Children’s Defense Fund Files Amicus Curiae Brief in Support of Federal Lawsuit Challenging Texas’ ‘Drag Ban’ Legislation

For Immediate Release

Senate Bill 12 could criminalize some drag performances in Texas. In an Amicus Curiae brief to the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, CDF argues the legislation would threaten the free expression of Texans while harming LGBTQIA+ youth.

Contact:

John Henry, JHenry@childrensdefense.org, CDF Media Relations Manager, @johnhenrydc, 708-646-7679

Washington, DC — The national youth advocacy organization Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) has filed an Amicus Curiae brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Texas Senate Bill 12.

Senate Bill 12 would make it illegal for drag performances to be shown in the presence of young people in Texas. Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas successfully sued to block the legislation on the behalf of its clients, two LGBTQIA+ nonprofit organizations, two drag production and entertainment companies, and a drag artist. However, the ruling was later appealed to the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals where the case will be decided at a later date.

CDF filed its brief, with the assistance of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, due to the proposed legislation’s potential to threaten the free expression of Texans and harm LGBTQIA+ youth in the state.

Children’s Defense Fund National Litigation Strategist Thomas Harvey said CDF decided to act in an effort to block Senate Bill 12 because of our longstanding commitment to standing alongside youth and children in their advocacy, adding our support as a strong and effective voice to all children and young people in America who cannot lobby or speak on certain issues for themselves.

“This unconstitutional law not only violates the First Amendment, but also the ability of children to live with dignity, hope, and joy,” Harvey said. “Senate Bill 12 is part of a broader effort in Texas to prevent LGBTQIA+ youth, especially Black and Brown youth, from experiencing expression that is beneficial to them and neither harmful nor obscene. It also ignores the autonomy of parents to share certain forms of artistic expression they value with their children.”

Children’s Defense Fund-Texas State Director Dr. Brandy Taylor Dédé said Senate Bill 12 could also criminalize transgender youth in Texas and the adults who love them.

“Children’s Defense Fund-Texas is proud of its continuing efforts to provide programming and events where young Texans can express themselves through art, film, and advocacy,” Taylor Dédé said. “This legislation acts as a clear affront to our efforts to support all children given the fact it would ban them from an LGBTQIA+ affirming space.”

Children’s Defense Fund calls on the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the permanent injunction first delivered against Senate Bill 12 before it negatively impacts the state’s young people and their interests. 

Instagram- @childdefender1973

TikTok-@childrensdefensefund

X/Twitter-@ChildDefender

###

About Children’s Defense Fund

Founded in 1973, Children’s Defense Fund envisions a nation where marginalized children flourish, leaders prioritize their well-being, and communities wield the power to ensure they thrive. The only national, multi-issue advocacy organization working at the intersection of child well-being and racial justice, CDF advances the well-being of America’s most diverse generation, the 74 million children and youth under the age of 18 and 30 million young adults under the age of 25. CDF’s grassroots movements in marginalized communities build power for child-centered public policy, informed by racial equity and the lived experience of children and youth. Its renowned CDF Freedom Schools® program is conducted in nearly 100 cities across 30 states and territories. Learn more at www.childrensdefense.org.

On April 2, 109-year-olds Viola Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle appeared together at a Tulsa courthouse in a hearing before Oklahoma’s Supreme Court. Mother Fletcher and Mother Randle, as they are known in their communities, are the last two known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. In 2020, they were part of a group of survivors and descendants who filed a lawsuit seeking reparations for the White supremacist mob violence that destroyed Tulsa’s Greenwood District on May 31-June 1, 1921, devastating Tulsa’s Black community with effects that have rippled through generations.  

At the time of the massacre, Greenwood was one of the most prosperous Black communities in the country, nicknamed “Black Wall Street,” and home to Black businesses, theaters, churches, restaurants, and thousands of Black citizens. By the end of the mob violence, historians estimate as many as 300 Black citizens were killed, 35 city blocks were burned down, and 10,000 people were left unhoused. Instead of stopping attackers, police deputized White civilians. They gave them more guns and ammunition, and the Oklahoma National Guard helped round up and detain 6,000 Black residents. No one was charged for any of the deaths, injuries, or property damage. The lawsuit has been an attempt to seek a measure of justice. 

