250,000 stand for children 'cuts hurt!'

by Fred Gaboury & Tim Wheeler

This article was reprinted from the June 8, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

WASHINGTON - They came from all directions and by every mode of transportation: And they kept coming until, by late morning on June 1, more than a quarter million were standing for children in the nation's capital.

The demonstration, under a sparkling sun and blue sky, was the largest protest against the "Contract on America" since Republican extremists took control of Congress in 1994. It was part Baptist revival, part grade school field trip and part a 1960s civil rights demonstration.

Shortly after noon, 10,000 children - Black, Brown and white - marched across the Memorial Bridge to join the thousands lining both sides of the Reflecting Pool at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. There was an interfaith prayer service and Bernice Reagon-Johnson led a chorus of thousands in belting out the African freedom song "Kum Bah Yah."

Leah Dade came with children from a Newark, N.J. low-income housing project. "A lot of the children have never been outside Newark," she told the World. "We thought it was important for them to be part of an historic event that they will remember for the rest of their lives. And we wanted to let [House Speaker] Newt Gingrich and his Republican friends know that they are wrong about how the American people feel. These budget cuts hurt our children and we're not going to stand for it."

Dade had a message for Bob Dole as well: "If he wants to cut the budget for school lunches, he's going to have a very hard time getting elected."

In her keynote speech, Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), made clear the purpose of the event. "We are here to commit ourselves to building an America that leaves no child behind," she said.

Despite its official "non-partisanship," the rally's implicit message was that an increasingly conservative federal government has slighted children and the time has come "to draw a line in the sand."

Stand for Children drew an immediate response from House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the right-wing Heritage Foundation's Kenneth R. Weinstein, both of whom called it "the last stand for big government.

In an angry response Edelman said, "We do not stand here advocating big government. We stand here advocating just government - government that does not give more to those that have and less to those who have not."

Edelman said, "We stand for a nation in which the poorest baby born in the Mississippi Delta, the Montana plains, the Texas bayou, the Arizona reservation and inner city ghetto has the same God-given, American-promised birthright of fair opportunity, respect and protection as a middle-class child born in Shaker Heights and the child born on Park Avenue."

Rev. Dr. Samuel D. Proctor, Rev. Martin Luther King memorial professor at Rutgers University, and one of the many clergy to address the crowd, said he was "alarmed over the painful neglect and painful plight of too many children. And I am shocked at the tendency that sees our nation tilting more toward building jails than building schools." Other speakers included comedian Rosie O'Donnell, actress Cicely Tyson, fashion model Iman and poet Geoff Canada.

Stand for Children comes at a time when the "Gang of 73" freshmen Republicans has renewed its attack on federal entitlement programs in the 1997 budget. If allowed to stand, the measure, written by the Republican-controlled House, slashes more than $700 from Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Medicaid and other life-line programs for children, seniors and the disabled. If the cuts are allowed to become law some nine million children would lose benefits.

On June 3 the prestigious Annie E. Casey Foundation released a report saying that the number of children of the working poor rose to 5.6 million in 1994 from 3.4 million 20 years ago. There are 19 million children under 18 in the United States.

The Baltimore-based foundation said children of the working poor were the fastest-growing segment of the nations children who live in poverty. The report took note of the fact that only 14 percent of poor children were born to teenage mothers and that half of these children lived in a home with two married parents, one of whom worked.