Marian Wright Edelman has been hailed by the Washington Post as, "...the most influential children's advocate in the country." In the 1960s she was the first and only Black woman lawyer in Mississippi. Edelman is the president of the Children's Defense Fund and the author of The Measure of Our Success and Guide My Feet.

Jonathan Kozol said of this work, "From the earliest years of the campaign for civil rights to the most recent struggles on behalf of children of all races, this memoir summons up the sense of deep and personal discipleship that each and every one of us depends upon to keep alive a flame of hope. Lanterns is a radiant and transcendent book, filled with moral lessons from the youth of a courageous woman to the hearts of those who follow in her footsteps: a gift of love from one heroic generation to the next."