In 2021, Mrs. Fletcher, Mrs. Randle, and Mrs. Fletcher’s brother Hughes Van Ellis, who passed away in October, were invited to provide Congressional testimony on the massacre’s centennial. Mrs. Fletcher, who had just turned seven when the massacre happened, said: “On May 31st in 1921, I went to bed at my family’s home in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa. The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich—not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community, heritage, and my family had a beautiful home. We had great neighbors and I had friends to play with. I felt safe. I had everything a child could need. I had a bright future ahead of me . . . Within a few hours, all that was gone.”  

She continued: “I will never forget the violence of the White mob when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot and Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot.” 

Mrs. Randle, who was six, testified about her own memories before her grandmother’s home was destroyed: “I didn’t have any fears as a young child, and I felt very safe. My community was beautiful. It was filled with happy and successful Black people. Then, everything changed. It was like a war. White men with guns came and destroyed my community. We couldn’t understand why. What did we do to them? We didn’t understand. We were just living, but they came, and they destroyed everything. They burned houses and businesses . . .They murdered people. We were told they just dumped the dead bodies into the river. I remember running outside of our house. I ran past dead bodies. It wasn’t a pretty sight. I still see it today in my mind—100 years later.” 

Mrs. Randle added: “You can help us get some justice. America is still full of examples where people in positions of power, many just like you, have told us to wait. Others have told us it is too late. It seems like justice in America is always so slow or not possible for Black people. We are made to feel crazy just for asking for things to be made right. There are always so many excuses for why justice is so slow or never happens at all . . .We have waited too long, and I am tired. We are tired.” She ended: “I am asking you today to give us some peace. Please give me, my family, and my community some justice.”  

Last summer, a judge dismissed their case. Many observers believe their appeal before the state’s Supreme Court on whether they have the right to continue their lawsuit may be one of the final chances for Mrs. Fletcher and Mrs. Randle to receive some measure of justice and peace. They said in a joint statement: “We are grateful that our now-weary bodies have held on long enough to witness an America, and an Oklahoma, that provides Race Massacre survivors with the opportunity to access the legal system. Many have come before us who have knocked and banged on the courthouse doors only to be turned around or never let through the door.” The fight continues. 

On March 27, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park officially opened in Montgomery, Alabama—the newest extraordinary Legacy Site created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). EJI is a nonprofit human rights organization committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, challenging racial and economic injustice, and protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society, all under the leadership of visionary Founder and Executive Director Bryan Stevenson. The Legacy Sites are three spaces in downtown Montgomery that help tell the story of our nation’s legacy of racial violence and terror and our ongoing struggle for equality and justice. The Legacy Museum sits on the former site of a cotton warehouse where enslaved people once worked, and uses interactive exhibits, video and digital pieces, and the work of dozens of contemporary artists to take visitors on a moving journey from the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary America. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a monument and sacred space that honors the more than 4,400 Black people who were killed in racial terror lynchings in our nation between 1877 and 1950, listing their names on more than 800 steel columns, one for each county where these murders took place. Now, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, which sits on 17 acres overlooking the Alabama River, brings EJI’s commitment to truth-telling to a new landscape. 

EJI explains that the new site intends to put the history of slavery in context, with sections of the park dedicated to the transatlantic and domestic trades of enslaved people, the laws surrounding slavery, enslaved people’s labor, and their “escape, rebellion, and resistance to slavery. The narrative journey includes love, death, family, and faith.”  The nearly 50 extraordinary sculptures set throughout the site do much of this storytelling. They include newly commissioned works and powerful large-scale pieces by Charles Gaines, Alison Saar, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, Rose B. Simpson, Theaster Gates, Kehinde Wiley, Hank Willis Thomas, and many more. 

The art sits alongside historical references, including a rail car like the ones that carried enslaved passengers as cargo on the nearby tracks and a pair of 170-year-old cabins from Marengo County, Alabama, in which enslaved people lived. At the park’s core is the National Monument to Freedom, a 43-foot-tall, 155-foot-long structure shaped like an open book that includes the surnames of 122,000 Black families listed in the 1870 U.S. Census, the first census in which formerly enslaved African Americans were counted by name. The book’s “spine” features this engraving: Your children love you. The country you built must honor you. We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement. We commit to advancing freedom in your name.  

