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October 13, 1994

Marian Wright Edelman will speak at 1995

Children's rights advocate Marian Wright Edelman will be the featured speaker at Pitt's April 30 commencement ceremony, to be held on the Cathedral of Learning lawn.

In making the announcement at Senate Council Oct. 11, Chancellor J. Dennis O'Connor said the ceremony will be on campus rather than in Downtown's Civic Arena, where it has been held in recent years, in order to give the University more control over scheduling the event. "We've had little control over our own destiny at the Arena in the past couple of years," said O'Connor.

Edelman is the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund. During the mid-1960s, she became the first female African-American lawyer admitted to the Mississippi bar, O'Connor said. After serving as director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund office in Jackson, Miss., Edelman founded the Washington Research Project in 1968. Five years later, the organization became the Children's Defense Fund.

Edelman was named a MacArthur Foundation Prize fellow in 1985. In 1990, the Ladies Home Journal cited her as one of America's 50 most powerful women and Business Week named her one of the country's best managers of nonprofit organizations.

Filed under: Feature,Volume 27 Issue 4

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