EDELMAN, MARIAN WRIGHT
During her career, MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN has appeared in Mississippi jail cells, Capitol Hill offices, and on TV talk shows, with the same objective: to help poor or disenfranchised U.S. citizens. Best known as the founder and president of the CHILDREN’S DEFENSE FUND (CDF), Edelman is a lawyer, lobbyist, author, and mentor to former first lady, now U.S. senator, HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON. Edelman began hercareer as a CIVIL RIGHTS attorney in the Deep South during the 1960s.While working on voter
registration campaigns—and keeping demonstrators out of jail—Edelman vowed to do
something about the plight of children in the United States. Improving children’s lives seemed like a logical starting point for improving all of
society. By the mid-1990s, Edelman’s influence
extended from day care centers to the Oval
Office as she helped shape the future for the
youngest citizens of the United States.
Edelman was born June 6, 1939, in Ben-
nettsville, a small, segregated town in South
Carolina. Her father, Arthur Jerome Wright,
was a Baptist minister, and her mother,Maggie
Leola Wright, was the director of the Wright
Home for the Aged. Named after singer Mar-
ian Anderson, Edelman recalls a childhood of
hard work and high expectations. She was an
outstanding student whose parents instilled in
her a strong sense of purpose and social aware-
ness. Edelman’s parents extolled the virtues of
self-reliance and personal initiative, and lived
their own counsel when they established the
Wright Home, the first African American resi-
dence for elderly people in South Carolina.
Edelman’s parents founded the nursing home
because they saw a need and felt obliged to fill
it. Given the example set by them, it is no sur-
prise that Edelman chose a life of self-directed
social activism.
After high school, Edelman attended well-
respected Spelman College, in Atlanta. Edelman
planned a career in the foreign service and took
preparatory courses at the Sorbonne, in Paris,
and at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland.
After spending a summer in Moscow, Edelman
returned to the United States for her senior year
at Spelman. Before long, she was caught up in
the emerging CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT.After a
campus visit by MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ,and
considerable soul-searching, Edelman dropped
her plans for the foreign service and joined other
African Americans in the struggle for equal
rights.
To make herself more valuable to the move-
ment, Edelman decided to attend law school.
After earning a degree from Yale University Law
School in 1963, she became counsel for the Legal
Defense and Educational Fund of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). In New York, Edelman received
NAACP training in civil rights law for one year.
She moved to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964 and
became the first African American woman ever
admitted to the Mississippi bar. (At the time,
Mississippi had a grand total of three African
American lawyers.)
Edelman’s first assignment was the Missis-
sippi Summer Project. This was an African
American voter registration drive conducted by
volunteers and college students from the North.
Edelman also served as the attorney for the
Child Development Group of Mississippi, where
one of her proudest accomplishments was help-
ing to reinstate federal funding for Head Start, a
successful program that encourages the intellec-
tual and social development of poor, at-risk
children.
When Senator ROBERT F. KENNEDY toured
Mississippi in 1967, Edelman showed him the
wretched poverty endured by thousands of
African American children. Many credit her
with opening Kennedy’s eyes to the reality of
hunger in the United States.
In 1968, Edelman married Peter B. Edelman,
a Harvard-trained lawyer who was Senator
Kennedy’s legislative assistant. The couple
moved to Washington, D.C., where eventually
they had three sons. Edelman hoped a move to
the nation’s capital would enable her to focus
national attention on the poverty she witnessed
in Mississippi.
Edelman’s first job in Washington, D.C.,
was as congressional and federal agency liaison
for the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. Also dur-
ing 1968, Edelman founded the Washington
Research Project, an advocacy and research
group that lobbied Congress for an expansion
in Head Start services. In 1971, Edelman and
her family moved to Boston for her to complete
a two-year stint as director of the Center for
Law and Education at Harvard University. Her
husband served as vice president of the Univer-
sity of Massachusetts at the same time. Upon
their return to Washington, D.C., in 1973, Edel-
man created an offshoot of her Washington
Research Project, which she called the Chil-
dren’s Defense Fund.
Edelman’s CDF began as a small, nonprofit
organization interested in children’s issues and
funded entirely by private foundation grants. In
CDF’s early days, Hillary Rodham Clinton
worked as a staff attorney and later became a
member of the CDF board of directors. In 1999,
with a staff of 130 and a budget of $10 million,
CDF had grown considerably in size and stature
60 EDELMAN, MARIAN WRIGHT
WEST’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 2nd Edition