In an interview about the Legacy Sites, Bryan Stevenson said: “I do think we’re at a moment where we’re debating whether we’re going to be honest about our history, about our past, and learn from it, reckon with it, and move forward, or we’re going to double down on silence and these false narratives. What I’m encouraged by is that we’ve had hundreds of thousands of people come since we opened the [first site] in 2018. And most of them say, ‘I didn’t know this.’ But not only have they come, they’ve left with a new understanding about what we have to do to make progress in this country. I don’t want to talk about slavery and lynching and segregation because I want to punish America. I want us to get to a better place.”  

He went on: “I believe there’s something better waiting for us. There’s something that feels more like freedom in this country. There’s something that feels more like equality, feels more like justice. But we can’t get there if we continue believing these false ideas about our greatness, about our failures, that we never made any mistakes, we never did anything wrong. And I actually hope that this moment illustrates the importance of this conversation that we’re trying to have about a time for truth- telling.” Now, as the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park welcomes it first visitors, Stevenson says: “I believe this will become a special place for millions of people who want to reckon with the history of slavery and honor the lives of people who endured tremendous hardship but still found ways to love in the midst of sorrow. Many of us are the heirs to that extraordinary perseverance and hope. There is a lot to learn at this site, and we want everyone to experience it.” 

It was a terrible irony that the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park opened in the same week that the state of Alabama passed new legislation banning public schools and universities and state agencies from sponsoring diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, along with banning transgender students at public colleges and universities from using campus restrooms that match their gender identity. Yet that timing only underscored the profound importance of EJI’s Legacy Sites and their unwavering determination to honor and share the truth. All of us who are “the heirs to that extraordinary perseverance and hope” described by Bryan Stevenson are deeply grateful for this work. 

Flynn joins CDF from the National Fair Housing Alliance where she also served that organization in the same role. Brady transitions from her role as Vice President of Strategy & Program. 

Contact:  

John Henry, JHenry@childrensdefense.org, CDF Media Relations Manager, @johnhenrydc, 708-646-7679 

Washington, DC — Children’s Defense Fund has announced two executive leadership changes. 

Following a nationwide search, Kathleen M. Flynn has been named Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Children’s Defense Fund. She will support Children’s Defense Fund President and Chief Executive Officer Starsky Wilson in the development and coordination of multi-year operational, financial, and human capital plans for the organization. In addition to directing and coordinating operations activities, Flynn will also provide volunteer management of Children’s Defense Fund’s Board of Directors Finance Committee.  

Flynn holds more than two decades of experience in non-profit operational management. She comes to Children’s Defense Fund from the National Fair Housing Alliance, where she also held the role of COO. Prior to that, she acted as COO for the New Venture Fund and Senior Director of Managed Organizations for Arabella Advisors. Earlier in her career, Flynn worked leading administration at the Dee Norton Child Advocacy Center in Charleston, South Carolina. She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Georgetown University and a master’s in library science from the University of Maryland, College Park.  

Sheri A. Brady has also been promoted to the role of Vice President and Chief Program Officer for Children’s Defense Fund. She served the organization as Vice President for Strategy and Program for the last three years. Brady helped lead the organization’s efforts to develop its first integrated theory of change and conceptualize a comprehensive evaluation approach to build capacity for a movement for child well-being.  

Brady will work alongside Flynn to serve as officers with fiduciary responsibility and accountability for elements of governance at Children’s Defense Fund. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from Wheaton College in Massachusetts and a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley.  

Children’s Defense Fund President and Chief Executive Officer Starsky Wilson said the executive staff announcements will better position the organization in its efforts to achieve its mission: 

“Kathleen and Sheri are remarkable servant leaders with demonstrated impact for children and families throughout their careers in the social sector and philanthropy. As partners in executive leadership, they will deepen Children’s Defense Fund’s capacity to build a movement for child well-being for a third generation of America’s young people. For 50 years, CDF has been blessed to welcome talented, skilled, and committed champions for children and youth. I am grateful for this tradition and excited to partner with Sheri and Kathleen to advance our work to build community so young people grow up with dignity, hope, and joy.” 

