Marian Wright Edelman: Activist, NAACP Lawyer, Founder of Children's Defense Fund

Posted on 29. Jul, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Places of Scholarly Work, Scholarly Celebrations

Marian Wright Edelman

Marian Wright Edelman is the Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund and the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi State Bar.

Marian Wright Edelman, one of five children, was born in and grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina. Her father, Arthur Wright, was a Baptist preacher who taught his children that Christianity required service in this world and who was influenced by A. Phillip Randolph. He died when Marian was only fourteen, urging in his last words to her, “Don’t let anything get in the way of your education.”

Marian Wright Edelman went on to study at Spelman College, abroad on a Merrill scholarship, and she traveled to the Soviet Union with a Lisle Fellowship (which is now named in her honor). When she returned to Spelman in 1959, she became involved in the civil rights movement, inspiring her to drop her plans to enter the foreign service, and instead to study law. She studied law at Yale and worked as a student on a project to register African American voters in Mississippi.

In 1963, after graduating from Yale Law School, Marian Wright Edelman worked first in New York for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and then in Mississippi for the same organization. There, she became the first African American woman to practice law. During her time in Mississippi, she worked on racial justice issues connected with the civil rights movement, and she also helped get a Head Start program established in her community.

During a tour by Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark of Mississippi’s poverty-ridden Delta slums, Marian met Peter Edelman, an assistant to Kennedy, and the next year she moved to Washington, D.C., to marry him and to work for social justice in the center of America’s political scene. They had three sons.

In Washington, Marian Wright Edelman continued her work, helping to get the Poor People’s Campaign organized, a project Dr. Martin Luther King started just before he was assassinated. She also began to focus more on issues relating to child development and children in poverty. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and the parent body of the Children’s Defense Fund. For two years she served as the Director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University.

Marian Wright Edelman then established the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) in 1973 as a voice for poor, minority and handicapped children. She served as a public speaker on behalf of these children, and also as a lobbyist in Congress, as well as president and administrative head of the organization. The agency served not only as an advocacy organization, but as a research center, documenting the problems and possible solutions to children in need. To keep the agency independent, she saw that it was financed entirely with private funds. In 1992, Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund formed the CDF Freedom Schools as an offshoot from the roots of the civil rights movement and the “Mississippi Freedom Summer Project” of 1964. CFR Freedom Schools Program provides summer and after-school enrichment that helps children fall in love with reading, increases their self-esteem, and generates more positive attitudes toward learning.

In the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was elected President, Hillary Clinton’s involvement with the Children’s Defense Fund meant that there was significantly more attention given to the organization. But Edelman did not pull her punches in criticizing the Clinton administration’s legislative agenda — such as its “welfare reform” initiatives — when she believed these would be disadvantageous to the nation’s neediest children.

As part of the efforts of Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund on behalf of children, she has also advocated pregnancy prevention, child care funding, health care funding, prenatal care, parental responsibility for education in values, reducing the violent images presented to children, and selective gun control in the wake of school shootings.

Among the many awards to Marian Wright Edelman:

* 1991 – ABC’s Person of the Week – “The Children’s Champion”
* MacArthur “genius” award
* Only non-Mayor awarded the US Conference of Mayors Presidential Award for Outstanding Achievement
*More than 65 honorary degrees

Mrs. Edelman served on the Board of Trustees of Spelman College which she chaired from 1976 to 1987 and was the first woman elected by alumni as a member of the Yale University Corporation on which she served from 1971 to 1977. She has received many honorary degrees and awards including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings.

Marian Wright Edelman is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She is also a board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, the Association to Benefit Children, and City Lights School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

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