Giving Her All for the Children

It perhaps hasn’t been the easiest decade for Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, the most powerful advocacy institution for children in the country.

Eight years ago, Edelman had high hopes that child health issues would soar to national prominence following the 1992 election of Bill Clinton as president.

Based on Edelman’s long-standing friendship with the Clintons (Hillary Clinton was chairwoman of the Children’s Defense Fund board from 1986 to 1992), children’s advocates had expected the Clinton years would be ones of clear progress on numerous fronts. While Edelman has not publicly commented on her relationship with the Clintons, she makes no secret of her disappointment over administration policy in the past decade. “Who would have thought it would be so hard to get universal health care for children? It is shameful that we haven’t gotten that yet,” she said in a recent interview.

Edelman, however, is clearly not given to dwelling on past disappointments. Indeed, the lawyer-activist says she is more hopeful than ever that a profound movement to improve the lives of children is coalescing. At 60, she now has the luxury of viewing progress though a long lens. And, she said: “I don’t know when I’ve seen so many people trying to do good and be connected. There is something stirring. Maybe it’s because of the millennium. But we seem to be asking, what is America about? Is it about more computers? In spite of all our prosperity, there seems to be a feeling that something is missing.”

Edelman has evolved as the undisputed soul of the movement to better the lives of children, says Carolyn Reid-Green, founder of the Drew Child Development Corp., a nonprofit provider of Head Start and other children’s services in Los Angeles.

“Marian Wright Edelman is this nation’s strongest advocate for children and families. She has a wonderful track record, and a huge investment in advocacy for kids.”

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Born in 1939, Edelman earned a law degree at Yale after attending Spelman College in Atlanta. She began her career in Mississippi as the first African American woman to be admitted to the state’s bar. She later led the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People’s legal defense and education fund and helped coordinate, in 1968, the Poor People’s March, in Washington, a seminal event that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began organizing just before he was assassinated.

Edelman founded the Children’s Defense Fund in 1973 to lobby the federal government on behalf of poor children.

She sets a broad agenda. In recent years, her mantra has been to give each child a “healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start and a moral start.”

She has been a champion of improved federal funding for child care and has promoted Head Start and health care for children. But older children have not been beyond her scope. Edelman is a leading critic of the trend to prosecute child and teen criminals as adults.

And she continues to rail against the repercussions of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, maintaining that the law has cut billions of dollars in aid from low-income families with children by limiting the amount of time that welfare recipients can receive aid.

“The struggle to balance jobs and families is such an important issue. If parents have to work, others have to get up and support them,” she said.

While she says the Children’s Defense Fund is nonpartisan and won’t endorse candidates, the group will ask all presidential candidates in the 2000 race for their positions on key issues regarding children. “We want to know their plans for ending child poverty as we know it, not just ending welfare as we know it,” she said.

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Married to Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University Law School, Edelman has three sons and understands the challenges of working parents.

“I think parenting today is harder in some ways,” she says. “Parents have fewer support systems. It’s harder for people to keep control of their children when the children are being treated like consumers.”

While preaching a politically liberal agenda, her views on the need to maintain commitment in marriage are more in tune with political conservatives.

“My father used to say that when romance goes by the wayside, settle for duty. I agree with that. I think marriage is more than a relationship between two people. Children need stability. I’m not advocating marriages when there is violence or abuse. But personal happiness is not the main concern.”

Her late father, Arthur, is one of the people she cites in her new book, “Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors” (Beacon Press). It’s a personal book that traces her upbringing and career and focuses on people who shaped her life.

“It’s about the natural, daily mentors in people’s lives, people your children learn so much from.”

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Edelman is a keynote speaker Saturday at 12:30 p.m. at The Times’ Festival of Health at USC.