- Founded the Children's Defense Fund
- Claimed that President Clinton’s 1996 welfare-reform bill would cause a million black children to starve
- Former trustee of the Industrial Areas Foundation
See also: Peter
Edelman Children's Defense Fund
Marian
Wright Edelman was born in 1939 in Bennetsville, South Carolina. She
briefly attended
Spelman College, then studied abroad on a Merrill scholarship,
and eventually traveled to the Soviet Union on a Lisle fellowship.
In 1959 she returned to the U.S., took an active role in the civil-rights
movement, and graduated from Yale
Law School in 1963, becoming the first African-American woman ever
admitted to the Mississippi bar. Edelman launched her post-academic
career by working
on a voter-registration project targeting Mississippi blacks, and later
found employment with the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund. In 1968 she married civil-rights attorney Peter
Edelman.
Also in l968, Marian Wright Edelman moved to
Washington, DC to serve as counsel
for the Poor People's Campaign that Martin Luther King, Jr. had
recently established. She subsequently founded
the Washington Research Project, a public-interest law firm, and then
spent two years as director
of Harvard University's Center for Law and Education.
In 1972
Edelman, who served
a stint on
the trustees' board of the Industrial Areas Foundation, delivered a eulogy at the funeral of its founder, the famed community organizer Saul
Alinsky. Edelman viewed
Alinsky as a “brilliant” man who “was working for underdogs” and
“trying to empower communities.”
In 1973
Edelman established the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), in an effort to inject new energy into the civil-rights movement by
emphasizing child welfare rather
than racial justice. “When you talked about poor people or black
people you faced a shrinking audience,” Edelman explains.
“I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to
broaden the base for change.” Hillary
Rodham [Clinton] interned with the nascent CDF after graduating from law
school in 1973, and Edelman became her trusted friend and
mentor.
Lamenting
that child poverty, teen pregnancy, academic failure, and criminal
involvement afflict African-Americans at disproportionately high rates, Edelman, in her writings and speeches, rarely
alludes to the fact that these problems are correlated much more
highly with fatherlessness than with race. By Edelman's calculus,
they are largely the result of America's intransigent racism. As she
wrote
in her 1987 book Families
in Peril:
“Children are poor because we have lost our moral bearings.”
A
key barometer of those “moral bearings,” as Edelman defines
them, is federal welfare spending. During the months prior to the August 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—a measure designed to move large numbers of
people off the welfare rolls and into jobs—Edelman persistently warned that the bill, if enacted, would “codify a policy of national child abandonment” by “push[ing]
millions of already poor children and families deeper into poverty.” She declared, further, that PRWORA represented the “biggest
betrayal of children” she had ever witnessed. In an effort to spark public opposition to the bill, Edelman
organized a June 1, 1996 "Stand for Children" March on Washington, which drew 300,000 people. Also in 1996, Edelman proposed,
as an alternative to welfare reform, a government guarantee of full
employment, socialized medicine, and federally funded babysitters:
“Let's guarantee a job. Let's guarantee health care and children
care [sic].
Let's turn this welfare repeal into real welfare reform.”
When President
Bill Clinton ultimately signed PRWORA into law, Edelman called it a "moment of shame."[1] But none
of Edelman's alarmist predictions about the consequences of welfare reform came to pass.
For details of the legislation's actual effects, click
here.
A strong critic of what she considers America's
inherent and pervasive bigotry, Edelman blames
white racism and white neglect for the decline of the nation's inner-city schools during the decades since
the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown
v. Board of Education
ruling. “The strong black traditions of family and hunger for
education,” she said
in 2004, “have been undermined by white resistance to Brown,
and [by] our nation's choices not to invest adequately in quality
public schools for all children.”
In June 2004 Edelman was
a guest speaker at an International
Socialist Organization event, along with such notables as
Howard
Zinn, Noam
Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom
Hayden, and Alice
Walker.
In her 2005 book Social
Injustice and Public Health,
Edelman emphasizes her desire to "address
the root causes of social injustice," which she identifies as: "widening gaps between rich and
poor, the unequal distribution of resources within our society,
discrimination, and the disenfranchisement of individuals and groups
from the political process."
Edelman
today is
a board member of the Robin Hood Foundation and the Association to
Benefit Children; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the
American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of
Sciences; and a founding
sponsor of The
American Prospect.
She has
received
more than 100 honorary degrees, along with a host of awards including
the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award (administered by the Heinz Family Foundation), the
MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award.
For additional information on Marian Wright Edelman, click here.
NOTE:
[1] "Never let us confuse what is legal with what is
right," Edelman said.
"Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not
right."
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