Children’s Defense Fund Chief Operating Officer Kathleen Flynn: 

“I am thrilled to join Children’s Defense Fund and support the important work its staff and volunteers do every day to improve the well-being of children and young people in America. For the last 50 years, Children’s Defense Fund has demonstrated unwavering dedication to that effort. With my background in child advocacy, I am honored to know I will have the opportunity to contribute to that critical mission.” 

Children’s Defense Fund Vice President and Chief Program Officer Sheri A. Brady: 

“I have enjoyed working with the talented and committed staff of Children’s Defense Fund for the last three years. I know our movement building efforts along with our efforts to establish new bodies of work in early childhood development and narrative change have already made significant impact. In my new role, I am excited to see what all our team will accomplish next.” 

Instagram- @childdefender1973  

TikTok-@childrensdefensefund  

X/Twitter-@ChildDefender 

### 

About Children’s Defense Fund 

Founded in 1973, Children’s Defense Fund envisions a nation where marginalized children flourish, leaders prioritize their well-being, and communities wield the power to ensure they thrive. The only national, multi-issue advocacy organization working at the intersection of child well-being and racial justice, CDF advances the well-being of America’s most diverse generation, the 74 million children and youth under the age of 18 and 30 million young adults under the age of 25. CDF’s grassroots movements in marginalized communities build power for child-centered public policy, informed by racial equity and the lived experience of children and youth. Its renowned CDF Freedom Schools® program is conducted in nearly 100 cities across 30 states and territories. Learn more at www.childrensdefense.org. 

As Christians prepare to celebrate Easter, in the midst of this holy season for so many faith traditions, I return again to the Easter Sunday service Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in April 1957 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, titled “Questions that Easter Answers.” Dr. King said one of these questions is “Is the universe on the side of the forces of justice and goodness?”:

“Sometimes it looks dark and sometimes people come to feel that the universe is on the other side, that the universe seems to say ‘Amen’ to the forces of injustice . . . Every now and then I feel like asking God, ‘Why is it that over so many centuries the forces of injustice have triumphed over the Negro and he has been forced to live under oppression and slavery and exploitation? Why is it, God? Why is it simply because some of your children ask to be treated as first-class human beings they are trampled over, their homes are bombed, their children are pushed from their classrooms, and sometimes little children are thrown in the deep waters of Mississippi?’ . . . I begin to despair sometimes, it seems that Good Friday has the throne. It seems that the forces of injustice reign supreme. But then in the midst of that something else comes to me. And I can hear something saying, ‘King, you are stopping at Good Friday, but don’t you know that Easter is coming?’”

Dr. King continued: “This is the meaning of Easter, it answers the profound question that we confront in Montgomery. And if we can just stand with it, if we can just live with Good Friday, things will be all right. For I know that Easter is coming and I can see it coming now. As I look over the world, as I look at America, I can see Easter coming in race relations. I can see it coming on every hand. I see it coming in Montgomery. I see it coming in Alabama. I see it coming in Mississippi. Sometimes it looks like it’s coming slow, but it’s still coming.”

Easter is still coming. Sometimes it may still feel as if the forces of injustice and those who are afraid of the light and the truth are winning for a day. But the message of this joyous season of renewal in many traditions, with family and community rituals centered on the promises of exodus, deliverance, new hope, and rebirth, is that darkness will not prevail. Death-dealing empires and injustice do not have the last word. Good will triumph over evil. A new day is still dawning.

I end with two prayers for renewal:

God, guide our faith that by it we might make our children and nation whole again.

God, help us to believe with every ounce of our being that we, with Your help, can save our children and make them well.

God, renew our spirits—Your spirit within us—and make us worthy carriers of Your message of love and hope and life in all we say and do this day and forever more.

**

God, please help us remember that all the darkness in the world cannot snuff out the light of one little candle. Help us to keep lighting our little candles until a mighty torch of justice sweeps our nation and the world.

“I have always had fire, and always been ready to engage in something. And it’s something that burns, you turn on a flame that burns for people who are being mistreated. I don’t care who they are. I don’t want any downtrodden person or persons to be mistreated around the globe.”

