Beloved,
This month, as America marks 250 years since its founding and we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, we are invited into a deeper reckoning with memory, inheritance, and responsibility.
Unfortunately, anniversaries can tempt us to celebrate without reflection. But milestones such as these require more. They ask us to tell the truth about where we have been, what has been passed down, and what we are leaving behind for the generations to come.
Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, children still inherit profound inequities shaped by race, economics, violence, and exclusion. Fifty years after Roots helped a nation confront the enduring power of lineage, history, and survival, we are reminded that inheritance is never only about what we receive. It is also about what we choose to repair, what we choose to carry forward, and what we refuse to pass on.
For too many children, summer continues to expose the fault lines of inequality. As temperatures rise, millions of children lose reliable access to meals, structured learning, and the stabilizing presence of trusted adults. This month also marked the anniversary of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, has caused more than 1.5 million children to lose food assistance since its passage.
Those same disparities are visible in the classroom. Recent national assessments reveal widening academic gaps, with children in under-resourced communities recovering more slowly and bearing the deepest learning losses in literacy and math. These are not simply measures of academic performance. They reflect the uneven conditions under which children are asked to grow, learn, and imagine their futures.
The question before us is not only what children are carrying, but what we are willing to carry with them. In this nation’s 250th year, and in the shadow of Roots at 50, we are reminded that inheritance is never passive. It is constructed. It is contested. It is ultimately revealed by whether we give children what they need to grow, to learn, and to thrive.
That is why this month matters. At Children’s Defense Fund, we gathered for the Hall-Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry not simply to commemorate, but to rightly remember, to recover sacred rhetoric for this moment, and to renew the moral imagination required to free our children. In the 50th anniversary of Roots—and at a time when its availability in school libraries is persistently challenged, we are reminded that truth-telling remains essential to liberation, and that the stories we preserve shape the futures we make possible.
In Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools®, young people are engaging the enduring work of literacy, servant leadership development, and civic formation in communities across the country. They are reading texts and wrestling with history, identity, and responsibility—learning that their voices matter and that their lives are bound up in the unfinished work of freedom. In this season of national remembrance and reflection, that work carries a particular weight. It reminds us that what we pass on to children is not only knowledge, but memory, moral courage, and the capacity to imagine a more just future.
Through this year’s National Day of Social Action, we asked with clarity and conviction: Are the children well? That question is not rhetorical. It is a measure of our public priorities, our moral commitments, and our willingness to build a nation where children inherit not neglect or exclusion, but dignity, hope, and joy.
What we pass on is never only memory. It is also condition, consequence, and possibility. The work before us is to ensure that what children inherit is worthy of their promise.
For our children,
Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson
President and CEO