laywer; founder; civil rights activist; writer
Personal Information
Born on June 6, 1939, in Bennettsville, SC; daughter of Arthur Jerome (a Baptist minister) and Maggie (Bowen) Wright; married Peter B. Edelman, July 14, 1968; children: Joshua, Jonah, Ezra.
Education: Studied in Paris, France, and Geneva, Switzerland, 1958-59; Spelman College, BA, 1960; Yale University Law School, JD, 1963.
Religion: Baptist.
Memberships:
(selected): Board of trustees, The King Center; advisory council, Council on Foreign Relations; Yale Univ. Corp.; chair, board of trustees, Spelman Coll; board of directors, March of Dimes; board member, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; board member, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc; board member, US Committee for UNICEF; National Commission on Children.
Career
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, New York City, staff attorney, 1963-64, director of office in Jackson, MS, 1964-68; Washington Research Project of Southern Center for Public Policy, partner, 1968-73; Harvard University Center for Law and Education, director, 1971-73; Children's Defense Fund (CDF), Washington, DC, founder and president, 1973-.
Life's Work
Marian Wright Edelman, the leading advocate for children's rights in the United States and the founder of the Children's Defense Fund, can trace her commitment to serve others directly back to her own childhood in the southern United States. Her father, Arthur Wright, was a Baptist preacher who raised his five children to believe that it was their Christian duty to help others and to try to make the world a better place. Although people of color were treated unfairly in their segregated South Carolina hometown, he urged the community to follow the self-help philosophy of African-American labor leader A. Philip Randolph and do what it could for itself. Edelman remembered that when blacks were barred from the public parks in her neighborhood, her father helped build a park and roller-skating rink behind his church for them to use. "That taught me, if you don't like the way the world is, you change it," she told Time. "You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time."
Since those early days, Edelman has taken many steps toward her goal of making the world a better place, especially for the poor and for minorities. She served as a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s; she brought the plight of the desperately poor families of the Mississippi Delta to the attention of Senator Robert Kennedy; and she helped begin and operate a Head Start program in Mississippi, designed to give underprivileged children a boost before entering the formal education system.
Became Civil Rights Attorney
Born on June 6, 1939, in segregated Bennettsville, South Carolina, Edelman was a teenager when the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision banned school segregation and ignited the fledgling civil rights movement in the United States. As reported in Parade magazine, the dying words of Arthur Wright to his daughter, then only 14 years old, were: "Don't let anything get in the way of your education." In 1956 Edelman enrolled at Spelman College in Atlanta, a straightlaced, liberal arts school for black women. As the winner of a Merrill scholarship, she was able to spend her junior year abroad in Geneva, Switzerland, and then traveled the following summer to the Soviet Union under a Lisle Fellowship. "That year gave me the confidence that I could navigate in the world and do just about anything," she said in the New Yorker.
Returning to college in 1959, Edelman plunged into the early civil rights movement. She often heard Martin Luther King, Jr., speak on the Spelman campus and helped organize other students to participate in organized sit-ins in Atlanta to protest laws of segregation. As a volunteer worker at a local office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Edelman realized that impoverished African Americans had almost no one to represent them. Instead of pursuing graduate work in Russian and entering the foreign service as she had planned, she decided to study law. "I had no aptitude or interest in law. I simply thought about what was needed," she told Wallace Terry in Parade.
She was accepted at Yale Law School, where she met Bob Moses, a pioneering member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who worked from time to time with the Yale-based Northern Student Movement. He was staunchly committed to breaking the cycle of racist intimidation that denied people of color their right to vote, and he fought to increase black voter registration in Mississippi, which was then considered a dangerous place for civil rights activists to work. Regardless of the hazards, Edelman went to Mississippi on a mission to recruit and register black voters during spring break of her third year at law school.
After graduating from Yale Law School in 1963, she spent one year in New York as a staff attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund before returning to Mississippi, where she headed the Fund's Jackson office for four years. The first black woman lawyer to practice in the state, she defended many African Americans who were arrested during the voter registration efforts of the 1960s. In the summer of 1964, the Ku Klux Klan rocked the South with their brutal white supremacist acts. But Edelman learned to live with violence and fear. "That summer, I very seldom got a client out of jail who had not been beaten, who didn't have broken bones or missing teeth," she told the New Yorker. "One young boy I represented had been shot and killed in jail, and I had to take his parents to the funeral home to view the body.... It was [one] of those watershed experiences--I had nightmares for weeks, but afterward I felt I could face anything."
