Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009 at 8 p.m.
Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009 at 8 p.m.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 8 p.m.Marian Wright Edelman
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Charting a Course for the Next Generation
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture • Location: Grand Hall, Rice Memorial Center (building 57 on the campus map) • Time: 8 p.m.
Marian Wright Edelman has spent a lifetime as an advocate for disadvantaged Americans. Under her leadership as founder and president, the Children’s Defense Fund has become the nation’s strongest voice for children and families, and its Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
Edelman’s career began in the mid-1960s when, as the first black woman admitted to 
the Mississippi Bar, she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. office in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1968, she moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel for the Poor People’s Campaign begun by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and the parent body of the Children’s Defense Fund. She also directed the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University.
Edelman chaired the Board of Trustees of Spelman College from 1976 to 1987, and she was the first woman elected by alumni as a member of the Yale Corporation. Her honorary degrees and awards include the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The author of nine books, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
