Class Day Speaker Marian Wright Edelman has spent the last few weeks as a real working mother.

Traveling across the nation and imparting her words of wisdom to college graduates, Edelman has proven herself as the much-in-demand career woman--too busy, even, to be interviewed for her own profile.

But Edelman, founder and president of the Washington D.C.-based Children's Defense Fund, has always made time for the children for whom she has spent a lifetime lobbying.

"America's mom," as Rolling Stone once heralded her, has spent the last 30 years fighting for the welfare and protection of all American children.

And today, Edelman will bequeath her legacy of service to just a few of her heirs as she addresses the Class of 1993.

Associates predict Edelman, in today's speech, will broach her preferred subjects: the plight of America's abused and poverty-stricken children and the necessity for Americans to dedicate themselves to service if there is to be any hope for societal reform.

"Those are the topics she cares about and I think those are the messages she will want to share with graduating college students," says Renee M. Landers '77, who was president of the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association when Edelman was awarded the Radcliffe Medal in 1989--one of her many nationwide awards received in the 1980s.

The medal is just one indication that Edelman's fame is not fleeting. Early in her activist career, Edelman was oft-regarded as a harbinger of woe, a voice of unnecessary despair amidst a sea of calm.

After graduating from Spelman College in 1960 and Yale Law School in 1963, Edelman was the first Black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar.

Her first job was with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Jackson, Miss., where she directed the Legal Defense and Education Fund.

In 1968 she left the NAACP to found the Washington Research Project. Five years later, that project became the Children's Defense Fund.

"Her work with the [Children's Defense Fund], one of the premier agencies in the nation devoted to family issues, demonstrates that you can be successful in challenging the system from the outside," Landers says.

Landers and former Harvard President Derek C. Bok agree that Edelman's involvement lent the children's rights movement a degree of credibility it had lacked in previous years. "This is a significant accomplishment for her and it is a significant accomplishment for women," Landers says.

Her achievements are particularly inspiring in light of the resistance Edelman faced as she tried to share her concerns for the welfare of children and families.

"The '80s were a chilly time for people espousing her sort of message," Bok says. "But [Edelman] showed admirable qualities of perseverance, often working against the national grain to get people to take notice of this enormously important set of issues she has chosen to champion."