Marian Wright Edelman

American social reformer

• Born: June 6, 1939
• Place of Birth: Bennettsville, South Carolina

Edelman created the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy and public education association dedicated to improving conditions for children in the United States.

Early Life

Marian Wright Edelman was born in Bennettsville, South Carolina, to Arthur Jerome Wright and Maggie Leola Bowen Wright. Her father, a Baptist minister, said that “service is the rent we pay for living.” Hence, helping others was the basic duty of all people and an essential part of her early family life. Her parents taught by example. They built a home for older people in which Edelman cleaned and cooked. Her parents reared five of their own children and cared for twelve foster children over the years.

Edelman’s education emphasized international understanding. After she completed high school at Marlboro Training High School, she attended Seplman College in Atlanta, Georgia. During her junior year, she received a Merrill Scholarship to study at the University of Paris and at the University of Geneva during the academic year 1958–59. In the summer of 1959, she participated in a student exchange study tour of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. These experiences broadened her perspective on humanity. She returned to the United States unable to accept the indignities of segregation, under which she had grown up and lived.

In 1960, Edelman received her bachelor’s degree from Spelman College as the valedictorian of her class. During that same year, Black college students were conducting sit-in demonstrations at college campuses throughout the South. Her own participation in a sit-in at Atlanta’s city hall led her to be arrested along with fourteen other students. Edelman’s civil rights activism, coupled with her international experiences and her family’s commitment to service, shaped her life. Instead of choosing to pursue graduate work in Russian studies and traveling abroad, she decided to become a lawyer and use the law to effect social change.

While she pursued higher education, she continued learning from other cultures through educational service. Her achievements led to her becoming a John Hay Whitney Fellow from 1960 to 1961 at Yale University. During the summer of 1962, she worked in Crossroads Africa, a work project in the Ivory Coast, West Africa. Edelman eventually received an LLB degree from Yale University in 1963. With her law degree in hand, Edelman was poised to launch her career as a civil rights attorney.

Life’s Work

From 1963 to 1964, Edelman worked in New York City at the headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where she served as a staff attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Because the NAACP was working in cooperation with other civil rights groups on the Voter Education Project in Mississippi, Edelman moved to Mississippi, where she became the first Black woman to be admitted to the bar. Because she had to work with federal law, she also became a member of the bar in Washington, DC, and in Massachusetts. From 1964 to 1968, she served as the director for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Jackson, Mississippi, where she successfully defended the Head Start Program from political attacks, helped to get student demonstrators out of jail, became involved in school desegregation issues, and risked injury and arrest in the process.

As part of her Head Start activities, Edelman served on the board of the Child Development Group of Mississippi, a representative for one of the largest Head Start projects in the United States. Her advocacy for people experiencing poverty in Mississippi led her to give testimony before the Senate and to work as a liaison between the Poor People’s Campaign and Congress. In the course of this work, she came in contact with Peter D. Edelman, a Jewish lawyer who served as an assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The couple were married on July 14, 1968. Theirs was one of the first interracial marriages to take place in Virginia after the state’s antimiscegenation laws had been declared unconstitutional. They eventually had three sons: Joshua, Jonah, and Ezra.

In 1968, Edelman toured Eastern Europe, India, Israel, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. From 1968 to 1973, she served as coeditor with Ruby G. Martin of the Washington Research Project of the Southern Center for Public Policy, headquartered in Washington, DC. The project used litigation to promote equal employment opportunity, monitored various federal programs in such areas as child care and school desegregation, and worked with community groups. This organization became the parent organization of the Children’s Defense Fund, which became incorporated in 1973. In 1971, Edelman and her husband moved to Boston, from where she continued to travel regularly to Washington, DC, as a partner of the Washington Research Project. She became a trustee of Yale University, the second woman to serve in this capacity in the university’s 270-year history. She also served from 1971 to 1973 as director of the Harvard University Center for Law and Education, part of the Office of Economic Opportunity’s legal services program. The organization emphasized reform in education through research and action related to the legal implications of educational policies.

In 1973, Edelman became a founder and the president of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), an advocacy and public education association for children’s issues that became one of the best-known and best-connected of all lobbies. Soon, as the leader of the nation’s most effective organization for children’s issues such as teen pregnancy, prenatal care, early childhood education, health services, child care, adoption, child labor, and child welfare, Edelman became known as “the children’s crusader.” Through CDF, Edelman sought to make it “un-American” for any child to grow up poor, lacking adequate health care, food, shelter, child care, or education.

To allow Edelman to spend more time at her organization’s headquarters, she and her family returned to Washington, DC, in 1979. As the spokesperson for CDF, Edelman avoided the politics of confrontation, choosing instead to forge alliances with other groups seeking to lessen the effects of poverty, injustice, inadequate health care, insufficient education, and family violence.

