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“Realizing Dr. King's Vision for Every Child: Ending Child Poverty”

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“Realizing Dr. King's Vision for Every Child: Ending Child Poverty” th The Annual 24 Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry “Realizing Dr. King’s Vision for Every Child: Ending Child Poverty” July 16 – 20, 2018 Children’s Defense Fund – Haley Farm Clinton, Tennessee 25 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001 • (202) 628-8787 • 1 (800) 233-1200 www.childrensdefense.org/Proctor www.childrensdefense.org Map of CDF Haley Farm Front gate ❽ Restrooms 12 Shuttle Bus Boarding Area ❼ ❻ Dining Area Restrooms Shuttle Bus Lodge Board Boarding Area Room ❾ 10 11 13 Registration, Action Center, ❷ First Aid, and Publications Luggage Tables ❶ ❸ Restrooms Restrooms ❹ ❺ 1) Lodge 7) Riggio-Lynch Interfaith Chapel 11) Dining Areas (in the Main Tent) 2) Lodge Board Room 8) Pastoral Room 12) Labyrinth 3) Langston Hughes Library 9) Registration, Action Center, First Aid, 13) Restrooms and Lost and Found 4) Business Center and Luggage (in the Main Tent) 5) Little Brown Building #1 10) Publications Tables (in the Main Tent) 6) Chapel Board Room The 24th Annual Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry Welcome Letter from Marian Wright Edelman ............................................................................ 2 Daily Schedule .............................................................................................................................. 5 CDF Proctor Institute Faculty-in-Residence and Staff ................................................................ 10 Great Preachers and Plenary Speakers ......................................................................................... 14 Workshop Descriptions............................................................................................................... 19 Late Afternoon Options ............................................................................................................. 27 Special Opportunities • Early Morning Option: Meditations for the Journey ................................................. 31 • Late Night Option: Open Mic and Intergenerational Conversation ......................... 31 • Publications Tables and Author Book Signings .......................................................... 32 • Taking Action at Proctor: 2018 Action Center .......................................................... 34 • Taking Action After Proctor: CDF Child Defender Fellowship ................................. 34 • 2018 National Observance of Children’s Sabbaths® Weekend ................................... 35 • About the CDF Freedom Schools® Program .............................................................. 36 • About the CDF Proctor Institute’s CDF Freedom Schools® Program ....................... 37 • CDF Proctor Institute: Graduate Intensive ................................................................ 39 About the CDF Proctor Institute • History ....................................................................................................................... 41 • The Reverend Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor ................................................................ 42 • Past Great Preachers ................................................................................................... 43 • CDF Haley Farm Emergency Information and Staff .................................................. 44 The 24th Annual Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry n 1 Welcome to the 24th Annual Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry Dear Proctor Family: Thank you for joining us in our Beloved Community as we come together for the inspiration, information, strategies, skills, and support we need to protect our children, end child poverty, challenge oppression and injustice, and transform our nation and world. We gather fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. announced the Poor People’s Campaign. We gather fifty years after Rev. Jim Lawson and the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike galvanized working folks to demand change from their community, state and Congress for decent wages. We gather fifty years after Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and farm workers, many of them immigrants, mobilized for justice through the collective power of the United Farm Workers. We gather fifty years after courageous students like Dr. Otis Moss, Jr., Joyce Hobson Johnson, Rev. Nelson Johnson and a number of others here sat in at lunch counters across the South, desegregated public libraries and transportation, and mobilized on campuses and in communities to generate profound and lasting change. It is time for the next transforming movement to end poverty beginning with our children and racial injustice driven by Dr. King’s three great evils: racism, materialism and militarism. They were days of terrible lows but also inspiring highs, of devastating losses and stunning victories when it had seemed all might be lost. We learned through our struggles as well as our successes, through what worked and what didn’t and why. And we kept going forward. They were hard, scary, fearful times of purpose when we held close to each other, to our faith, and to our conviction that, to paraphrase the song “Can’t Give Up Now,” we didn’t believe God had brought us this far to leave us. Fifty years later, we are in the midst of grimmer, more devastating, more terrible days than many of us hoped and thought we would ever see again. I can only imagine the terror and helpless desperation felt by nearly 3,000 severed children and parents. It is sickening that thousands of children have been snatched from parents in a strange land, placed with strange caregivers, who may not speak their language, in detention facilities – even cages – with the timeline for reuniting them being debated in the courts. Assaults on children and family well-being—including the heartless ripping of children from their parents’ arms as they seek refuge in our country to the families torn asunder by mass incarceration and the Cradle to Prison Pipeline, rampant and resurgent racism, the devastations of poverty with safety nets shredded and tax changes gifting the rich at the expense of millions left behind and among pretensions to be a just society—drive many to despair. But this is no time to stop fighting with all our nonviolent might. Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote these words that were only published after his death in an essay titled “Testament of Hope.” They still speak to us today: [My] words may have an unexpectedly optimistic ring at a time when pessimism is the prevailing mood. People are often surprised to learn that I am an optimist. They know how often I have been jailed, how frequently the days and nights have been filled with frustration 2 n Children’s Defense Fund and sorrow, how bitter and dangerous are my adversaries. They expect these experiences to harden me into a grim and desperate man. They fail, however, to perceive the sense of affirmation generated by the challenge of embracing struggle and surmounting obstacles. They have no comprehension of the strength that comes from faith in God and [people]. It is possible for me to falter, but I am profoundly secure in my knowledge that God loves us; [God] has not worked out a design for our failure. [People have] the capacity to do right as well as wrong, and … history is a path upward, not downward. The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to [humanity’s] blunders but to [humanity’s] capacity to overcome them. While it is a bitter fact that in America in 1968, I am denied equality solely because I am black, yet I am not a chattel slave. Millions of people have fought thousands of battles to enlarge my freedom; restricted as it still is, progress has been made. This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful? The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. All too many Americans believe justice will unfold painlessly or that its absence for black people will be tolerated tranquilly. Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo. We gather here at CDF’s Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry in 2018 recognizing that justice demands radical changes in our society and that the status quo cannot continue. We gather here as today’s students and young adult leaders, as clergy and organizers, as educators and activists determined to embrace struggle and surmount obstacles, drawing strength from God and each other, Together, we will worship and work, sing and strategize, drill down into the information and lift up new ideas, take action and rest so that when we leave this place we will be a mighty force to speak up, stand up, vote out those who block a democratic fair nation, and help realize, at last, Dr. King’s vision for every child and end child poverty as a first step towards ending poverty for all in our nation.
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