Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors

Throughout her life and work, Marian Wright Edelman has been at the heart of this century's most dramatic civil rights and child advocacy struggles. In this stirring, heartfelt memoir she pays tribute to the extraordinary mentors who helped light her way including Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, and William Sloane Coffin. She celebrates the lives of her parents and the great Black women of Bennettsville, South Carolina -- Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate -- who gave her love and guidance in her youth, as well as the many teachers and figures who inspired her education at Spelman College and empowered her early years as an activist in the 1960s.

Illustrated with many of the author's personal photographs, Lanterns also includes a "Parents' Pledge" and "Twenty-Five More Lessons for Life" to guide, protect, and love our children every day so that they will become, in Edelman's moving vision, the healing agents for national transformation.