Give children the richness of their heritage: Marian Wright Edelman recounts her childhood as the daughter of a southern Baptist minister.

A long time ago when I read that Martin Luther prayed four hours a day, I wondered how he found the time. He said it was the only way he could gain enough strength to carry on his work. As I have grown older and wearier trying to help our nation to put our children first; as I have become more worried about my own and other people's children growing up in an America where moral and common sense and family and community values are disintegrating, I pray more and more. I know that only with God's help and only with prayer, can some mountains be moved.

As I contemplate the kind of future I want for children--my own and other people's--I believe we must look inward to God for guidance and strength. We also need to look backwards to draw on the values and legacies of our families, ancestors, and communities. After many challenges and successes in over three decades of service to children, I have repeatedly drawn from my childhood experiences when family, church, the extended community family, and teachers provided a seamless web of support for Black children. Although stigmatized and devalued by the external world in an era of racial apartheid, when government not only did not help but hindered, Black adults refused to let external barriers become internal ones. They wrapped children in a cocoon of caring and activity. And they knew that the care of the mind and the body needed to be grounded in the care of the spirit, which was the glue that held our families and our community together.

Every Sunday morning my parents, sister, three brothers, and I gathered around the breakfast table. Each child had to recite a Bible verse before our family recited the Lord's Prayer. We could get away with "Jesus wept" only once. After breakfast, we brushed our teeth, combed our hair, dressed up in our best clothes, checked out our appearances in the mirror and with each other, and went off to Sunday school and to Shiloh Baptist Church. Daddy was the pastor and Mama was the church organist and choir director.

After church we drove elderly or disabled parishioners home and then prepared and ate dinner together. While my mother fried or "smothered" chicken or pork chops, we children took turns churning ice cream for dessert, setting the table, and entertaining any guests invited to join us for Sunday dinner in our church parsonage. On communion Sunday, once a month, I eagerly rushed before dinner to the church kitchen to help clean up the communion trays so I could drink all the tiny glasses of grape juice, a luxury in my home that I could never get enough of. I'd leave just enough untouched glasses for Daddy to take to give communion to the sick and shut-in.

On Sunday afternoons, we took flowers from the church to the hospital and visited members of the congregation who were sick at home. Sunday evenings were always shared with one church member's family or another, who prepared scrumptious suppers for our family. My favorite Sunday evening was at Miz Tee Kelly's, whose fried chicken and biscuits and sweet potato pone nobody else has ever matched. Black church folk during my childhood in Bennettsville, South Carolina, loved their pastors, treated them like royalty, and competed to see who could outcook and outdo the others in providing hospitality for a pastor's family.

On school day mornings we got up to the smells of breakfast cooking and came home every afternoon to a hot dinner and discussions about our day. After cleaning up the kitchen, we did our homework and went out in the yard to play marbles, dodgeball, horseshoes, red light, Mama May I, regular jump rope or double-clutch, hide-and-seek, and hopscotch. We had a snack, read or played a game of jacks, Old Maid, Monopoly, Chinese checkers, or pickup sticks. We prepared for bed by taking sponge baths, then said our prayers, and went to bed about nine o'clock.

We had fun without a lot of money, making up games that didn't need store-bought toys, money, or directions from adults. Regular checkers played with soft drink bottle caps, home made stilts from discarded pieces of wood, or tin cans attached to wire were more fun than any expensive toys we parents feel the need to buy our children today. Pin the Tail on the Donkey tickled our young funnybones for hours, and as we got older Spin the Bottle titillated our adolescent libidos, which were kept in check by ever-present adults.

Books were always a part of our home life. My parents considered them necessities rather than luxuries. Indeed, a new book was more important than a second pair of shoes. I loved to visit my daddy's book-lined study where he read for many hours of the day. Our house also had piles of magazines like Time, Life, the Saturday Evening Post and the Christian Century. Along with the daily White newspapers, Black newspapers--the Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier and Black magazines like Ebony and Sepia kept us abreast of Black community news.

On weekends, all the children had to help clean the house, the car, the yard, do errands like grocery shopping with our parents, help our daddy prepare the bulletin for Sunday sermon, and work with the sexton to clean up the church and churchyard. My daddy could not stand to see trash littering anything. A child's protest that we did not put it there was met with: "Pick it up anyway--it doesn't matter who put it there, it spoils our yard!"

