Children’s Defense Fund president and founder Marian Wright Edelman discusses the importance of Freedom Summer 1964 during the 50th Anniversary conference at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, June 26, 2014. The civil rights activist was the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar and practiced law with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.’s Mississippi office, working on racial justice issues connected with the civil rights movement and representing activists during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. The conference commemorates the months of 1964 when volunteers came from across the country to assist state and local NAACP leaders and others in the South’s voter registration drives, and especially in Mississippi. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
Marian Wright Edelman
One of the best-known children’s rights advocates, Marian Wright Edelman has advocated for African Americans since the Civil Rights era. She graduated from Spelman College and Yale Law School, and was the first Black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar. She directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Miss.
In 1968, she moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel to the Poor People’s Campaign organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. before his death. That year, Wright Edelman founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and the parent body of the Children’s Defense Fund. In 1973, she founded the Children’s Defense Fund and its mission: No Child Left Behind.
