Marian Wright Edelman, the country’s premier advocate for children, will give the spring Assembly Series’ final talk, at 11 a.m. April 19 in Graham Chapel.
A celebrated lawyer, author, educator, activist and reformer, Edelman has devoted her life to improving the lives of poor, neglected and marginalized children.
Since 1973, when she founded and became president of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), Edelman has worked tirelessly to fulfill the mission of the CDF: ensure every child a healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start and a moral start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
Throughout her life and in her eight books, Edelman has tried to teach the need for helping the vulnerable in our society and how to find strength and inspiration through life’s struggles. These values became important to her early in life.
While at Spelman College in the late 1950s, she became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and worked to register African-American voters in Mississippi. After earning a law degree from Yale University in 1963, she worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
When she moved to Washington, D.C., Edelman became involved with the Poor People’s Campaign, an initiative of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, beginning her focus on children’s issues. She also created a public-interest organization called the Washington Research Project.
Back in Mississippi, she experienced firsthand the struggle against institutionalized illiteracy, poverty, lack of health care and lack of hope. It also was in this state where she became the first African-American to join the bar.
Her awards and honors number in the hundreds; among the most prestigious are the 2000 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, a MacArthur “genius” grant, the Heinz Award and more than 65 honorary degrees, including one bestowed by Washington University in 1992.
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
The event is free and open to the public and is co-sponsored by The Women’s Society of Washington University, University Libraries and the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.
For more information, go online to assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call 935-4620.