Marian Wright Edelman has worked for human rights in this country since 1964, when she began the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. She was deeply involved in numerous school desegregation cases and related civil rights causes during the '60s, and served on the board of one of the largest Head Start programs in the country. In 1968 she founded what became the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), the organization she now directs.
The Children's Defense Fund is active in a wide range of children's and family issues in an effort to change policies and practices that result in the neglect of children. Its work includes research, litigation, public education, community organizing, and the monitoring of federal programs and policies. CDF's annual National Legislative Agenda for Children, covering 1981, is now available. The organization also publishes the results of its studies and a monthly newsletter, CDF Report.
To her advocacy of the poor Marian Wright Edelman brings personal compassion as well as political analysis. Sojourners sought her out to pose the questions on the following pages about the current situation and future prospects of poor black children and their families.--The Editors
Sojourners: The Children's Defense Fund put out a report several months ago called Portrait of Inequality that with page after page of shocking statistics effectively shattered any notions about the progress black people have made in the last 20 years. In the course of compiling that report did you find any one thing that was most disturbing or revealing about the situation of black people?
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