er father was the Reverend Arthur Wright, a modest, unassuming,
and powerful man who spent his life ministering to a segregated
and struggling African-American community in Bennettsville, South
Carolina, where she grew up. He was the kind of leader who built
a park and roller skating rink behind his Baptist parish, because
the people of his congregation were prohibited from enjoying the
local public parks. In his eyes, it was the only right response
to the injustice at hand. "That taught me," his daughter would later
tell Time magazine, "if you don't like the way the world
is, change it."
Marian Wright Edelman was so affected by the love, devotion, discipline,
and self-sacrifice of her father that she made it her life's mission
to bring the same level of care, concern, and protection to vulnerable
and underprivileged children everywhere. The rationale behind her
life's work has been pretty simple: "If we don't stand for children,
then we don't stand for much." In 1973, at just thirty-four years
old, she started a national crusade of "conscience and action" to
"leave no child behind." She called it the Children's Defense Fund,
and began to lobby tirelessly for the rights of every child-from
access to the right educational resources and essential health care,
to Head Start initiatives for pre-school kids and pregnancy prevention
programs for teens....