Every day in our segregated and very unequally funded Black school, we pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America--"to one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all"--and sang every verse of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the Negro national anthem by James Weldon Johnson, which reminded us of "the faith that the dark past has taught us and the hope that the present has brought us."

In junior high, we memorized and recited the Gettysburg Address before our class, and in the eleventh grade every student participated in an oratorical contest. Winners displayed their rhetorical stuff before the whole community. This helped children gain confidence to speak in public, and enabled us to learn about and be inspired by Black history and the rich legacy of Black struggle and achievement.

I picked a speech Ralph Bunche gave at Fisk University in the 1940s entitled "The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted," and I still think about that speech on days when I doubt it. Today the millions of poor Black children growing up in single-parent households could draw strength and inspiration from the remarkable achievements of Bunche, our first Black Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who spent a significant part of his childhood years in a poor, mother-only household, and, after her death, with his grandmother, who expected and helped him to achieve and to be proud of his racial heritage. Neither being orphaned nor spending his adolescence in segregated Los Angeles, where racial stereotyping and discrimination required him to get into UCLA by his outstanding athletic skills rather than by his intellectual prowess, stopped him from turning his family losses and racial barriers into badges of distinction as he fought tirelessly for civil rights and traveled the globe in pursuit of peace on behalf of the United Nations, especially in the Middle East.

Too many Black adults today have not taught our children about their great heritage: about the kings and queens of courage and achievement who overcame slavery and segregation and helped make our land fairer for all Americans. Too many children never have heard of Medgar Evers, who died so that they could vote and sit where they want in public spaces. Too many have never read or spoken the eloquent words of Black Nobel Peace Laureates like Bunche, Martin Luther King, Jr., Chief Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela, or basked in the literary genius of Nobel Laureates Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Toni Morrison. They've not fought and overcome slavery with Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass, or wrestled segregation to the ground with Fannie Lou Hamer, Thurgood Marshall, and Rosa Parks. They don't know how Black children and youths withstood bombings and fire hoses in Birmingham, mobs in Little Rock, Nashville, and Jackson, and taunts and jeers in Greensboro to overcome segregation and discrimination with moral courage rather than with guns. They have not read Benjamin Mays' and Mary McLeod Bethune's words telling them they can do anything and overcome any odds. They have not prayed with Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, or Howard Thurman, or laughed and cried with Langston Hughes's "Simple."

Vacation Bible School week was one of our two summer highlights as we robustly sang rounds about John Brown's body and Michael rowing his boat ashore, and asked God to "Kum ba ye, Kum ba ye." The other highlight was the week of revival meetings when great Black preachers visited and lifted us beyond our daily small-town routines, work grinds, and struggles. We children watched in wonder, and often with uncontrollable giggles, as the Holy Spirit lifted some of the old church folks from their pews as they erupted in joyful shouts and dances to God with intricate rhythmic steps the envy of Bojangles and Gregory Hines.

The "Amen Corner" singers, led by Miz Sylvia Rivers' piercingly clear, steely voice, blended the chords of our slave forebears' spirituals into an a capella church-wide harmonic choir of heavenly fugues the great Black composers like Nathaniel Dett, Fisk's John W. Work, Morehouse's Kemper Harreld, Tuskegee's William Dawson, and Spelman's Willis Laurence James could scarcely capture on paper. "Let everybody say Aaa-men, Aaa-men, A-a-men, A-men, A-men."

After the hour or so of singing warmed our spirits and after the visiting preachers' sermons scared us to death about the wages of sin, unsaved young people (and a few desperate older sinners) went to the mourners' bench, dropped to their knees panting and praying, and fervently begged God for salvation, while congregation members clapped and sang over them, urging Jesus to come and save their souls. Although my daddy disapproved of the mourners' beech, with its "whooping and hollering," I tried it one night. I felt smothered, bothered by the noise and pressured by the heat and insistent urgings of the clapping hordes to find God. God chose instead to lift me very quietly and unexpectedly from my pew one Sunday morning when I was twelve, to walk me to the front of the church to stand beside my waiting daddy, and give Him my life.