Edelman also became involved in efforts to establish a Head Start program for poor children in Mississippi and helped in the fight to keep it funded year after year. At the same time, mechanization of the cotton industry had created tremendous poverty in Mississippi, but few people outside the state were aware of it. Edelman helped bring the problem to national attention when she testified before a Senate subcommittee holding a public hearing in Jackson in 1967. Later she took two of the senators, Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark, both Democrats, on a tour of Mississippi Delta slum areas where families lived without heat, light, or running water. During this trip she became acquainted with Peter Edelman, a white lawyer of Jewish descent who was then serving as Senator Kennedy's legislative assistant.
Pursued Broader Goals in D.C
Edelman moved to Washington, D.C., in 1968. "Peter was one reason," she told Terry in Parade--within months the couple was married--but Edelman also knew that she could be more effective in her quest for social justice if she were based in the nation's capital. That same year, the United States was sent into a tailspin by the deaths of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Kennedy, both at the hands of assassins.
Shortly after Edelman relocated to Washington, King's Poor People's Campaign--a mass demonstration for social and economic equity--arrived in the capital with plans of carrying on their slain leader's work. Their shock and grief over King's death, combined with a lack of Washington savvy, made it impossible for the group to coordinate their crusade. Edelman, who had learned the Washington ropes through her work for Head Start, stepped in to help pull the campaign together. She also began working on other important issues, like child care legislation, and laid the foundation for the establishment a few years later of the Children's Defense Fund.
The Edelmans went on to have three sons and instilled in them a sense of pride in the richness of their mixed racial background and a deep respect for both Jewish and Christian religious traditions. Raising three children while pursuing a very demanding vocation has given Edelman a personal perspective on the problems of working parents. "I who have everything am hanging in there by my fingernails," she told Ms. "I don't know how poor women manage."
Edelman's work to help "poor women manage" a little more easily intensified in the early 1970s. In 1971 she helped put together a broad coalition of groups in support of a comprehensive child development bill. It sailed through both the U.S. House and the Senate but was vetoed by President Richard Nixon. Although Edelman was disappointed, she claimed that the effort marked an important beginning for her. She had been struggling for years to get more federal help for the poor and minorities. But the child care issue helped her realize that by focusing on the needs of children--all children--she could cut across class and race to gain broader support. "I was absolutely shattered [by the veto]," she told the New Yorker. "But that whole experience was very useful to me. I'd learned the importance of being highly specific in my goals. I'd got the idea that children might be a very effective means for broadening the base for change. The country was tired of the concerns of the sixties. When you talked about poor people or black people, you faced a shrinking audience."
Founded the Children's Defense Fund
In 1973 Edelman founded the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) to protect the interests of the country's children. Supported entirely by private foundations, the CDF studies and documents conditions affecting children and lobbies intensively for legislation it believes will help them. Through the CDF, Edelman called attention to many issues on the national agenda that had previously been ignored--from foster care to teen pregnancy to child care. She has also expressed many of her views in her books Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change, and The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours.
Edelman has been consulted by both lawmakers and journalists on virtually any issue relating to children. Senator Edward Kennedy has called her "the 101st senator on children's issues." "She has real power in congress, and uses it brilliantly," Kennedy told Time. One of the sources of Edelman's credibility is the CDF's respected documentation of the status of American children. Many find it hard to argue with the organization's overwhelming statistics. According to the CDF, one-fifth of all American children--twelve and a half million--live in poverty. "If recent trends continue," Edelman was quoted as saying in Parade in 1993, "by the end of the century, poverty will overtake one in every four children."
Child psychiatrist Robert Coles commented on the unique qualities of the CDF in the New Yorker: "Of course, this country has always been fascinated by children because of its own youthfulness and hopefulness. But she [Edelman] educates us about them." Coles continued, "She organizes a body of knowledge--statistical, investigative, observational and analytic--and she puts it together in astonishing ways. One of the major achievements of the Children's Defense Fund is its documentation. There's a faith in knowledge ... that the truth will somehow prevail, and so they are constantly educating us."
