LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Marian Wright Edelman : Crusading for Children With This Special Defense Fund

Marian Wright Edelman may as well have Friend of Hillary as a honorific behind her name. Although the head of the Children’s Defense Fund downplays her powerful White House connections, all Washington has noticed. Edelman, America’s best-known children’s advocate, and her husband, Peter, are on the A list--thanks to their long history with the Clintons. Hillary chaired the CDF board for years. The current CDF board chair, Donna Shalala, is the Clinton Administration’s secretary of Health and Human Services; Peter Edelman serves as her counselor. Another CDF friend, Janet Reno, is attorney general. Those connections are bound to pay off for Edelman’s constituency: America’s children.

Edelman crusades for children with the same passion and skill she used while a civil-rights attorney on the dangerous front lines in Mississippi, 30 years ago. Then, the goal was freedom. Today, the goal remains freedom: Freedom from poverty, violence, abuse, hunger, homelessness, poor schooling and lack of health care.

A daughter of the South, Edelman grew up in segregated South Carolina, attended the prestigious, predominantly black Spelman College in Atlanta and Yale Law School. She founded the nonprofit Children Defense Fund in 1973, and has spent her professional life in service to others.

In Washington, Edelman pursues her agenda relentlessly. Tough by her own admission, unwilling to compromise unless she must, Edelman, 54, lobbies Congress and the White House to invest more in children. Her “must” list includes universal health care for all children, full funding for Head Start, decent welfare reform, strict gun control and a host of other laws that emphasize prevention or intervention. But she doesn’t limit her advice to the government, her best-selling book, “The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours” shares her commitment to service and the values she used to raise her three sons, Joshua, 24, Jacob, 23 and Ezra, 19. Her next book, a parenting guide for African-Americans, whose children Edelman believes are in the worst shape, is due out next year.

Question: Is America losing a generation of children to poverty, violence, drugs and lack of health care?

Answer: We’re losing two generations, the younger parents and the young families . . . . We are going through a period that is unprecedented. Look at violence against and by children. We’ve never seen anything like it. I cannot believe a child is murdered in this country every three hours; a classroom-full of 25 children, every two days--and we’re standing for it. I cannot believe 2-year-olds and 4-year-olds can be shot. And we go on doing business-as-usual. We still don’t have serious gun control . . . .

Q: How do we stop the killing?

A: By confronting the obsession with violence in this culture . . . the incredible proliferation of guns. We produce a handgun every 20 seconds. There is no industrialized nation that permits people to sell handguns in such careless ways and to have this proliferation of guns. Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose. Hunters don’t need semi-automatic weapons. We’ve got to have serious gun control . . . .

We have to deal with the signals, the glamorization of violence in our culture, on TV and in the movies. You can’t turn on the tube without seeing somebody maimed or killed. Surely we can be more creative in producing programs that don’t laud violence as a way in which weresolve disputes.

Q: Sen. Carol Moseley Braun wants to prosecute young teen-agers, 13- and 14-year-olds, as adults. Is that an answer?

A: You’ve got to have law enforcement. People cannot go around killing people. You also have to have gun control--but that’s not the long-term answer. There are no prisons that can hold the despair and the hopelessness that is all around us. We’ve got to talk about prevention . . . productive alternatives . . . jobs, decent education, rebuilding communities . . . decent role models . . . These 13-year-olds are children. What are you solving by sending them off to prison, which is just another breeding ground for more crime . . . . Give me more jobs rather than more prison cells, and we’ll begin to deal with that 13-year-old.

Q: Why does the Children’s Defense Fund have a specific campaign targeted at the black community?

A: It is a campaign within a campaign. Our goal is to mount a massive crusade, to leave no child behind--white, black, middle-class, poor, Latino, Asian-American--because it’s really time for a new movement, to pick up where we left off from the civil-rights promise of the ‘60s and early ‘70s . . . .

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations--and if they didn’t have food, didn’t have jobs, didn’t have health care, didn’t have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success. The challenge of the 1990s is . . . to provide every child, all children, a healthy start, a fair start, a head start and a safe start. Within that, however, it is clear that the African-American community faces special problems. We face the worst crisis since slavery with the break-down of our families, the number of out-of-wedlock births, the hopelessness of our young people, particularly black males, many of whom, without training, have been pushed out of the mainstream economy and have no hopes of forming healthy families, and no positive alternatives . . . .

These are problems that have become mainstream problems, but it is crucially important for the black community to mobilize to say to black kids: “I’m here for you”-- . . . to rebuild our extended families, to reconnect our black middle class with our poor, to reform the links between the generations, to raise up our children like we were raised up to confront the problems of the ‘90s. And that is what is beginning to happen . . . .

Q: Will Latino children be left behind if they are the children of illegal immigrants?

