Hidden in Plain Sight
The Tragedy of Children's Rights from Ben Franklin to Lionel Tate
Introduction
Ain't I a Person?
Ain't I a person? Ain't I got rights?
-Questions posed by a thirteen-year-old foster child
The great strength of history in a free society is its capacity for
self-correction. This is the endless excitement of historical writing-the
search to reconstruct what went before, a quest illuminated by those ever
changing prisms that continually place old questions in a new light.
-Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
The boy I shall call Tony was not very tall or strong for his age, but he
was intense, intelligent, and articulate. Tony had been removed from his
mentally ill mother's care at age four because of medical neglect. He and
his younger half sister had spent the previous nine years in various
foster homes. He saw his mother often but she remained unable to care for
him. When Tony was thirteen, the attorney for the state had decided to
file a motion, known as a TPR, to terminate the parental rights of Tony's
mother. A TPR is the ulti ... read full excerpt from Hidden in Plain Sight: The Tragedy of Children's Rights from Ben Franklin to Lionel Tate ebook