We Black children were wrapped up and rocked in a cradle of faith, song, prayer, ritual, and worship which immunized our spirits against some of the meanness and unfairness inflicted on our young psyches by racial discrimination and poverty in our segregated South and acquiescent nation. When Detroit's great preacher Dynamo Campbell, one of my favorites, came for revival, he took us down into the Valley of Dry Bones with Ezekiel, where God asked, "Mortal, can these bones live?" and Ezekiel and Dynamo answered, "O Lord God, You know." With excitement, we collectively experienced God breathing life into and connecting those dry bones limb by limb as Dynamo strutted up and down the aisle connecting the neck bone to the shoulder bone and the hip bone to the thigh bone and the leg bone to the ankle bone and the ankle bone to the foot bone and we all emerged invigorated new people. We internalized the presence of a God, personal as well as universal, who could open our earthly graves, snatch us from death's cold hands, lift us out of misery and despair, and breathe a new spirit of life into us.

On other nights after Dynamo and Daniel's God delivered us from the lion's den, rescued Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the fiery furnace, saved Joseph from the evil jealousy of his brothers and the treachery of Potiphar's wife, parted the Red Sea for Moses and the Hebrew children, helped Joshua fight the battle of Jericho, and guided Harriet Tubman and Black slaves to freedom, we knew once and for all that our God--the God of our parents and grandparents and their parents and our preachers and church elders--was mighty indeed and able to deflect any threat or overcome any injustice however hard or impossible the odds appeared to our puny human eyes.

At 6:30 every morning at Spelman College, bells awakened us for breakfast and another day of study. At 7:45 A.M. chimes beckoned us to daily worship. "Faith of Our Fathers" (and Mothers), "Lord Make Me More Holy," "In Christ There Is No East or West," and other familiar hymns of childhood rang in our ears as we walked across campus to beautiful Sisters Chapel, which grounded college life.

During Sunday vespers, Willis Laurence James led the Spelman chorus and Sisters Chapel audience in an a capella rendering of a spiritual connecting us to our ancestral past while asking God to "guide my feet while I run this race" today. When my spirit is too depressed and arid to pray with words, King David's 90th Psalm "Lord Thou Hast Been Our Dwelling Place in All Generations," which Dr. James put to music for the Spelman chorus, soothes my soul. When I am frantic about how I am going to get through my week, I sing the Apostle Matthew's "Consider the Lilies of the Field," as I once did in Spelman's chapel, and am reminded that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." It helps me do what is at hand rather than worry about what has to be done tomorrow and next week, and prompts me to remember that God knows and will meet our needs if we will but trust Him.

I was lucky not only to sing in Spelman's wonderful chorus but to be one of eight Spelman students who joined eight Morehouse students in the Sunday morning chapel choir, directed by the late and gifted Wendell Whalum. Morehouse's chapel, like Spelman's, was rich not only in music but in eloquence and in wisdom. Its president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mentor, and other inspirational speakers shared with us what they believed, had experienced, and thought we needed to know to make it in the world and to make the world a better place by not becoming like the world. No idea was too big and no detail was too small to share with us as these great people and speakers prepared us to wade into the river of life with sturdy boats and oars and life vests to keep us afloat if we fell into rough waters.

They taught us to be neither victims nor victimizers; they urged us not to hate White folks because God created White folks and Black folks and Brown folks and all folks out of the same dust and would hold us--and them--ultimately to the same standards of justice. They preached that service to community was a higher value than service to self, that conscience took precedence over career, that respect for life our own and others was inviolate. And they taught us to value and respect ourselves and others by valuing and respecting us enough to carefully plan and prepare the daily rituals of fellowship, homework, community activities, and support at each stage of our development. When we got scared, we had someone to talk to. When we tested our wings by sitting in and picketing to challenge segregation, adults supported and shared our protests--including Dr. King--and countered the inevitable grumblers and opposition of those who object to any change and any new leadership and who seek to hang onto their comfortable status quo.

Morehouse men, like Spelman women, were taught how to dress neatly and inexpensively, to sit up straight, say yes ma'am and no ma'am, thank you and please, look people in the eye, shake hands firmly, speak clearly, and stand up when an elder entered the room. Morehouse men were even counseled--with humorous seriousness--how to woo the hearts of Spelman women by holding the door open for them to enter first and getting up and giving them their seats! What a contrast these teachings present to the filthy, disrespectful, and misogynistic lyrics of Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre and others who shamelessly dishonor our foremothers, grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and daughters by referring to them as "hos" and "bitches." The shame of those who buy this debasing music is matched or exceeded only by those who profit so greatly from it--the record companies and the performers. How far we have plunged from Ralph Bunche and Benjamin Mays and Mary McLeod Bethune as role models to the Hollywoodized and TVized synthetic heroes- and heroines-for-a-day in our profit- and celebrity-crazed manufactured culture. It is time for parents and preachers and teachers and community leaders to fill the huge moral and guidance vacuum that gangsta rappers and others in the music and entertainment industries have exploited.

