Child Poverty in America - Marian Wright Edelman November 25, 2008

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2008/10/27/Marian_Wright_Edelman_A_Course_for_the_Next_Generation

Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman criticizes child poverty rates in America, using the image of a family with six children who only care for five.

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Marian Wright Edelman talks about her new book The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation.

The founder of the Children's Defense Fund looks back on what has been done, and what needs to be done, to make the nation and world safe and fair for all children. - Book Passage

Marian Wright Edelman was born in and grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina, one of five children. In 1963, after graduating from Yale Law School, Marian Wright Edelman worked first in New York for the NAACP Legal and Defense Fund, and then in Mississippi for the same organization. There, she became the first African American woman to practice law. During her time in Mississippi, she worked on racial justice issues connected with the civil rights movement, and she also helped get a Head Start program established in her community.

During a tour by Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark of Mississippi's poverty-ridden Delta slums, Marian met Peter Edelman, an assistant to Kennedy, and the next year she moved to Washington, D.C., to marry him and to work for social justice in the center of America's political scene. They had three sons.As part of the efforts of Marian Wright Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund on behalf of children, she has also advocated pregnancy prevention, child care funding, health care funding, prenatal care, parental responsibility for education in values, reducing the violent images presented to children, and selective gun control in the wake of school shootings.