During the course of her tenure as president of CDF, Edelman testified about the human and public costs the United States would face if it continued to fail to provide adequate funds and resources to meet the needs of American children and families. Such problems became greater in the 1980s as increasing numbers of children and families faced poverty as a result of economic recession, structural change in the economy, stagnating wages, tax and budget policies that favored the well-to-do, lack of state enforcement of child-support payments, and greater dependency on welfare by the growing number of female-headed households. Edelman used statistics and personal testimony to demonstrate that children had become the poorest Americans and would become a permanent “underclass” if public policy failed to address the needs outlined by CDF. Her passion was also mixed with optimism, since she not only stressed the problems but also provided remedies to build the broadest constituency to protect the children and alleviate poverty through education, legislation, and welfare reform.

Edelman has been a member of numerous committees addressing social, educational, and public policy, such as the advisory council of Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the advisory board of Hampshire College, the Presidential Committee on Missing in Action (1977), the Presidential Committee on International Year of the Child (1979), and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). She has also served on many boards of directors, such as those of the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Carnegie Council on Children (1972–77), the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, the Robin Hood Foundation, and the Association to Benefit Children. She has served as trustee for the March of Dimes, the Joint Center for Political Science, the Yale University Corporation (1971–77), and the Aetna Center. In 1980, she became the chair of the Spelman College Board of Trustees, becoming the first Black American and the second woman to serve in that role. Through the years, Edelman has worked closely with former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a friend since 1969 and former staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund. After the election of Bill Clinton as president, Edelman consulted with Hillary Clinton on national health-care issues and legislation but indicated that she did not want any administrative appointment. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Her outstanding contributions have been recognized with many awards. Edelman has been the recipient of more than one hundred honorary degrees from such institutions as Smith College, Columbia University, Swarthmore College, Rutgers University, Georgetown University, and Yale University. Named one of the Outstanding Young Women of America in 1966, Edelman continued to be recognized for her outstanding achievements. She received the Mademoiselle magazine award (1965), the Louise Waterman Wise Award (1970), the National Leadership award from the National Women’s Political Caucus (1980), the Black Women’s Forum award (1980), and the Eliot Award of the American Public Health Association (1987). She was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1985. Edelman also was honored with the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian prize from Johns Hopkins University (1987), the Hubert Humphrey Civil Rights award, and the AFL-CIO award (1989). In 1991, the Jackie Robinson Foundation recognized her decency and dedication to working on the behalf of children. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That same year she also received the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award in honor of her many publications, which include Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change (1987); The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (1992); Stand for Children (1998); Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors (1999); and The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation (2008).

Following an announcement in 2018 that Edelman would be transitioning away from her daily duties as president of the CDF, in 2020, shortly after she had personally participated in street protests of the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, the organization confirmed that she had become president emerita as Starsky Wilson took on the role of president. That same year, the American Bar Association honored her contributions to civil rights efforts by presenting her with the Thurgood Marshall Award. She then received the Award for Excellence in Public Policy and Affairs from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

Significance

Edelman’s leadership in shaping programs and legislation to improve life for American children made her one of the nation’s most effective lobbyists for the young. She argued that conditions must be changed to provide a better environment for the development of the nation’s future leaders. In the course of her work, she also contributed significantly to the efforts to obtain equal rights for all citizens, particularly Black Americans and women.

Bibliography

Atkins, Norman. “Marian Wright Edelman.” Rolling Stone, Dec. 10, 1992.

Bouton, Katherine. “Marian Wright Edelman.” Ms., July/Aug., 1987.

Costello, Paul. "The Children's Defender." Stanford Medicine 30.3 (2013): 16–17. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.

Edelman, Marian Wright. Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change. Harvard UP, 1987.

Edelman, Marian Wright. Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors. Beacon, 1999.

Edelman, Marian Wright. The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours. Beacon, 1992.

Hess, Frederick M. "Our Achievement-Gap Mania." National Affairs 9 (2011): 113–29. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.

Jones, Arthur. “A Voice for the Poor in D.C.” National Catholic Reporter, Mar. 24, 2000.

Kaus, Mickey. “The Godmother.” New Republic, Feb. 15, 1993.

"Marian Wright Edelman Addresses Class of 2015." Oberlin News Center, 28 May 2015, www.oberlin.edu/news/marian-wright-edelman-addresses-class-2015. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Stewart, Nikita. "Marian Wright Edelman Steps Down and a New Generation Takes Over." The New York Times, 3 Sept. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/nyregion/marian-wright-edelman-childrens-defense-fund.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.