History
CDF grew out of the Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of Marian Wright Edelman who remains its President. CDF traces its heritage to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Poor People’s Campaign that fought for social and economic justice for all in the 1960s.
Mrs. Edelman—a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School—witnessed abject poverty first-hand in the Mississippi Delta and worked with Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy in the 1960s to help the millions of poor people in America. Mrs. Edelman then moved to Washington, D.C., and founded CDF to continue Dr. King’s call for justice for the poor and to ensure a level playing field for all children in America.
CDF is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and has offices in several states around the country: California, Minnesota, New York, Louisiana, Ohio, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. CDF programs operate in 24 states and the National Outreach staff also works on the ground and with partners in all 50 states.
Since its founding, CDF has helped pass several critical pieces of legislation, like the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) and the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act and programs involving issues of disabled children, early childhood education, health care and child welfare; ran several public awareness campaigns including the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign and the gun violence prevention campaign. CDF has also published a number of reports, including the State of America’s Children, educating the public on the issues facing children.
Read more about this topic: Children's Defense Fund
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)