Although the administrations of presidents Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter were often opposed to increased spending for social services, Edelman lobbied, often successfully, for more support for the handicapped, Head Start programs, foster care, and health and nutrition for poor women and children. Congress did enact a child welfare bill in 1980, but when other programs for poor families were slashed under President Ronald Reagan, Edelman struggled to at least keep fundamental legislation in place.
In the mid-1980s, as poverty and homelessness increased, Congress began to restore some funding for social programs. In 1984 the CDF successfully lobbied for increased Medicaid coverage for poor children. On this, as on many other issues, Edelman argued for the importance of what she called preventive investment: "One dollar up front prevents the spending of many dollars down the road," she explained in Ms. In this case, she showed that increasing health services to children leads to lower doctor and hospital bills later on.
Focused on Child Care and Pregnancy Prevention
In the late 1980s Edelman felt the United States was ready to address the child care issue. After consulting with 170 groups all over the country, the CDF put together a multibillion-dollar program that would put some money toward helping low and moderate income families pay for child care and some money toward improving child care for all families. It also established strict health, safety, and quality guidelines. Although the bill had wide support, it foundered in the last days of the Reagan administration and was reintroduced in the 101st Congress.
Edelman's concerns about child welfare extend to the rampant problem of teen pregnancy, which plays a major role, she says, in perpetuating poverty. "I saw from our own statistics that fifty-five and a half percent of all black babies were born out of wedlock, a great many of them to teenage girls," she said in the New Yorker. "It just hit me over the head--that situation insured black poverty for the next generation." To combat the problem, which affects proportionately more black teens, but many more white teens overall, the CDF has sponsored an annual pregnancy prevention conference that brings together social workers and community and church leaders from all over the country. By emphasizing pregnancy prevention, the group has sidestepped the issue of abortion and attracted broad support. The CDF has also tried to reach teens and their parents through publicity campaigns. One of the organization's posters featured a pregnant teenage girl and asked the question, "Will your child learn to multiply before she learns to subtract?"
On all these issues, from child care to teen pregnancy to Head Start, Edelman has earned a reputation not only for concern and vision, but for formidable political skill as well. Peter Edelman, himself a Georgetown University law professor, told the New Yorker that his wife has "an absolutely super strategic and tactical sense, a real smell for how to get things done.... She understands how the system works. She's as tough and determined as anyone can be, but always within the rules of the system." Her friend, Robert Coles, saw another side to Edelman. "There's still ... a kind of lovely innocence [about her]," he remarked in the New Yorker. "It's a mixture of gentleness and personal dignity and savvy, and maybe even southerness. She didn't fall prey to arrogance or smugness. She had good judgment, a sharp, active mind and she knew how to stay connected to the ordinary people of the region."
Continued Crusade in Speech and Print
Under Edelman, the CDF has ballooned in size--to a staff of over 100 child care, welfare, and educational specialists, and an annual budget of approximately $9 million. More importantly, in the decades since its founding, the agency has become a central organ of hope for the 13.4 million American children who live in poverty. Possessing the commitment of a missionary and the tactical skills of a seasoned Washington insider, Edelman, as a voice of conscience, has challenged politicians and everyday citizens to make good on their professed dedication to the well-being of the nation's youth.
In Edelman's eyes, ignorance is the explanation for the empty lip service paid to an issue as critical as child welfare. "There's ignorance in people who just don't know that we have a national child emergency," she told Black Enterprise. "And there are a lot of people who are conveniently ignorant--they don't want to know." Edelman's educational crusade, involving her tactical placement of the CDF at the center of many high-profile policy debates, has been a battle against common yet mistaken assumptions that threaten many of the CDF's basic initiatives. Edelman, for example, must frequently tell people that the majority of poor children in the United States are white and from rural and suburban areas, thus correcting the impression that her agency's programs benefit only inner-city blacks on welfare. To those who loudly bemoan the throwing of public funds at social programs, Edelman answered that it is wiser to spend some money on preventive medicine, such as prenatal care, rather than huge amounts on the treatment of low-birth-weight babies whose parents may not be able to foot the hospital bills.
