Marian Wright Edelman honored with Inaugural James M. Lawson Humanitarian Award
November 25, 2015
The year was 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been assassinated and riots had broken out all over the country. Twenty-nine year old Marian Wright Edelman went into schools to talk to children to tell them not to loot and risk their future by getting arrested. Edelman vividly recalled a little boy, about 11 or 12, who looked her straight in the eye and said “‘Lady, what future? Ain’t got no future. Ain’t got nothing to lose.’ I’ve been trying for the last 40 years to prove that boy’s truth wrong.” As a Black child growing up in