• Founded the Children’s Defense Fund
• Claimed that President Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill would cause a million black children to starve

Marian Wright Edelman is the founder and President of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF).

Edelman is a black American who was born in 1939 in Bennetsville, South Carolina, where she spent her childhood. Her father, Arthur Wright, was a Baptist minister who died when Marian was fourteen years old. Marian went on to study at Spelman College, then abroad on a Merrill scholarship. She eventually traveled to the Soviet Union on a Lisle fellowship. She returned to Spelman in 1959 and thereafter decided to study law. She graduated from Yale Law School in 1963 and became the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi bar. She launched her post-academic career by working on a voter-registration project for Mississippi blacks, and then found employment with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, first in New York and then in Mississippi.

In 1968 Marian married civil rights attorney Peter Edelman and thereafter went by the name Marian Wright Edelman.

In 1972 Mrs. Edelman spoke at the funeral of radical organizer Saul Alinsky, about whom she would later say: "He was brilliant. He was working for underdogs. He was trying to empower communities, which we still need to do. He spoke plainly. He had his outrageous side, but he also had his pragmatic side."

In 1973 Mrs. Edelman established the Children's Defense Fund. Hillary Rodham [Clinton] interned with CDF after graduating from law school in 1973; during her time there, Miss Rodham developed a close relationship with Edelman, who became the younger woman's trusted and adviser.

A strong critic of what she considers America's inherent and pervasive bigotry toward minorities, Edelman blames white racism for the decline of the nation's inner-city schools since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. "The strong black traditions of family and hunger for education," she says, "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 a 1996 essay, Edelman said that black children and their families were losing ground to their white counterparts in every aspect of American life. She attributed this, in part, to the failure of Congress to raise the minimum wage. "For a growing number of black children," she wrote, "living in a family where the parents are employed does not provide an escape from poverty."

Edelman further attributed black poverty to what she characterized as unjustified and dangerous cuts in federal programs for low-income families and children. But her assertion that such spending had been slashed was patently untrue. According to the Congressional Research Service, social welfare spending by the federal government had increased by an average of some $25 billion per year, every year, between 1970 and 1995.

In the summer of 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which was intended to move large numbers of people off the welfare rolls and into jobs. President Clinton signed the bill into law, thereby radically transforming America's welfare system.

Prior to Clinton's historic signature, Edelman had passionately and persistently condemned the proposed law, predicting that it would cause great harm to American children, particularly poor minorities. In November 1995, for instance, she wrote an open letter to Clinton, stating: "As president, you have the opportunity and personal responsibility to protect children from unjust policies. It would be a great moral and practical wrong for you to sign any welfare 'reform' bill that will push millions of already poor children and families deeper into poverty ... We do not want to codify a policy of national child abandonment."

The welfare reform bill, Edelman said on another occasion, "will leave a moral blot on [Clinton's] presidency and on our nation." "It takes no political courage," she added, "to stand up to 2-month-old babies or to play election-year games of political chicken at preschoolers' expense." She called the bill the "biggest betrayal of children" which she had witnessed since CDF was founded 23 years earlier, and forecast that it would cause the starvation of a million black children.

In 1996 Edelman exhorted Jim Wallis' leftist religious group Call to Renewal: "Let's guarantee a job. Let's guarantee health care and children care [sic]. Let's turn this welfare repeal into real welfare reform." In short, she endorsed full employment, socialized medicine, federally funded babysitters for all, and ever-expanding welfare benefits for those not inclined to work.

After the 1996 welfare reform bill was enacted, America's welfare rolls declined by more than 50 percent, as millions of formerly dependent people were moved successfully into jobs where they were able to earn their own way instead of being the wards of American taxpayers. In 2000, the Clinton administration's Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala stated, "After four years, we have strong evidence that welfare reform is working." By May 2002, there were 2.3 million fewer children living in poverty than there had been in 1996. To this day, Edelman has never acknowledged the error of her alarmist predictions.

Throughout her career, Edelman has called for increased federal spending on social welfare programs, coupled with cuts in military expenditures. In her 1987 book Families in Peril, she wrote, "We must curb the fanatical military weasel and keep it in balance with competing national needs."

Committed to the notion that America's allegedly widespread injustices can be rectified only by expanded government and massive handouts, Edelman is an attractive figure to devoted socialists. Thus in June 2004, the International Socialist Organization -- a revolutionary Marxist vanguard -- promoted an event featuring guest appearances by Edelman, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Hayden, and Alice Walker.

Edelman is the author and editor of a number of books on social justice, including Social Injustice and Public Health (2005), which expounds her belief that "a primary goal of public health is to address the root causes of social injustice: 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."

Other books penned by Edelman include: Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change (1989); Measure of Success (1994); and Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors (1999).

In 1998 San Francisco State University established the Marian Wright Edelman Institute for the Study of Children, Youth, and Families, which serves as an advocacy and research center and also houses a bachelor's degree program in Child and Adolescent Development.

In 2000, Edelman was a signatory to a letter titled “Appeal for Responsible Security” that appeared in the New York Times. The letter stated, “… we call upon the United States government to commit itself unequivocally to negotiate the worldwide reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons, in a series of well-defined stages accompanied by increasing verification and control.” Other signatories included Jimmy Carter, Martin Sheen, George Soros, John Sweeney, and Ted Turner.

Edelman has received a number of awards and honors over the course of her career. At the 1985 commencement ceremonies at Barnard College, she was awarded the school’s highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. The following year, she received an honorary LL.D. from Bates College. She has also received the Community of Christ International Peace Award, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, and the MacArthur "genius" award given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

In a 2006 interview published in AlterNet, the Marxist historian Howard Zinn suggested that Edelman would make a better presidential candidate than either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, stating: “She's the epitome of what we need. A very smart black woman who deals with children, poverty…. She's in the trenches, and she ties it in with militarization.”

Over the years, Edelman has made a number of campaign contributions to Democratic political candidates, including Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry.

At one time, Edelman served on the Board of the Saul Alinsky-created Industrial Areas Foundation. A passionate admirer of Alinsky, Edelman has said:

"He [Alinsky] was brilliant. He was working for underdogs. He was trying to empower communities, which we still need to do. He spoke plainly. He had his outrageous side, but he also had his pragmatic side."