Peter had accompanied Senator Kennedy to Mississippi in 1967 on a fact-finding trip to expose the extent of poverty and hunger in the Deep South. Marian was one of the Senator’s guides for his travels around Mississippi. After that trip, Marian continued working with Peter, and after Senator Kennedy’s assassination, they married.
I first met Peter Edelman at a national conference on youth and community development held in October of 1969 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, and sponsored by the League. The League had invited a cross section of activists from around the country to discuss ways in which young people could become more positively involved in government and politics. I was invited to serve on the Steering Committee along with Peter, who was then the Associate Director of the Robert E Kennedy Memorial; David Mixner, of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee; and Martin Slate, a fellow Yale law student who had been a friend of mine from the days he was at Harvard and I was at Wellesley. One of the issues that united us was our belief that the Constitution should be amended to lower the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. If young people were old enough to fight, they were entitled to vote. The 26th Amendment finally passed in 1971, but young people between the ages of eighteen and twentyfour did not choose to vote in the numbers many of us then anticipated, and that group today still has the lowest registration and voter turnout of any age group. Their apathy makes it less likely that our national politics will reflect their concerns and safeguard their future.
During a break in the conference, I was sitting on a bench talking with Peter Edelman when our conversation was interrupted by a tall, elegantly dressed man.
“Well, Peter, aren’t you going to introduce me to this earnest young lady?” he asked.
That was my first encounter with Vernon Jordan, then the Director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta and an advocate of the lower voting age. Vernon, a smart and charismatic veteran lawyer of the civil rights movement, became my friend that day, and later, my husband’s. He and his accomplished wife, Ann, can always be counted on for good company and wise counsel.
Peter told me about Marian’s plans to start an anti-poverty advocacy organization and urged me to meet her as soon as I could. A few months later, Marian spoke at Yale. I introduced myself to her after wards and asked for a summer job. She told me I could have a job, but she couldn’t pay me. That was a problem since I had to earn enough money to supplement the scholarship Wellesley had awarded me for law school and the loans I had taken out. The Law Student Civil Rights Research Council gave me a grant, which I used to support my work during the summer of 1970 at the Washington Research Project Marian had started in Washington, D.C.
Senator Walter “Fritz” Mondale of Minnesota, later Vice President under Jimmy Carter, decided to hold Senate hearings to investigate the living and working conditions of migrant farmworkers. The 1970 hearings coincided with the ten-year anniversary of Edward R. Morrow’s famous television documentary Harvest of Shame, which had shocked Americans in 1960 with its expose of the deplorable treatment migrants endured.
Marian assigned me to do research on the education and health of migrant children. I had some limited experience with migrant children who had attended my elementary school for a few months each year and with others my church had arranged for me to babysit when I was about fourteen years old. Every Saturday morning during harvest season, I went with several of my Sunday school friends to the migrant camp, where we took care of the children under ten while their older brothers and sisters worked in the fields with their parents.
I got to know one seven-year-old girl, Maria, who was preparing to receive her First Communion when her family returned to Mexico at the end of the harvest. But she wouldn’t be able to mark that passage unless her family saved enough money to buy her a proper white dress. I told my mother about Maria, and she took me to buy a beautiful dress. When we presented it to Maria’s mother, she started crying and dropped to her knees to kiss my mother’s hands. My embarrassed mother kept saying she knew how important it was for a little girl to feel special on such an occasion. Years later, I realized that my mother must have identified with Maria.
Although these children lived harsh lives, they were bright, hopeful and loved by their parents. The children dropped whatever they were doing to run down the road when their families came home from the fields. Fathers would scoop up excited kids, and mothers would bend over to hug toddlers. It was just like my neighborhood when fathers came home from the city after work.
But as I conducted my research, I learned how often farmworkers and their children were―and still too often are―deprived of basics like decent housing and sanitation. Cesar Chavez started the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, organizing workers in the California fields, but conditions in most of the rest of the country hadn’t changed much since 1960.
The hearings I attended in July 1970 were part of a series the Senate Committee had been holding to take testimony and evidence from farmworkers, advocates and employers.
Witnesses presented evidence that some corporations owned
