S.C. Encyclopedia | Marian Wright Edelman was born on June 6, 1939, in Bennettsville, the daughter of the Baptist minister Arthur Jerome Wright and Maggie Leola Bowen. She graduated from Marlboro Training High School in 1956; from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1960; and from Yale Law School in 1963.
Edelman became active in civil rights as a student at Spelman College. Following the historic sit-in of four black students at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, Edelman and seventy-seven other students were arrested on March 15, 1960, for conducting a sit-in at Atlanta restaurants that served only whites. After graduating from law school, Edelman spent a year, on an Earl Warren Fellowship, at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where she learned to litigate a variety of civil-rights-related cases. From 1964 to 1968 she served as director of the LDF office in Jackson, Mississippi, where she became the first black woman to pass the state’s bar exam. During her time in Mississippi, Edelman expanded her horizons beyond civil rights to include the issue of children’s rights. In 1965 she helped develop the Child Development Group of Mississippi, which ran Head Start programs for the state’s poor children after the state refused to accept federal funds. For three years she prodded federal officials who were being pressured to discontinue the funding by Mississippi’s powerful and racist U.S. senators James Eastland and John Stennis.
After four years of protracted struggle, Edelman decided to leave Mississippi. The abject poverty and feudal conditions she had observed in Mississippi affected her vision profoundly. In 1968 she took a position in Washington, D.C., as the legal counsel for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s planned “Poor People’s Campaign.” On July 14, 1968, she married Peter Edelman, a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy. They met in 1967 when her future husband accompanied Kennedy to Mississippi and witnessed its poverty firsthand. Their union was the first interracial marriage in Virginia after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the state’s miscegenation law in Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia. The couple has three sons: Joshua, Jonah, and Ezra.
Edelman founded the Washington Research Project to develop legal strategies to benefit the poor. She continued as the project’s director while also directing the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University, where she had accompanied her husband in 1971. The Washington Research Project ultimately became the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) in 1973. The CDF became one of the nation’s strongest and most influential advocates for children in the United States, especially the children of the poor, minorities, and the disabled, and worked to ensure a safe, healthy, and moral start for all children in America. Edelman has served on the boards of trustees at Spelman College and Yale University. She has received numerous awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She has also written five books, one of which, Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, reveals the formative influence of her South Carolina youth.
– Excerpted from the entry by Carmen V. Harris. To read more about this or 2,000 other entries about South Carolina, check out The South Carolina Encyclopedia by USC Press. (Information used by permission.).
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