–Dorie Ladner

When Dorie Ladner visited a Georgetown University history class ten years ago to talk about her experiences as a young civil rights activist in Mississippi, at the end of the lecture one student asked her how the Civil Rights Movement ended. Her answer: “It hasn’t.” Dorie Ladner, who was a fellow Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member, a founder of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an organizer of Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer, and an antiwar and antipoverty activist, held a fiery determination to fight injustice and inequality her entire life. When she passed away March 11 she left behind a long legacy of courageous stands for freedom and justice, often taken side-by-side with her beloved sister, Dr. Joyce Ladner. One of the most important pieces of her legacy for children and young people is her example that you are never too young to start making a difference.

The sisters grew up in the small Black community of Palmer’s Crossing, Mississippi, just outside Hattiesburg, where their mother made sure to instill the message that they and their siblings were as good as anyone else. Dorie often recounted a story that took place when she was 12: a white grocery store clerk groped her buttocks as she was reading a magazine, and she immediately turned and beat him with the bag of donuts she was holding. When she told her mother what happened, she remembered, her mother advised her: “You should have killed him. Don’t ever let any white man touch you wrong.” This sense of self-worth and steely courage would be invaluable assets as Dorie started becoming involved in Mississippi’s dangerous Civil Rights Movement battles just a few years later.

As she explained in an oral history interview: “When I was 14, a number of things happened that brought me into the freedom movement. There was the murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. He was just one year older than I was. I was enraged, but I did not know what to do with that anger . . . In the newspapers about the trial I read references to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. I asked my social studies teacher Mr. Clark what they were about and did not get a satisfactory answer, so I got a copy of the U.S. Constitution. When I read those amendments I felt empowered. My sister Joyce and I had an opportunity to do something with our anger when Mrs. Beard took us to NAACP state meetings in Jackson, Mississippi, where we met Roy Wilkins, Medgar Evers, and others. I was impressed by Medgar Evers, who was outgoing and showed great warmth toward us. He told us about our rights to better schools and pointed out that our parents were paying taxes for our education.”

Mrs. Beard, one of the mentors she mentioned, was Eileen Dahmer Beard—a close friend of her mother’s who attended their church, and the sister of local NAACP president Vernon Dahmer. Vernon Dahmer soon became a key mentor too as he helped Dorie and Joyce organize a Hattiesburg NAACP Youth Council. When Dorie wanted to learn more about her own rights, she initially had an experience with her teacher that too many of our children still have in school today: she was confronted with an inability, or a deliberate unwillingness, to share the whole truth. But Dorie did not stop there. She educated herself, and she was blessed to be surrounded by other caring adults who took her seriously and helped her realize that even as a young Black teenage girl, she could take action.  Once she started, she never stopped, and her activism and organizing at every key step of the Civil Rights Movement helped change history.

As Women’s History Month continues, many schools are still making a special effort to teach students about women leaders. I hope some of them are learning about Dorie Ladner today—and I hope adults are determined to do their part to educate and empower the children and young people in their families and communities so they know the truth about history, understand their rights today, and realize they too can take action. In a more recent interview with the Washington Post Dorie Ladner shared a message for today’s young activists that reiterated what she told the Georgetown student: the war is not over. Her example should keep inspiring the young people who are picking up her battle now and carrying on.

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son—we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.

–Ella Baker

As Women’s History Month continues, I wanted to highlight again another transforming woman whose name I hope young people will learn: Ella Josephine Baker. Ella Baker said this 60 years ago as she was speaking about the murders of Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who disappeared together in Mississippi in June 1964. During the nationally publicized weeks-long search for Chaney, who was Black, and Goodman and Schwerner, who were white, FBI investigators also found the bodies of several other murdered Black men whose disappearances had not received the same attention. Ella Baker’s statement was a rallying cry that has never stopped resonating. She was a lifelong warrior against injustice and inequality, a mentor for my generation of civil rights activists, a powerful advisor to colleagues like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and always, always, unwilling to rest.

Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice Johnson Reagon featured those words in the stirring “Ella’s Song”—we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes—and she and I were both among the hundreds of young people Ella Baker mentored. Ella Baker believed in servant leadership and shared leadership rather than charismatic leadership, and always encouraged young people to find and lift their own voices and join them with others.

