Marian Wright Edelman: Commencement 2003

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Children's advocate Marian Wright Edelman delivered the main address and received the Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Service at the commencement exercises for the University of Massachusetts Boston on Saturday, May 31 at the Bayside Exposition Center at 10:30 a.m. A lawyer, educator, and reformer, Edelman has dedicated her career to helping children and the disadvantaged.

Edelman is the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), a non-profit agency that has become the nation's strongest voice for children and families. Created in 1973, CDF is devoted to promoting the fund's No Child Left Behind initiative, fostering early childhood education, increasing children's access to health insurance, improving children's safety, and decreasing child poverty. For over thirty years Edelman has worked tirelessly to advance civil rights, education, and healthcare for children.

It is a calling inspired by her father, a Baptist preacher who taught his five children that Christianity required service in the world. Born in Bennetsville, South Carolina, Edelman was fourteen when her father died and heeded his deathbed advice, "Don't let anything get in the way of your education."

Edelman went on to earn her bachelor's degree at Spelman College and her law degree at Yale Law School. Upon graduating from Yale in 1963, Edelman worked for the NAACP Legal and Defense Fund in New York and in Mississippi, where she became the first black woman to be admitted to the state's Bar.

more: http://www.umb.edu/news/2003news/releases/commencement/edelman.html

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