As the creator and President of the Children's Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, the youngest of five children, was born in Bennetsville, South Carolina on June 6, 1939. With her father Arthur Wright teaching her a responsibility to right and wrong, Edelman gives tribute to him for all of her accomplishments. She states about her father's principles, "I was taught that the world had a lot of problems, but I could struggle and change them, that those of us with intellectual and immaterial gifts brought the privilege and responsibility of sharing with others who are less fortunate- He only had two things he anticipated his children accomplishing: working hard at pursuing their education and serving others. Conceivably, it was this beneficial rearing that impelled Marian into an accomplished career in law, but definitely helped her become of the nation's top activists for children. .
Studying at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, Edelman became concerned with the civil rights movement, which motivated her to discontinue her plans of foreign service and study law instead. She went on to study law at Yale and work on a development to register African Americans voters in Mississippi. When she graduated from Yale Law School in 1963, she began working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal and Defense Fund in New York and then moved to Mississippi, where she became the first African American woman to practice law. While in Mississippi, she worked for racial issues related to the civil rights movement, and also helped fight for funding of one of the largest Head Start programs in the country for which she was nationally recognized. .
Edelman moved to Washington, D.C. in 1968 where she founded the Washington Research Project (WRP), which concentrated on lobbying Congress for child and family nourishment programs and intensifying the Head Start program.
The Dream Yet to be Realized. Almost fifty years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court declared, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that laws separating the races in school are unconstitutional. Hundreds of lawsuits later, black and white students were bused back and forth to desegregated schools in cities across the United States. ...