As children and as college students, we also were taught to pay our dues with effort, earn our rewards with work, make ourselves necessary--indeed indispensable--if we wanted to get ahead, do more than is needed before it is asked, do it well without expecting huge praise, and understand that freedom was not free. In fact, freedom brought reciprocal responsibility and demanded continuing vigilant effort. Just as we sang and were trained to "Give of Your Best to the Master" in church and chapel, so we understood that doing our best carried over into every aspect of our lives. Serving God and others well was synonymous with excellence--an internally driven ethic rather than an externally imposed requirement.

Practical adult worldly advice to youth always was grounded in a deeper message of purpose and of service reinforced by example. Education was about lifting self and others, too. Unlike many of today's complaining citizens and our often spoiled children afflicted by affluenza, we were helped to put momentary setbacks in perspective. Howard Thurman's powerful reminder that "no single act or failure is ever determinative of our life" picked us up when we fell down or thought our world was coming to an end because we were jilted by a boyfriend, had flunked a course, were called a nigger by a white passerby, or had been harassed by the police for no reason other than skin color. And, for me, Dr. King's willingness to share his fears and uncertainties with us while still urging us to act in faith when we were scared encourages me still to trust God's faithfulness when faced with setbacks.

Our elders saved us from action paralysis and self-pity by putting our present problems in spiritual and historical perspective. They shared lessons of the mighty oppression of slavery, of the great dashed promises of Reconstruction, and of the violent Klan lynchings aided and abetted by powerful economic and political interests and a silent citizenry. They made us see that our individual struggles were part of an ongoing struggle for freedom and justice that had to be won over and over again and that can never be taken for granted. They also made us see that, we did not have to fight these battles alone--that God was on the ' side of truth and righteousness, which would eventually prevail.

I do not know how I could survive the indifference and evil and violence rife in our nation and world, and the shallowness and pettiness of so much of Washington's self-important life, without these seeds of faith, prayer, and music that were planted in my youthful soul by parents and other elders. I worry in every fiber of my being about our many children who, lacking a sense of the sacred or internal moral moorings, are trying to grow up in a society without boundaries, without respect, without enough positive role models at home, in school, in religious congregations, in our communities, in our political and economic life, and in a culture where almost anything goes on television, in the movies, in music, and in how we treat each other. Without a sense of core values like honesty, discipline, work, responsibility, perseverance, community, and service, we all become easy prey for the false idols and vultures of culturally manufactured glitz, materialism, greed, and violence. Few of us escape the suffocating vise of these things in our spiritually famished society. No value, even the Cross, has been left uncommercialized in a culture where planned obsolescence consumer products keeps the cash registers ringing and plastic smiles, plastic cards, and plastic souls have lost touch with the genuine.

Never have we exposed children so early and relentlessly to cultural messages glamorizing violence, sex, possessions, alcohol, and tobacco with so few mediating influences from responsible adults. Never have we experienced such a numbing and reckless reliance on violence to solve problems, feel powerful, or be entertained. Never have so many children beer permitted to rely on guns and gangs rather than on parents, neighbors, religious congregations, and schools for protection and guidance. Never have we pushed so many children on to the tumultuous sea of life without the life vests of nurturing families and communities, caring schools, challenged minds, job prospects, and hope.

Never before have we subjected our children to the tyranny of drugs and guns and things or taught them to look for meaning outside rather than inside themselves, teaching them in Dr. King's words "to judge success by the value of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationships to humanity."

As we face a new century and a new millennium, the overarching challenge for America is to rebuild a sense of community and hope and civility and caring and safety for all our children. I hope God will guide our feet as parents--and guide America's feet--to reclaim our nation's soul, and to give back to all of our children their sense of security and their ability to dream about and work toward a future that is attainable and hopeful.

Let us begin by praying that God's spirit will be born anew within and among us in our own family, our extended family, and in our community, private sector, and public life. I cannot recreate the same small-town childhood of my past for my children, but I can teach and try to live the same enduring God-given and lifegiving values of faith, integrity, and service.

By Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund. Reprinted from GUIDE MY FEET: Prayers and Meditations on Loving and Working for Children. Copyright [C] 1995 by Marian Wright Edelman. By permission of Beacon Press.