Children’s Champion : Marian Wright Edelman Is a Feared Lobbyist and America’s Most Powerful Advocate for the Young

Years ago, when Martin Luther King Jr. was an unknown minister, Marian Wright Edelman and her brothers and sister marched to the dictums of another Baptist preacher, their father.

In the Rev. Arthur Wright’s book, only homework came before the sick and needy of tiny Bennettsville, S.C., and he ensured his children understood that.

But when the older children ached for a treat, like a midweek movie, they would tell their daddy that it was educational or assigned by a teacher. If that failed, they launched their ultimate weapon--the wondrous effect of their baby sister’s tears.

“Daddy couldn’t stand it when Marian cried,” recalled Olive Covington, the oldest sibling. “And Marian understood that power, though she never abused it.”

Today, when Marian Wright Edelman weeps, it is with indignation over what America has done to its children, over their deprivations, abuse and the waste of so many of their lives.

Edelman, 51, founder and president of the advocacy group, the Children’s Defense Fund, has come a long way from stomping the wood floors of a preacher’s house. Now, when she wants something, she cajoles, argues, pleads and pulls on sleeves--and somebody besides her daddy listens.

Over the last 20 years, Edelman has become the most powerful advocate in America for children, a feared lobbyist demanding that the government provide the support the nation’s young so desperately need. And she has become known for speeches that rumble through auditoriums like steaming lava coursing beneath the earth’s crust.

Tonight, she will unleash her oratory in Los Angeles at her group’s first West Coast fund-raiser. Like others, Edelman comes to Hollywood seeking the cash and cachet of celebrities; opera star Jessye Norman, Disney chief Michael Eisner and Mayor Tom Bradley are sponsors of the event.

But Edelman, as she is most wont to do now, will not use tears but the data and research her professional staff of 100 assembles so she can present canny analyses and convincing arguments.

Which is not to say that she does not, on occasion, resort to what all Washington lobbyists often do when they really want something, whether it is legislation or money. They turn to a handy weapon: relentless whining. There, Edelman can compete with the best of them.

Her stubbornness and indefatigability can be incredible strengths but are also major liabilities, some in Washington say. Last year, for example, she violated the lobbyists’ unwritten rules on whining with her personal, public lambasting of two friends in Congress who rejected her approach to financing a new child-care program. The sting from that episode still lingers.

Still, not even her congressional critics dare dismiss her. Edelman wields well the power of moral suasion, and as a pioneer in the civil rights movement, she wears her credibility with the same confidence she sports smart suits and sensible shoes.

In 1965, Edelman became the first black woman lawyer in Mississippi, and after all the summer interns and Northerners had gone home during those tumultuous times, she stayed.

Rep. Henry Waxman, the Los Angeles Democrat who successfully worked with Edelman in the 1980s, chipping away at conservative resistance to free health care for poor kids, said her greatest strength is persistence.

“Marian has beat down a lot of walls and doors in her day and buttonholed a lot of members (of Congress) during budget time,” he said. “Her strategy is to go face to face and not go away.”

There was pandemonium last week in Washington.

Political leaders on Capitol Hill were skidding toward disaster over their inability to agree on a budget, and at the bottom of the Hill, in crammed offices stacked high with reports about malnutrition and infant mortality, anger brewed.

“Where’s the child-care bill? Where’s the bill?” Edelman asked, punctuating her remarks during a long interview with tirades about “that inept bunch of men.”

Again, it looked as if Congress, crazed over the need for a deficit reduction and the impending elections, might end the budget season without funding a child-care program, the most ambitious new domestic plan to be considered in a decade.

Having galvanized scores of groups to get behind the legislation three years ago and engaged in scorched-earth politics along the way, Edelman was chafing to see it passed.

Sitting in her office, the walls plastered with awards and posters of Gandhi and Einstein peering down at her, Edelman and two aides hashed over ways to get attention to the issue.

“This is terrible, terrible . . ., “ said Sara Rosenbaum, a veteran Edelman aide. “We may have the money but no legislation. And if we get it passed, we’ll still be competing for money.”

The trio reviewed which big shots they might get to see in Congress amid the budget mayhem. Go after House Speaker Tom Foley’s office, Edelman advised: “I want (his aide) to tell me they’re not going to move this bill.”

Rosenbaum suggested they issue a press release listing how the budget would hurt kids. “Don’t forget to say good things about child care,” Edelman added.