Ella Baker grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and graduated as valedictorian of her class at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, before moving to Harlem, where her life as an activist took root over several decades. She eventually worked with the NAACP as a field secretary, National Director of Branches, and director of the New York office, pushing for organizational structure just as she would do when she helped establish both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

She was the one who sat down with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison to discuss how to create a continuing movement out of the Montgomery bus boycott, leading to SCLC’s formation. As the first SCLC staff member, she was the one who tried to put the new organization in operating order so that Dr. King was not just a leader who reacted to and jumped from one event to the next. She worked to give SCLC the capacity to plan and implement action. And Ella Baker was the one who convinced Dr. King to bring me and about 200 other Black college students who had been arrested for engaging in lunch counter sit-ins around the South to a meeting at her alma mater, Shaw University, in April 1960—the meeting where SNCC was founded. I was a senior at Spelman College, and my first plane ride ever was from Atlanta to Raleigh for that meeting. Ella Baker fought to make sure the students retained our own independent organization rather than simply becoming the youth arm of the SCLC. Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Bob Moses, and many other fellow student activists and young activists were all influenced by her example, counsel, and convening, and we all shared a special debt of reverence and gratitude.

Ella Baker was tough and disciplined and demanded the best of the young and older adults around her. She understood that movement building was about more than protests and meetings and speeches—it was hard, daily, persistent, and sacrificial behind-the-scenes work. She was an institution builder and stressed the importance of strong institutions that could last over time rather than reliance on a single strong leader. And as a woman, Ella Baker was fully aware of but unintimidated by the men she worked with who devalued the advice of women and sometimes resented her forcefulness, prodding, and “mothering.” She made no special effort to be ingratiating.

She labored at SCLC as she had at the NAACP to raise money, conduct voter registration drives, speak to citizen groups (sometimes ten times a day), and travel to community after community to help people help themselves. She warned against SCLC becoming “a cult of personality” for Dr. King rather than an organized means of empowering others, and she eventually left SCLC after deciding that movement building was more important than the specific organization and personalities involved. At a gathering celebrating Ella Baker’s 75th birthday, Bob Moses called her the “Fundi,” the person in the community who masters a craft with the help of the community and teaches it to other people. Fundi became the title of a film on her extraordinary life and work.

Ella Baker remains my civil rights generation’s Fundi. The Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools® Ella Baker Child Policy Training Institute proudly honors her. Sixty years after she taught us that we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes, we can all honor her by keeping her belief in freedom and equality alive until it becomes the reality for every mother’s child.

By Marian Wright Edelman

The National Urban League has just released the 2024 edition of its signature publication The State of Black America, and this year the report centered on examining the 60^th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the National Urban League says: “For Black America, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the first time that the United States government addressed the racial caste system that had been protected for centuries by unjust laws and systemic brutality of nonwhite people in this country. The law, in many ways, answered the calls for jobs and freedom in the March on Washington by banning discrimination in the workplace, in our housing system, and programs funded by the government, and marked the death of the Jim Crow South.” But, they add, “Sixty years later, the fight for equality is far from over.”

They continue: “We have a Supreme Court that has dismantled Affirmative Action, threatening not only equitable access to higher education and the economic opportunities born from a college degree but also endangering diversity and equity initiatives that make our workplaces safer and more accessible for people from all backgrounds. We have states not only dictating who gets to vote in elections but also enforcing ID laws and requirements that make it harder for marginalized people to participate in the Democratic process. In Congress, extremist elected officials continue to hold our economy and our physical safety hostage by proposing the dismantling of federally funded safety net programs in exchange for the passage of critical spending bills that keep our government open and support our armed service members . . . It is not the time to be silent. We cannot stand by while this law is stripped of its power by those who oppose progress. This fight is one for our future, our legacy, and the soul of this country.”

The report goes on to evaluate progress and danger across a range of measures. Since 2005, the National Urban League has used an “Equality Index” to evaluate how well Black Americans are doing in comparison to white Americans in measures of health, economic status, education, social justice, and civic engagement. They study a wide range of data to score each of these categories individually before calculating a combined score, and this year’s Equality Index was 75.7%. In economics and health, scores were closer to full equality this year than they were in 2005, but in other areas the numbers are slipping in the wrong direction.