Most of Edelman's child-betterment sermons have been delivered in Washington, where her faith in government has endured despite years of cuts to many of the CDF's pet programs. Speaking on the benefits of government spending, notably President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" domestic programs of the 1960s, Edelman was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "The fact is we made dramatic progress in the 1960's in eradicating hunger and improving the health status of children, and then we just stopped trying." Her attempts to re-energize this public sector activism were rewarded in 1990 with the passage of a child care bill through Congress and in 1992 with a $200 million boost for Head Start funding. The child care go-around spawned a controversy involving Edelman, who publicly lambasted two representatives for, in her view, self-servingly leading a war against the legislation. This bitter attack, according to some observers, weakened the CDF's effectiveness, but Edelman countered, saying her agency, unlike other lobbying organizations, represents a silent constituency--children--that is too precious for compromises and political games.
As much as Edelman understood her role as a government prod, she was aware that politics can never deliver all the answers, particularly in the area of child rearing, which is well beyond the bounds of legislation. In this vein, she has urged parents to reevaluate the messages they teach their children and to pay keen attention to the cultural signals--the images of sex and violence on television, for example--that frame the mindset of children and therefore play a central role in the development of the adults of tomorrow. "I think we've had a breakdown in values in all of our society," she noted in Newsweek. It is as a celebratory ode to family that Edelman wrote her 1992 bestseller The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours. Hailed as a "profound and moving book" by Library Journal reviewer Angela Washington-Blair, the slim volume is a doctrinal overview of the moral values Edelman absorbed as a child--beliefs that have endured through her experiences as a mother and powerbroker. In it, she warns that "the 1990s struggle is for America's conscience and future--a future that is being determined right now in the bodies and minds and spirits of every American child."
Struggled With Presidential Administrations
When Bill Clinton was elected U.S. president, it was understood that Edelman, as a friend and intellectual soulmate of First Lady Hillary Clinton (who had earlier served as chairman of the CDF), would command a level of attention within the new administration that had been absent during the tenures of presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. There were rumors that Edelman would join the cabinet, but she was quick to reaffirm her role as an advocate who relishes her independence. "I need to work outside government, on my own," she was quoted as saying in the New York Times. "I love what I do, and I think I am making a difference."
In 1992 the CDF began its "Leave No Child Behind" campaign. The goals covered full-funding of Head Start, proper medical insurance for every child and pregnant mother, and vaccinations for every child. The campaign also included an expanded children's tax credit for parents.
Edelman organized the Stand for Children march in 1996. More than 200,000 parents and children marched to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to protest the neglect of children in the world's richest country. Such organizations as the NAACP, the March of Dimes, the Salvation Army, the National Urban League, and others supported the event. Actors Cicely Tyson, Lynn Whitfield, and Malik Yoba, along with author Cornel West and model Iman also made appearances to show their support. Edelman later commented in Ebony that the event was an attempt "to give children a new visibility and to show the support and breadth of support in every state in the nation, from every race and faith and age and income group ... we've got a movement going to leave no child behind."
Interviewed by The Christian Century in 1998, Edelman commented on the U.S. need for improved child day care. "Obviously, the best thing for children is parents who can afford to stay at home. But most of the parents who are out in the labor force are working because they would be in poverty if they didn't," Edelman explained. Because of this reality, she argued, it is vital that we "make sure every child whose parent has to work has safe, high-quality, affordable care." To this end, the CDF set the following goals: 1) work to see that at least $20 billion in additional money is committed to improving child day care by putting the money into a child care grant fund that would help parents afford day care, 2) stress the importance of quality day care and training for care givers, and 3) work for increased government funding of after-school and summer programs.
In the same interview, Edelman also criticized the welfare legislation that the Clinton administration created. This legislation cut $54 billion from such programs as food stamps and child and family nutrition. "I'm not trying to defend the former welfare system," Edelman said. "But I'm for ending child poverty as we know it, not just for ending welfare as we know it." The CDF developed a volunteer program to document the effects of this legislation, hoping to discover if those who left the welfare program now had jobs, health care, and child care.
