OUR VOICES: The Scratch Line

BY MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

My dear and much beloved preacher-teacher friend and spiritual mentor Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor was a great president of a historically Black college, a Peace Corps leader in Africa, and pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York. He preached a great sermon at Children’s Defense Fund (CDF)-Alex Haley Farm’s opening as a center for servant leadership development and advocacy for children and young people. As we prepare Alex Haley Farm for CDF’s annual Hall-Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry, Sam Proctor’s words from that day resonate again — reminding us that even though we all enter the world in the same hypothetical starting position, “we do not all start at the same scratch line.”

He said: “You were born here owning nothing, having earned nothing, just born! There you are, helpless! You are indebted to everybody — but some of us opened our eyes and saw nothing but blessings just dumping on us. I opened my eyes and there was Herbert and Velma and my grandma Hattie — a slave in Chesterfield County [who graduated from Hampton Institute] in 1882 — smiling on me. How in the world could I lose? Taught me how to read and sing four-part harmony before I ever got to school; taught me how to play the clarinet and the piano and made me go to Sunday school. Daddy didn’t send us, Daddy took us to Sunday school.

If there was nobody in the Sunday school but one person, that would’ve been my daddy with his six little children there in the Sunday school at the Bank Street Baptist Church. That’s what I inherited! I didn’t earn it. You can’t get that with a Visa card. It was given to me.”

He continued: “Now, all through my neighborhood, there were other young fellas. I could remember all of them. Daddies were drunk half the time, they didn’t read in their homes, nobody went to Sunday school, none of that. They started life below the scratch line. I started life way above the scratch line. Everywhere I went, someone said, ‘Aren’t you Ms. Hattie’s grandson?’ ‘Are you Herbert’s boy?’ Skipped three grades. I never was in the 3rd grade to 5th grade or 7th grade. Everything smiling on me. Finished high school at 15, went on to college on a scholarship. None of that did I deserve; I hadn’t earned any of it. I started out with a head of steam…they had trained my mother and father, they had learned poetry — Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alfred, Lord Tennyson — and they gave all of that to us in great abundance, and my bud- dies up the street had none of that.

“Now, if we want these bones to live again, those of us who have inherited benefits that we did not earn or deserve need to turn around and help those who inherited deficits that they did not earn or de- serve and help them to rise up to the scratch line where we are so that they may earn and enjoy all of the benefits that we so take for granted. Can these bones live again, O Lord? These bones can live!”

Throughout his life, Sam Proctor thanked his parents, Herbert and Velma Proctor, and his grandparents — especially his paternal grand- mother, Hattie Ann Proctor — for all they had done to ensure he started life so far above the scratch line. He understood how many millions of children and young people do not get the same good start. Can these bones live again? At a moment when so many forces are rallying against equity and inclusion, the forces working alongside children and young people to make sure all of them can reach their full potential and thrive must remain even stronger.

Edelman is founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund.