Advocate for the Disadvantaged to Speak at Commencement
- By Ann E. Shanahan '59
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- Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense
Fund (CDF) and a lifelong advocate for disadvantaged Americans, will be
the speaker at Smith College's 119th commencement on Sunday, May 18. Honorary
degrees will be awarded to poet and writer Gwendolyn Brooks; Nancy Weiss
Malkiel, dean of the college at Princeton University; Wilma Pearl Mankiller,
former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation; Leelavathy Patrick, founder
of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Madras, India; and Harvey Picker,
retired executive and dean emeritus of the Columbia University School of
International and Public Affairs.
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- Edelman, a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School, began her
career when, as the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar,
she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson,
Mississippi. In 1968 she moved to Washington, D.C. as counsel for the Poor
People's March that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., began organizing shortly
before his death. In the early 1970s she served for two years as the director
of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University. In the same
year, she founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law
firm and the parent body of the Children's Defense Fund, which was established
in 1973. The recipient of many honorary degrees and awards, including the
Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award and a MacArthur Foundation
Prize, Edelman is the author of several books, including Families in Peril:
An Agenda for Social Change. Edelman received an honorary degree from Smith
in 1969.
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- Brooks, whose first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, was published
in 1945, has been a prolific writer through all the intervening years.
Her awards have been many. The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1950,
she has also been awarded the Frost Medal by the Poetry Society of America
and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Endowment of the Arts.
The Gwendolyn Brooks Chair in Black Literature and Creative Writing was
established in her honor in 1990 at Chicago State University. Most recently
she has been an instructor in poetry at Columbia College and Northeastern
Illinois State College, both in Chicago.
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- Malkiel, a 1965 graduate of Smith who received her graduate degrees
at Harvard University, is a professor of history at Princeton University
as well as dean of the college. Her major publications include Whitney
M. Young, Jr., and the Struggle for Civil Rights and Farewell to the Party
of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR. She is currently a trustee
of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and of the McCarter
Theater at Princeton. Her extensive record of service to Smith includes
membership on its board of trustees from 1984 through 1994 and on the board
of counselors and its committee of Afro-American studies. She has also
served on the board of directors of the Smith College Alumnae Association
and as chair of her 25th Smith College reunion.
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- Mankiller's initial work with the Cherokee Nation included recruitment
of young Native Americans into university training in environmental science.
She went on to become the founding director of the Cherokee Nation community
development department in 1981 and, in 1983, the first woman deputy chief
in Cherokee history. From the mid-1980s until 1995, she served as principal
chief of the Cherokee Nation. Her recent activities have included coediting
The Reader's Companion to the History of Women in the United States and
teaching at Dartmouth College. Her autobiography is titled Mankiller: A
Chief and Her People. Mankiller is a graduate of Flaming Rainbow College
in Oklahoma and has done graduate work at the University of Oklahoma.
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- Leelavathy, who received the master of education for the deaf degree
from Smith in 1970, came to Northampton to enter the SmithClarke School
program in 1968 from Madras, India, where, with little formal training,
she had been teaching deaf children. Shortly after earning the M.Ed. and
returning to India, with an enrollment of three children, she founded a
school, which she named Clarke School for the Deaf in appreciation for
the training she had received at the original Clarke School. Leelavathy's
school grew rapidly and now serves some 600 children. Her achievements
include establishing training programs for teachers of the deaf, raising
funds to support the expansion of her school in a country faced with serious
economic challenges and creating screening programs for hearing-impaired
infants and children and counseling programs for their families.
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- Picker, who is currently owner and chairman of the board of Wayfarer
Marine Corporation, a yacht storage and repair business in Camden, Maine,
was dean and professor of international relations at Columbia University
from 1972 to 1983 and an executive in the Picker Corporation, a manufacturer
of X-ray equipment, for many years. He was educated at Colgate and Harvard
universities and was nearing completion of a Ph.D. at Columbia University
when he was invited to become dean of its School of International and Public
Affairs. His current philanthropic and civic activities include service
on the board of trustees of the Research and Education Fund and the board
of directors of the Academy of Political Science. He is also a member of
the Maine Health Care Finance Commission. Picker's late wife, Jean, graduated
from Smith in 1942 and served on its board of trustees from 1977 to 1987.
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