Edelman was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the country, in 2000. President Bill Clinton, who presented the award, compared Edelman to ground-breaking opera singer Marian Anderson. "Like her namesake, Marian's voice is always strong and true, singing that we are all children of God and, therefore, must protect all our children," Clinton was quoted as saying in Jet.
In 2002 President George W. Bush, who had co-opted the CDF's "Leave No Child Behind" slogan during his 2000 presidential campaign, unveiled his budget proposal. Edelman, along with Senators Ted Kennedy and Christopher Dodd spoke out against the president's proposed cuts to the Head Start program. "The plan would leave millions of children behind without safe, affordable, quality child care when parents work," Edelman wrote in the New Catholic Reporter. The president's proposal also included a $1.6 billion tax cut, of which Edelman was also critical. "We want every child to reach their full potential," Edelman was quoted as saying in U.S. Newswire, "but having poor children subsidize tax cuts for the wealthy is unacceptable."
Edelman published I'm Your Child, God: Prayers for Children and Teenagers in 2002. The book, Edelman noted in the preface, according to Black Issues Book Review, was intended for those who "need stronger inner anchors and spiritual grounding" as they face a world that is "too materialistic, too violent, too busy, too noisy, too secular." Black Issues Book Review noted that the book "answers many of the serious questions that young people face in trying to understand religious faith."
Awards
Selected: Louise Waterman Wise Award, 1970; Whitney M. Young Award, 1979; leadership award, National Women's Political Caucus, 1980; Black Women's Forum Award, 1980; John W. Gardner leadership award, independent sector, 1985; Grenville Clark Prize, 1986; A. Philip Randolph Award, 1987; William P. Dawson Award, Congressional Black Caucus, 1987; Gandhi Peace Award, 1989; Murray-Green-Meany Award, AFL-CIO, 1989; Jefferson Award, American Institute for Public Service, 1991; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2000; Tipper Gore "Remember the Children" Award, NMHA, 2002; numerous honorary degrees.
Works
Selected writings
- Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change, Harvard University Press, 1987.
- The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours, Beacon, 1992.
- Guide My Feet: Prayers and Meditations on Loving and Working for Children, Beacon Press, 1995.
- Lanterns: a Memoir of Mentors, Beacon Press, 1999.
- I'm Your Child, God: Prayers for Children and Teenagers, Hyperion Books For Children, 2002.
Further Reading
Books
- Who's Who Among African Americans, 16th edition, Gale, 2003.
Periodicals- Black Enterprise, May 1992, p. 67.
- Black Issues Book Review, January-February 2003, p. 71.
- Black Issues in Higher Education, May 10, 2001, p. 8.
- Christian Century, July 15, 1998, p. 682.
- Christianity Today, March 17, 1989, p. 35.
- Christian Science Monitor, November 5, 1987, p. 27; May 30, 1989, p. 19.
- Ebony, July 1987, p. 60; August 1988, p. 128; August 1996, p. 118.
- Essence, September 1980, p. 70; May 1988, p. 65.
- Glamour, December 1990, p. 96.
- Jet, August 28, 2000, p. 22.
- Library Journal, May 1, 1992, p. 103.
- Mental Health Weekly, June 10, 2002, p. 6.
- Mother Jones, June 1990, p. 6; May/June 1991, p. 31.
- Ms., July/August 1987, p. 98.
- Nation, July 24-31, 1989.
- National Catholic Reporter, August 2, 2002, p. 25.
- Newsweek, June 8, 1992, p. 27; February 15, 1993, p. 20.
- New York Review of Books, December 3, 1987, p. 26.
- New York Times, January 5, 1990, p. A20; January 29, 1991, p. A18; May 19, 1991, sec. 1, p. 28; October 8, 1992, p. C1.
- New York Times Book Review, June 7, 1987, p. 12.
- New Yorker, March 27, 1989, p. 48.
- Parade, February 14, 1993, p. 4.
- People, July 6, 1992, p. 101.
- Rolling Stone, December 10-24, 1992, p. 126.
- Time, March 23, 1987, p. 27.
- U.S. News & World Report, March 26, 1990, p. 22.
- U.S. Newswire, February 27, 2003.
On-line- Library of Congress, www.loc.gov (October 7, 2003).
— Cathleen Collins Lee, Isaac Rosen, and Jennifer M. York
