League for Emotionally Disturbed Children brochure, Box 3, Folder, 1. Courtesy of the Brooklyn College Archives and Special Collections, The Papers of Dr. Lauretta Bender.
Founded in New York by a group of 20 parents in 1950, the League for Emotionally Disturbed Children had become a national organization by 1955. Its goal was to improve the lives of children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. Strategies included reducing stigma by raising public consciousness and providing new community-based services for children where few or none had existed before. This brochure is undated but is likely from the late 1950s. As the names identified with its National Board of Directors and National Advisory Committee make clear, the League attracted the support of many leading professionals, advocates, and celebrities, from writer Pearl Buck and psychologist Kenneth Clark to Jewish philanthropist Bernard Manishewitz and Susan Wagner, the wife of New York Mayor Robert Wagner.
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