MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Proctor Institute — Providing Sustenance and Hope

When I was a child my father was pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Bennettsville, South Carolina, and my mother was director of the youth and senior choirs, church organist, founder and head of the Mothers’ Club, and fundraiser-in-chief. We watched Daddy and Mama staying up to date by subscribing to theological and church music publications and buying the latest books by leading theologians and thinkers, and they did not confine their self-improvement to reading. They went to Union Theological Seminary, to a Black Mountain, North Carolina, conference center, and to Oberlin College for summer courses and other enrichment, and they went away every year for a week to the Minister’s Institute at Hampton Institute in Virginia, sometimes taking me along. I would wander along…