Marian Wright Edelman

Marian Wright Edelman

Born June 6, 1939, in Bennettsville, South Carolina,the youngest of five children of a Baptist minister Marian Wright attended Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia (B.A., 1960) and the Yale University Law School (LL.B., 1963). After work registering African-American voters in Mississippi, she moved to New York as a staff attorney for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In 1964 Wright returned to the South and became the first African-American woman to pass the bar in Mississippi. In private practice, she took on civil rights cases and fought for funding of one of the largest Head Start programs in the country. She served as director of the Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Jackson, Mississippi (1964-68) and then moved to Washington, D.C., to start the Washington Research Project of the Southern Center for Public Policy, a public interest law firm. In 1968 she married Peter Edelman.
From 1971 to 1973 Marian Edelman was the director of Harvard University's Center for Law and Education, and in 1973 she founded and became president of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) in Washington, D.C. The CDF became a highly effective organization in advocating children's rights. In 1996 Edelman founded another children's organization, Stand for Children, which brings together children's rights activists from across the United States.
Edelman's publications include Children Out of School in America: A Report (1974), Portrait of Inequality: Black and White Children in America (1980), Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change (1987), The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (1992), and Guide My Feet: Meditations and Prayers on Loving and Working for Children (1995). Her many honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1985) and several humanitarian awards.

Edelman receives the Heinz Award in the Human Condition for her dedication to protecting the rights and meeting the needs of America's children. From her work with poor children in Mississippi in the 1960s to the present, Mrs. Edelman has endeavored to give all children the public voice they lack yet so desperately need. Through the Children's Defense Fund, which she created over 20 years ago, Mrs. Edelman has sought to bring the plight of children to the attention of policy makers and the public, and has been a vigorous advocate for the creation and funding of programs to improve children's lives, for strengthening families and for weaving a web of community support for children. In a world in which children are too often overlooked or blithely used as props in battles between adults, Mrs. Edelman urges us to remember children and their distinct needs.
Marian Wright Edelman was raised to believe that it is every person's duty to help improve the lives of others. From this upbringing and her childhood in the segregated South, she derived a personal philosophy that has guided her throughout her life: "If you don't like the way the world is, you have an obligation to change it," she says. "Just do it one step at a time."
From an early age, Mrs. Edelman knew that the world she wanted most to change was the world experienced by children, especially the children of the poor. A graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School, she became the first African-American woman admitted to the Mississippi state bar while serving as head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund's office in Jackson, Mississippi. Following a move to Washington, D.C., she became counsel to the Poor People's Campaign and later established the Washington Research Project, where she concentrated on lobbying Congress for expanded child and family nutrition programs and an expanded Head Start program. In 1973, she founded the Children's Defense Fund.
Mrs. Edelman has described America's overarching challenge as the need "to rebuild a sense of community and hope and civility and caring and safety and morality for all our children." It is an ambitious agenda that reflects her work through the past two decades. Through CDF, Mrs. Edelman was instrumental in persuading Congress to overhaul foster care, support adoption, improve child care, and protect handicapped, homeless, abused and neglected children. CDF also has worked to curtail teen pregnancy, encourage immunizations of poor children for major childhood diseases, and distribute information about programs that help African-American children and preserve their families.
Mrs. Edelman has never shied from controversy in her single-minded pursuit of a nation more attentive to the needs of its children. She recalls urging a group of teenagers the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated to forego violence and to think about their futures. One of the youths responded, "Lady, why should I listen to you? I ain't got no future." Marian Wright Edelman will undoubtedly continue her mission to ensure that every child is given reason to believe in the future. At a time of momentous change in government, it is important that we each remain mindful of her timeless admonition that we remember the children.

Quotations

on family values: "We talk about family values, but then we make it very hard for parents to care for their children. And then we say, `Don't go on welfare! All you middle class women, don't work and neglect your children!'"

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

Being considerate of others will take you and your children further in life than any college or professional degree.

If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.

Don't feel entitled to anything you don't sweat and struggle for.

No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

LINKS

stand for children

Standing Up For The World's Children:
Leave No Child Behind

Africana.com: Articles: Edelman, Marian Wright

Marian Wright Edelman - Tulane University Commencement Speaker, Spring 2001