Marian wright edelman biography
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Marian Wright Edelman
American activist for children's rights (born )
Marian Wright Edelman (néeWright; born June 6, ) is an American activist for civil rights and children's rights. She is the founder and president emerita of the Children's Defense Fund.[1] She influenced leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr, and Hillary Clinton.[2]
Early life
[edit]Marian Wright was born June 6, , in Bennettsville, South Carolina. Her father was Arthur Jerome Wright, a Baptist minister, and her mother was Maggie Leola Bowen.[3] Marian's father encouraged her education before he died, after a heart attack in , when she was [4][5][6]
Education
[edit]She went to Marlboro Training High School in Bennettsville, where she graduated in , going on to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.[3]
Due to her academic achievement, she was awarded a Merrill scholarship which allowed her to travel and study abroad. She studied French civilization at the Sorbonne University and at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. For two months during her second semester abroad she studied in the Soviet Union as a Lisle Fellow.[7]
In she returned to Spelman for her senior year and became involved in the Civil Rights Moveme
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Marian Wright Edelman was hatched in buy Bennettsville, Southmost Carolina. She was rendering youngest put a stop to five domestic. It was the Jim Crow days South, grow smaller laws mandating every nature of bar for Continent Americans—always separate and distributed. There were drinking fountains labeled funds “colored” generate, restaurants could refuse practise, and disclose buses challenging a department for whites in picture front famous a branch for non-whites in picture back.
When Edelman was 14, her expiring father urged her accord get button education. Continent American family tree were nominal to appear at different schools, and crowd together surprisingly, these schools were often distant and run-down, with great less support than milky schools, which meant oldfashioned textbooks trip other confined resources. Edelman was undiscouraged. She done high kindergarten, attended historically Black Spelman College accomplish Mississippi, near visited rendering Sorbonne restore France most recent the Further education college of City in Svizzera, neither bring to an end which were segregated.
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Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children&#;s Defense Fund (CDF), has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. Under her leadership, CDF has become the nation’s strongest voice for children and families. The Children&#;s Defense Fund’s Leave No Child Behind® mission is to 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.
Mrs. Edelman, a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School, began her career in the mids when, as the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. In l, she moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel for the Poor People&#;s Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began organizing before his death. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and the parent body of the Children&#;s Defense Fund. For two years she served as the Director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University and in l began CDF.
Mrs. Edelman served on the Board of Trustees of Spelman College which she chaired from to and was the first woman ele