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First Lady Launches
Children's Defense Fund Library

At an invitation-only ceremony March 19 in Clinton, Tennessee, Hillary Rodham Clinton snipped the ribbon to open the new Langston Hughes Library. The facility is a special library for the Children's Defense Fund, a national advocacy organization. A symposium on children, race, and poverty followed the event.

Maya Lin, architect of the famed Vietnam Memorial, created the building that Barnes & Noble CEO Len Riggio funded. The site—a 19th-century cantilevered barn that Lin transformed into a library—is on a farm owned by the late Roots author Alex Haley, who left it to the CDF when he died in 1992, according to the Chattanooga Times and Free Press. CDF president Marian Wright Edelman called the facility "an exquisite piece of work."

Reading rooms were dedicated to poet Maya Angelou and author John Hope Franklin, and another area honors civil rights hero Rosa Parks.

Hillary Clinton has been a longtime supporter of CDF, joining it as an intern in 1970 and eventually chairing its board.

Posted March 29, 1999.

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First Lady Launches
Children's Defense Fund Library