Marian Wright Edelman is an American activist for the rights of children. She is president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund. Edelman was born the youngest of five children to Arthur Jerome Wright and Maggie Leola Brown in Bennettsville, South Carolina.

She attended Spelman College and traveled the world on a Merrill scholarship and studied in the Soviet Union as a Lisle fellow. She became involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and after being arrested for her activism, she decided to become a doctor and entered Yale Law School in 1963, joining the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1968.

Edelman was the first African American admitted to the Mississippi Bar.

In 1973, she founded the Children's Defense Fund as a voice for poor, minority and disabled children.

The organization has served as an advocacy and research center for children's issues, documenting the problems and possible solutions to children in need.

To keep the agency independent, she saw that it was financed entirely with private funds.

Source: wikipedia.org