This year’s report also examines some of the recent and pending cases and legislation that threaten the Civil Rights Act, including the Supreme Court decisions in 303 Creative v. Elenis, which eroded protections of LGBTQ rights, and the case striking down race-conscious university admissions policies. We can’t afford to slide backwards—and we certainly can’t afford retrenchment towards the unequal and unjust systems the Civil Rights Act was meant to address. Essays by President Joe Biden, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge, and many other civic and corporate leaders underscore the same message. 

As the 2024 election primary season continues, Americans are focusing on the real choices that lie ahead for their states and our nation. Reports like this one help paint a picture of where we are and where we need to be in order to achieve the full measures of equality every child and young person deserve. One of the tenets in the National Urban League’s framework for collective activism is to defend democracy—and this begins with the urgency of registering to vote. As they also say: Our freedoms are not free. Be sure you are doing your part to defend them!

Last night, President Biden presented a vision for building a nation where all children can thrive, from crucial interventions to provide children and youth with high-quality early learning experiences to economic and community interventions that create conditions for young people to grow up with dignity, hope, and joy.  

President Biden echoed the urgency for access to high-quality child care that our CDF Freedom Schools® families regularly share. CDF’s State of America’s Children 2023 revealed that more than half of families live in areas without an adequate supply of child care and that child care costs single parents more than one-third of their salaries. Yet childcare providers earn less than half of a living wage in all 50 states and D.C. These data demonstrate the severity of the childcare crisis in families, not just by obstructing parents’ ability to work but also by denying young children high-quality experiences that contribute to a full, joyful childhood. That orientation extends to the president’s call for universal pre-K education. 

Child care and educational experiences are most effective when shared in the context of economically stable families. Family stability results from a just economy that provides for affordable housing—the current lack thereof has a massive racial disparity, with three in four children experiencing houselessness being Black or Brown.  The president reminded Congress that they can advance economic justice almost immediately through an expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC). The impact of the pandemic-era CTC is indisputable: It cut child poverty in half and helped sustain millions of families through one of our nation’s most challenging episodes. This crucial support for families should never have expired, and the Senate is positioned to roll back that error in part with the passage of the current tax package. 

And yet, even with those provisions in place, it’s difficult for children to live joyfully while also living with the persistent threat of gun violence. The regular cadence of gun violence and mass shootings, so common that only the most egregious events make headlines, denies children any safe haven—not their neighborhoods, not their schools, not their places of worship. Gun violence ends the lives of 5 in every 100,000 children, with Black children suffering this violence at a rate six times greater than their White peers.  President Biden’s renewed call for a ban on assault weapons restores a movement for the safe environments young people deserve. 

Children’s Defense Fund stands ready to work with the Biden administration and our allies in Congress to advance this vision of communities wielding the power to ensure all young people thrive. 

Children’s Defense Fund

As Black History Month ends and Women’s History Month begins, it’s always a special privilege to honor leaders who overlap in both—Black women who did their part to change American history. As we approach the 60^th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Summer, one of these leaders to know and honor is Mrs. Septima Clark, the woman Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “Mother of the Movement.” Throughout her long life, Mrs. Clark pioneered literacy and citizenship education for Black Americans, including the Citizenship Schools that helped inspire the 1964 Freedom Schools.

Readers familiar with Brian Lanker’s marvelous photography collection I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America may remember Mrs. Clark as the proud, strong, and beautiful woman with silver braids whose portrait graced the front cover of the original book and captured her indomitable spirit. Mrs. Clark was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1898, the second of eight children and the daughter of a formerly enslaved father. She graduated from Avery Normal Institute in 1916 with a teaching certificate, but because the city of Charleston would not hire Black teachers, she found a job in a rural community on Johns Island, South Carolina. The white teacher in that community had only three students but was paid $85 a month, while the Black school had two teachers for 132 children, and its two Black teachers were paid a combined salary of $60. This was the first of many injustices she encountered throughout her long career, and as time went on, she just started speaking out even when others around her would not. As she put it simply years later: “They were afraid, but I wasn’t.” 

