By Marian Wright Edelman
During the Thanksgiving season I often share the description of an editorial cartoon my father kept pinned up in the vestibule of our church that made a deep childhood impression on me I have never forgotten. It was a black and white drawing by the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Herblock that was originally published in the Washington Post in October 1947. The picture showed a group of well-dressed, happy people, sitting at a banquet table overflowing with place settings, goblets, and so much food the table cannot hold any more: a roast, gravy boats, bread and butter, covered dishes, heaping platters of sides. Hovering behind them and filling the rest of the image is a crowd of gaunt, wide-eyed hungry children dressed in rags. There are too many of these skeletal figures to count; the starving masses go on and on into the distance. Back at the table, one of the dinner guests is speaking cheerfully to his smiling companions. The caption reads: “Shall we say grace?”
In some houses Thanksgiving dinner will look a little like that cartoon, with tables overflowing with favorite foods as family and friends crowd around them to give thanks and say grace. But for too many families, Thanksgiving will be like any other meal: not a time of plenty but a time of want. In his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., asked: “Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? . . . Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.’” We are reaching another crossroads when we must decide whether Dr. King’s definition of a truly great nation will stand as our goal, or whether other loud voices and competing visions will allow the gulf between the haves and have-nots to grow, reveling in their own successes while millions of others are left outside and left behind.
Some years ago, Children’s Defense Fund pro bono advertising partner Fallon Worldwide created a campaign for CDF that very simply updated the moving words of Langston Hughes’s poem “God to Hungry Child”:
Hungry child,
I did not make this world for you.
You didn’t buy stock in my corporation.
You didn’t invest in my mutual fund.
Where were you when my company went public?
I made the world for the rich
And the will-be-rich
And the have-always-been rich.
Not for you,
Hungry child.
As we are giving thanks to God for all our blessings this season, is that the message we believe God wants us to send to hungry children, young people, and families in our nation? If it is not, will we be among the persistent voices who continue lifting up Dr. King’s definition of greatness and keep insisting we find another way?