cantury's most dramatic civil rights and child advocacy struggles. In this stirring, heartfelt memoir she pays tribute to the extrordinary mentors who helped light her way including Martin Luther King, Jr. She celebrates the liv Throughout her life and work, Marian Wright Edelman has been at the heart of this cantury's most dramatic civil rights and child advocacy struggles.

She celebrates the lives of her parents and the great Black Women of Bennetsville, South Carolina- Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate-who gave her love and guidance in her youth, as well as the many teachers and figures who inspired her education at Spelman College and empowered her early as an activist in the 's. Illustrated with many of the author's personal photographs, Lanterns also includes a "Parents' Pledge" and "Twenty-Five More Lessons for Life" to guide, protect, and love our children every day so that they will become, in Edelman's moving vision, the healing agents for national transformation.

Paperback , pages. Published September 5th by Harper Perennial first published To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

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To ask other readers questions about Lanterns , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Dec 01, Diann Blakely added it. Jul 25, Daniel L. For centuries sailors have relied on the constellations of heavenly lanterns to guide their way. In crisp, vivid prose, Marian Wright Edelman tells us about the heroes who provided beacons of hope and inspiration, helping her find her way through the many moral dillemas of life and stay on course.

What is interesting is the sheer variety of backgrounds Dr. Nevertheless, they all share the author's passion for human rights and social justice. As a bonus, Dr. Edelman gives a brief history of the civil rights era, a nice complement to two other fine books on that fascinating topic, Taylor Branch's "Parting the Waters" and David Halberstam's "The Children. It is a call of action and an inspiration for all of us to act for the common good, to serve the community.

It is up to the current generations to act as a positive role model for the next, much as Dr. Edelman's mentors did for her. Mentors, lanterns, are important at all times, during the economic boom of the late s, when this book was written, as well as in the troubled initial years of the 21st century.