In 1919 Mrs. Clark returned to Charleston, where she volunteered for a NAACP petition effort that ultimately changed the local law prohibiting Black teachers. For the next several decades she taught primarily in Charleston and Columbia while continuing her own education in the summers—at Columbia University in New York; at Atlanta University, where W.E.B. DuBois was one of her professors; at Benedict College, where she finally received a bachelor’s degree; and at Hampton Institute, where she earned her master’s. But after 40 years her career as a South Carolina public school teacher came to an abrupt halt in 1956 when the state legislature ruled that state employees could not belong to the NAACP. Mrs. Clark refused to resign or lie about her membership and was dismissed.

Mrs. Clark signed her name to a letter to 726 other Black teachers asking them to protest the law, but only 11 of them agreed to attend a meeting with her and the superintendent, and on the day of the meeting only four showed up. She later said that effort was the big failure of her life, and she believed it failed because she tried to push the other teachers into something they weren’t ready for. The lesson she learned was that people needed to be trained first so that they would be prepared to act—and the trainings she went on to develop helped shape the course of the Civil Rights Movement.

Mrs. Clark had already attended several meetings at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the legendary grassroots education center devoted to social justice. In the summer of 1955, she led a workshop at Highlander on developing leadership whose participants included a shy, quiet NAACP member from Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks. After Mrs. Clark was fired from her teaching job, Highlander’s extraordinary director, Myles Horton, invited her to be Highlander’s full-time Director of Workshops, where she pioneered innovative programs that combined literacy education for adults with citizenship and voter education. When the state of Tennessee forced Highlander to close in 1961, Mrs. Clark continued the same work as Director of Education and Teaching for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)’s new Citizen Education Program. Her workshops formed the basis for the Citizenship School movement she helped establish across the South.

In addition to teaching basic reading skills using familiar materials like the Sears catalog and covering practical topics like how to write checks, these “schools” taught basic civics and citizenship rights and focused on the arcane voting requirements specific to each local community that were being used to disenfranchise Black voters. Classes met on evenings and weekends in churches, store backrooms, and other available spaces. Lessons were written on dry-cleaning bags in place of blackboards. They relied on training local citizens to teach other community members; Fannie Lou Hamer was among the local leaders who volunteered.

Mrs. Clark eventually helped establish and recruit and train teachers for hundreds of Citizenship Schools: “They were in people’s kitchens, in beauty parlors, and under trees in the summertime. I went all over the South, sometimes visiting three Citizenship Schools in one day…One time I heard Andy Young say that the Citizenship Schools were the base on which the whole Civil Rights Movement was built. And that’s probably very much true.” Rosa Parks also said that while she may have sat down once, Mrs. Clark kept on working and building: “I am always very respectful and very much in awe of the presence of Septima Clark because her life story makes the effort that I have made very minute. I only hope that there is a possible chance that some of her great courage and dignity and wisdom has rubbed off on me.”

As a woman in the movement, Mrs. Clark said she felt the men around her often did not do a good job of listening to or including her or other women. Yet she observed that it was largely women who got things done: “In stories about the Civil Rights Movement you hear mostly about the Black ministers. But if you talk to the women who were there, you’ll hear another story. I think the Civil Rights Movement would never have taken off if some women hadn’t started to speak up.” Even later in life Mrs. Clark was never hesitant to speak up. One of the injustices after her 1956 firing was that South Carolina refused to pay the pension she had earned for her forty years of teaching or the pay she would have earned in the few years before her retirement if she had not been dismissed. She did not give up on fighting for those wrongs to be righted, and in 1976 the governor reinstated her pension, and five years later the legislature approved paying her back pay.

Although her signature accomplishment may be the programs she established for Black adults, she never lost her original and enduring passion for educating children. During “retirement” in her 70s she became the first Black woman elected to the Charleston School Board. Near the end of her life, she said: “Education is my big priority right now. I want people to see children as human beings and not to think of the money that it costs nor to think of the amount of time that it will take, but to think of the lives that can be developed into Americans who will redeem the soul of America and will really make America a great country.” This Women’s History Month, let’s continue to honor Septima Clark’s history-making legacy by making her priority our own.