|
Marian Wright Edelman b. 1939
"If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much!"
"I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful
to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important."
"The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything.
But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so.
They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves."
Marian Wright Edelman was the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi state bar and is Founder and President of the Children's Defense Fund, and is known for her advocacy of children's issues, through the organization that she founded: the Children's Defense Fund.
She is a lawyer, educator, activist, reformer, children's advocate and administrator.
Marian Wright Edelman was born in 1939 and grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina, one of five children. 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. 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 and 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. She also began to focus more on issues relating to child development and children in poverty.
Marian Wright Edelman 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.
Marian Wright Edelman also published her ideas in several books. The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours was a surprising success.
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.
A prolific author, lecturer, and proud social agitator, Edelman has touched the lives of countless children by providing the basic necessities of success—educational opportunity, equality, justice, and hope. Edelman has received dozens of honorary degrees and many awards including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Prize. Marian Wright Edelman shines as a beacon of light illuminating what is possible for an individual to accomplish as well as a beacon of hope safeguarding all American children
Among the other awards to Marian Wright Edelman:
1991 - ABC's Person of the Week - "The Children's Champion"
More than 65 honorary degrees
"One in six children in the United States -- 12.1 million -- still live in poverty.
In fact, children are more likely to be poor today in this time of unprecedented wealth than they
were 20 or 30 years ago. The overall poverty rate in 1999 was almost three percent higher than
in 1969. Nearly 11 million children are without health insurance, 90 percent of whom have working
parents. These are not acts of God. They are our moral and political choices as men and women,
citizens and leaders."
Marian Wright Edelman - 2001, Testimony before the House Budget Committee.
Source: Women's History: Marian Wright Edelman
Source: Marian Wright Edelman - Quotations
Source: The Learning Place: Marian Wright Edelman
Link: My Hero - Marian Wright Edelman
Contributed by: Demelza Co~Galaxy Star - Causes
Contents of this page are
Copyright Sisters of the Golden Moon
And should not be removed from this site.
>
|