Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, came to campus recently to be feted, to preach and to sign copies of her latest book, a tribute to the mentors at Yale and elsewhere who most influenced her life.
Edelman '63 LL.B. received the Yale Law Association's Award of Merit on Oct. 9 during the Law School's annual Reunion Weekend. The next morning, she was the featured preacher at the 11 a.m. University Public Worship service in Battell Chapel. At a reception in Calhoun College later that day, the alumna signed copies of her newest book, "Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors."
Edelman began her lifelong career as civil rights activist and children's advocate in Mississippi, where she was the first black woman admitted to the state's bar association. She later moved to Washington, D.C., where she was counsel for the Poor People's March before founding the Children's Defense Fund.
In "Lanterns," Edelman describes the men and women who profoundly influenced her life and inspired her career.
In a chapter titled "The Yale Years," Edelman singles out former University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin and activist Malcolm X as particularly important to her during the years she studied at the Yale Law School.
The alumna lived in Coffin's home -- free of charge -- during her second year at Yale, and cites him as an "inspiring, outspoken and eloquent ... mentor, friend and billboard for faith in action."
She adds: "[H]is commitment to racial justice and his later arrest with Dr. Benjamin Spock in opposition to the war in Vietnam made him a lifelong hero to me."
A childhood friend who had converted to Islam introduced her to Malcolm X when he came to Yale's Law School to speak. Later she visited him several times in New York. "I was buoyed and enthralled by Malcolm X's intelligence, by his barbed humor...and by his keen analysis of America's racial divide," she recounts.
Although she admits to a "complete lack of interest in property and contracts and corporations and legal procedure courses," Edelman says she persevered in her legal studies because she realized that knowledge of the law "was needed to fight racial discrimination in the South in the early 1960s."
-- By Dorie Baker
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