A: We’ve got extraordinary hostility to immigrant children. It gets back to a point in time of economic insecurity, when many Americans are struggling. In fact, it was the black community that coined this phrase: “Leave no child behind.” In focus groups, every group of Americans thought their children were being left behind. Whites thought their children were being left behind. The middle-class thought their children were being left behind. American business folks and other people think our children are being left behind the children of other nations and, in many ways, that is so. It is a universal problem that is applied in different ways in different communities. Immigrant children clearly face extra problems of language and hostility: Are they going to be included in health care.

Q: Should they be included in the Clinton Administration’s health-care plan?

A: These are complicated issues that we are going to have to debate but not in a hysterical or negative way. I don’t think that children living in this country should be punished because we don’t like the behavior or the sins of their parents.

We need to look at what makes sense from a public-policy point of view. Our first priority is to see that we do have universal coverage for all children. That makes good sense. You want everybody to be immunized, because that is a public-health issue . . . .

What is going to be most cost-effective? Do you want children not immunized and showing up at the emergency room when that costs everybody much more? Do you want children dying in this country when we have the means, for a very small, modest amount of investment, to protect them?

Q: You’re an old friend of the First Lady, so you have a little different access. Have you had these discussions?

A: In politics, there are no friends. We have had lots of input, and Mrs. Clinton is committed to protecting children. But there are many, many different pulls and pushes. We, like everybody else, will be out there fighting . . . .

Q: But certainly you have some personal influence on her?

A: Of course, I hope so from time to time. But, again, her role is different from our role. We are advocates, and we will advocate absolutely as toughly as we can with her, and with everybody else in the Congress, to get everything we can get for children.

It is wonderful to have people in power committed to many of the same goals. On the other hand, Mrs. Clinton, the President and members of Congress have many, many and far more powerful forces around them trying to get the best they can for their constituencies. We also have clear fiscal constraints. People are going to have to make hard choices. So I recognize, friends or no friends--if we are going to make sure children and the poor are fully protected in any health-security plan in the Administration and in the Congress, we are going to have to build a strong, well-informed public constituency for it . . . . We have to build a movement for kids . . . . We have no illusions about how hard we are going to have to fight on the Hill to make sure children, and the poor, and families come out with universal coverage and the high-quality comprehensive benefits they require.

Q: What has the Clinton Administration done to help children?

A: There’s a major new tone. It is wonderful to have people in leadership, in the White House and the executive agencies, who really want to try to make things happen right. It is a pleasure to have Cabinet officials who want to work together to look at the whole child and the whole family . . . . First-rate folks who know what they are doing, so at least you can have conversations about how you solve problems. The tone of government has changed: How can government begin to meet the needs of families rather than how can they cut as many people off and save as much money.

You’ve got a President and First Lady who are really talking about investing in children so--in addition to having the Family and Medical Leave Act as the first thing--you’ve seen children and families surround everything they’re doing . . . .

In the budget bill, for all the discussions about taxes and spending cuts, there’s $26 billion in new investments in what we call the Children’s Initiative. There’s a $600-million immunization program, which shouldn’t have been so hard. I thought it was going to be our easy issue. It turned out to be a knock-down, drag-out. The Administration wanted a universal program, the resistance from the drug companies and everybody else made it impossible but, nevertheless, we have a strong new set of immunization provisions. I can’t believe, in 1993, we had to work so hard to get them, but for every uninsured child in the family, they can get immunizations in their usual place of care. Now we’ve got to go out there and implement it. But again, this is an Administration that is serious about families.

We have a billion-dollar family-preservation program to try to prevent child neglect and abuse and to strengthen parents and to preserve families and to prevent removal and foster care . . . . There’s a focus, an attention on children and families. People ask: What is this going to mean for children? . . . We see government trying to re-instill hope.

Q: Is welfare reform possible without sacrificing poor children?

A: If it sacrifices poor children, it’s not welfare reform. We’re trying to take care of children and rebuild families. Welfare reform has to be about self-sufficiency . . . hope . . . jobs . . . . None of us like welfare as it is . . . . How do we encourage work? How do we make sure work is there? . . . .

I do hope this will be a healthy debate and not be just about how you punish people whose behaviors we think you don’t like . . . . Rewarding parents who are responsible, by rewarding work and not dependency . . . by making sure if you work full time, you can get out of poverty . . . to make work pay.

Q: Are you tough?

A: I’m tough in the sense that I believe as strongly in what I’m doing as anybody else believes in what they are doing. I reject that description; I don’t see them talking about men being tough if they fight hard for a tax loophole or fight hard for a special interest. I believe deeply in children and families.

Q: What’s next for you? Supreme Court? Cabinet post?

A: Of course not. I am doing what I think I was put on God’s Earth to do. I wouldn’t do anything else, and I could never work for government. This is my life’s work. It’s the most important thing I can be doing, because if we don’t save our children, we can’t save ourselves . . . . I don’t have any career ambitions. I just want to win for kids.