“These men don’t really take kids seriously or take women’s issues or the poor seriously,” she had said earlier. “These are perceived to be weak constituencies, and so these men are free still to make campaign promises, go to child-care centers and kiss babies. . . . And then, when it comes down to the budget room, child care is not perceived as important as capital gains. It’s obscene.”

Leaning forward in her chair, her elbows on her knees, Edelman grew so impassioned it seemed she was about to jump up. Yet, while her tone was harsh, her voice was soft with words tumbling out so fast they sometimes got lost at the end of a sentence.

Rarely has Edelman been described without mention of how swiftly her mind and mouth move together. During 1967 Senate hearings on the War on Poverty, the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy interrupted her testimony, pleading for her to “talk a little slower.” A 1970s book on the same subject referred to her “as the fastest talking woman in the world.”

Edelman, in fact, has become a master at winning attention with rhetoric. And since she doesn’t throw lavish cocktail parties like other lobbyists nor contribute to campaigns to sway candidates, her words must suffice.

“If we don’t get child care this year, we’ll do whatever we can to embarrass (the leadership) in the media,” she said. “I’m prepared to call a spade a spade. . . . “

But it was a similar attempt at lancing politicians in public that got Edelman in trouble last November.

After Congress didn’t act on child care for a third time, Edelman fired off a three-page memo accusing Democratic congressmen Tom Downey of New York and George Miller of California--considered two of the most aggressive advocates for children in the House--of sabotaging the legislation “for petty jurisdictional and power reasons.”

Only a year before, Miller had been honored at the defense fund’s 15th anniversary dinner. But the line Edelman drew in the memo was that, because he and Downey had not supported her view, they did not care about kids.

While she won praise from fellow advocates, many in the political establishment suddenly deemed Edelman petulant and inflexible, especially after she was reported to have unraveled her anger at Speaker Foley. The powerful House Ways and Means Committee chairman called her “a bully.”

But this fight went far beyond name-calling. Rather, it reflected dueling views of how to squeeze the federal budget for new funds in the Era of the Deficit, as well as deeper conflicts over family values. And, the vision of spending billions of dollars set off all kinds of fighting: intra-committee, intra-party, intra-advocacy groups.

Edelman’s faction wanted a brand-new program but one that would have to be refunded annually by Congress. Downey and Miller ultimately accepted a similar program but changed the financing to guarantee predictable funding for core services.

Downey complained that Edelman was living in the glories of the past. “Lyndon Johnson,” Downey told reporters, “is not going to come back to sign this bill.”

But Edelman insisted that they could have accommodated their differences--if only Miller and Downey had tried harder. “Why the failure to compromise?” she asked. “My goodness, you can always disagree with your enemies. Also you have to feel free to differ with your friends.”

It is still unclear whether Edelman acted out of pique, frustration or both. It is also unclear whether she permanently damaged her reputation on the Hill. Her relations with Downey and Miller--neither of whom would be interviewed for this story--remain strained.

Some political insiders have said the friction might have helped the issue and the Children’s Defense Fund by elevating their visibility.

Edelman personally didn’t need the attention, having reached the heights of East Coast exposure with 1989 profiles in “The New Yorker” and “60 Minutes,” which noted that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) refers to her as the “the 101st senator.”

But “what worries me is that she began to believe she was the 101st senator,” said one critic who asked to remain nameless, noting, “She’s still pretty powerful.”

David Liederman, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America, assailed Edelman’s detractors for not understanding her role, saying: “When you’re an advocate, it is not your job to compromise. Marian gets paid to tell people what’s right for kids.”

Edelman’s postscript on the rift was characteristically blunt: “I think we have gained a little respect. They are not free to screw children in private and then expect to make wonderful speeches out front. . . . All I care about at the moment is having our Democratic leadership produce that child-care bill for 1991, and I say to Mr. Downey and Mr. Miller, whatever their strategy, where’s the bill? Where’s the money? Where’s child care?”

For all her fire and brimstone, there is another picture of Edelman, one that is serene, curled up, contemplative.

It appears in “I Dream a World,” a book of portraits of 75 black woman by Brian Lanker, who also used Edelman’s photograph in a calendar. She is June, the smallish woman in the rocking chair with the faraway look hugging her knees. She is in a garden.

