Marian Wright Edelman was born in Bennettsville, South Carolina. She received a bachelor’s degree from Spelman College in Atlanta in 1960 and a law degree from Yale Law School in 1963. After completing law school, Edelman worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, first in New York City and then in Jackson, Mississippi. She was the first African American woman permitted to practice law in Mississippi. In 1968 Edelman moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel for the Poor People’s March—a march that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began organizing shortly before his death. Later that year Edelman established the Washington Research Project, a public interest and research organization. For two years Edelman served as the Director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University. In 1973 she founded the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) to educate the nation about the needs of children. Edelman lobbied for a group she considered powerless. The CDF wanted to improve children’s health and access to medical care, to increase the availability of education, and to encourage the government to pass childcare legislation. Her books include Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change (1987), The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (1992), and Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors (1999).