“Oh that’s my retreat where I built myself a garden and in my garden I built a little house,” she said, eagerly paging past her own picture to one of two plump Mississippi activists staring sternly at the camera. “Look at those faces,” Edelman said. “Aren’t they wonderful?”

When wrestled back to the subject of that garden in one of Washington’s most affluent neighborhoods, Edelman explained that it is where she revives herself from a bone-crushing schedule. It has also been the scene of many family occasions.

Besides trying to help other’s children, Edelman and her husband, Peter, a Georgetown University Law Center professor, have raised their own three with the help of good child care.

“Marian had Miss Amy, a woman of our mother’s generation who belonged to daddy’s church,” explained Edelman’s sister Olive Covington. “She was uneducated but she had our parents’ values. She never failed Marian or the boys.”

Each son experienced one of the most novel attempts at ecumenism in that back yard--a “Baptist bar mitzvah,” with both a rabbi and a minister, Edelman’s brother.

“I am a person of faith “ she said. “I believe there is something beyond me, and I want my sons to know that.”

It was one of many lessons she learned from her parents. When there was no playground for blacks in Bennettsville, the Rev. Edelman built one in the churchyard; when there was no home for the elderly, he started one, which his wife ran after his death in 1955 and their son took over after she died. Selflessness was bred into the Wright children the way other kids now learn to play Nintendo. While both Marian, the youngest child, and Olive, the oldest, played the piano from the time they could reach the keys, their father taught them never to assume they would perform on Sundays when others might want a chance.

“Our mission was to develop other people,” recalled Olive Covington, now 62 and an education specialist in Washington.

Yet from a young age, Marian had no problem developing herself. She was an ‘A’ student and a majorette. After graduating from Atlanta’s Spelman College with honors, she studied overseas on scholarships. Later, she went to Yale Law School seeking ways to use the law to battle segregation.

After law school, she moved to Jackson, Miss., directing the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1964 to 1968. While they were harrowing years of violence and injustice, they were also rewarding. At age 24, Edelman was named by Mademoiselle magazine “one of the four most exciting young women in the country.” The others anointed were writer Anne Tyler, actress Lesley Ann Warren and ballerina Suzanne Farrell.

But Marian Wright never made it to New York to pick up her “merit award.” As she was preparing to go she was called to court. A black man, who had enrolled his 6-year-old daughter in an all-white school, was Christmas shopping when he was beaten from behind, then arrested for assault and battery. She went to his defense.

Besides traversing rural Mississippi defending such cases, Edelman also helped bring Head Start for poor preschoolers to the reluctant state.

Yet even in those days, Edelman never shrank from criticizing her “friends,” growing impatient with what she saw as mediocrity in the civil rights movement. In a 1966 Ebony magazine profile, she complained that “if the movement had to depend upon Negroes alone for financial support, it would have ended long ago.”

Edelman left Mississippi in 1968, using a small federal grant to start a research project that was to become a voice for low-income people in the nation’s capital. The tiny staff also served as watchdogs, complaining, for example, when money for poor schools was used to remodel a principal’s office.

It was in those years that Edelman’s greatest strategy emerged: As a means of focusing on the poor, she began scrutinizing children’s needs, thereby engaging the broader political constituency they attracted.

In 1973 she expanded the research project into the Children’s Defense Fund and began demonstrating to politicians why children were a vulnerable class.

In its first report about children out of the school, the fund declared:

“If a child is not white, or white but not middle-class, does not speak English, is poor, needs special help with seeing, hearing, walking, reading, learning, adjusting, growing up, is pregnant, or married at age 15, is not smart enough, or is too smart, then in too many places school officials decide school is not the place for that child.”

This one statement embodied everything that the fund has come to represent: a persuasive style, ambitiousness for the cause, use of hard data and a conclusion that says it all. It also reflected Edelman’s adamant tone and a theme she was to popularize--that if America was to compete internationally it had to “invest” in its children.

Over 17 years, the fund has issued similar reports, analyzing problems such as teen-age pregnancy and child abuse. As the group grew to an $8-million-a-year operation, one of Edelman’s best techniques was to structure it around people. “Marian’s instinct was to find really smart people, really creative people and figure out a way to bring them into her orbit,” said one former staffer.

She could also be overly demanding, said another former staffer. “She is driven for the cause but then again one can’t accomplish much without that.”

It was no mean feat in the early years of the Reagan Revolution to keep attention on poor children, when, for example, the President himself would snicker on occasion about an unnamed welfare recipient who bought an orange with food stamps and used the change to buy vodka.

Edelman and her staff feverishly tried to document how budget cuts hurt the poor, then they shipped the findings to editorialists nationwide.

“It was really quite a victory that we came out of that decade with a groundswell of support for programs like Head Start,” said Wendy Lazarus of California’s Children Now, a 2 1/2-year-old advocacy group.

With Edelman and her staff as a model, new troupes trying new strategies to help children emerged. Last year, for example, Children Now got prominent Californians to issue a “report card,” giving the state a “D” for how its 7.7 million children are faring.

“Marian has the battle scars of having been in the real world for 20 years,” said Lazarus. “Remarkably, though, she’s still a dreamer that things can be done.”

But why hasn’t she burned out?

Edelman knows countless civil rights activists who have faded from the fight, burned out on liberal causes, racial politics, speaking tours and back room brawls. And, she has seen conditions deteriorate.

“At least in Mississippi, the country had come to an awareness of the need to provide political and civil rights, and even though it was painful and violent and awful, there was a great sense of hope and a move in the right direction,” she said. “What is different today is that we know so much more about what works . . . and it’s like talking to the deaf and to the blind because we are not wanting to move in the right direction.”

Yet there are internal pressures that keep her going. There are memories of her late father cleaning an ailing woman’s bed sores and her late mother cooking in the old age home for people younger than she.

And there are the outside voices, nudging her onward, calling her to action.

“I try to give Marian a little reality about how things look out here in the heartland,” said Mark Real, head of the fund’s Ohio office. When Edelman visits Columbus, Real takes her to welfare offices. He reminds her that the state pays for child care for only 20,000 of the 800,000 youngsters who he argues desperately need it.

“Congress can debate until the cows come home, but they haven’t come through for us,” Real said, screaming into the phone. “I don’t want to hear another speech from anyone in the 202 area code. It is enough already.”

Mae Bertha Carter’s message inspires Edelman in a different way. They go back a long way.

In 1965, Carter riled all of Drew, Miss., pop. 2,000, by putting eight of her 13 children in an all-white school. Edelman and her new law degree came to the rescue.

“We didn’t have no food, no clothes and they was shooting at us with the children all around the house,” said Carter who grew up on a plantation picking cotton and never attending school.

The family was thrown off the plantation when the trouble started. But as Carter recalled, that became unimportant after Edelman successfully fought in court for the children to stay in the white school. Later, the American Friends Service Committee bought her a house, some clothes and food.

“The (whites) thought we was little ol’ ignorant people living on the plantation,” Carter said. “We was. But we knew enough to call the likes of Marian.”

Edelman and Carter stayed in touch. In 1982, Edelman nominated her old friend for a “Wonder Woman” award created by the comic strip sponsors to honor women with “compassion, honesty and courage.” Carter beat out 1,300 applicants for a $7,500 cash award and was honored at a ceremony in New York, along with actress Marlo Thomas and arts supporter Joan Mondale. Explained Edelman, “Women like Miss Mae Bertha are my role models. They keep me going.”

And they have kept after her.

Just the other day, Carter wrote Edelman about problems at the high school that her children desegregated 25 years ago. “They’re sending too many children home in the middle of the day,” Carter complained. “They should have inside suspension to keep them in school.”

But why write Edelman in Washington? Aren’t there locals who can help?

“Why honey,” Carter said, incredulously, “Marian Wright is one of the greatest women in America, don’t you know that? Somebody has to do something for this generation coming on or else the United States is coming down. And who else but Marian Wright?”

SIGNS OF HOW KIDS SUFFER Among California’s 7.7 million youngsters, 18 or younger:

* More than 1 of 5 (roughly 1.6 million children in 1988) live below the poverty level (defined as an annual income of $10,560 or less for a family of three).

* More than half of all 2-year-olds are inadequately immunized.

* One-third of high school students drop out or fail to finish on time; in some inner city schools, the dropout rate exceeds 60%.

* California has the highest teen-age pregnancy rate in the nation.

* The number of children not living with their families (mostly in foster care) increased 66% between 1986 and 1990.

* Of infants born in public hospitals in large cities, 10% to 25% have been exposed to illegal drugs.

* If all the state’s poor children under age 18 lived in a city, it would be California’s second largest.

Source: Public and private studies, with information compiled by Children Now, a California advocacy group.