A
true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness
and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we
are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will
be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole
Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be
constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s
highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It
comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, April 4, 1967

In March 1967 when I was working as a young
civil rights lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Mississippi, I
was asked to come to Washington to testify before the Senate Committee
on Labor and Public Welfare’s Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and
Poverty about how the War on Poverty was working in the state. I told
the committee I had become deeply and increasingly concerned about the
growing hunger in the Mississippi Delta. The convergence of hostility
towards Black citizens and workers involved in civil rights activities,
development of chemical weed killers, farm mechanization, and recent
passage of a minimum wage law covering agriculture workers on large
farms had resulted in many Black sharecroppers being pushed off their
near feudal plantations that no longer needed their cheap labor. Many
displaced sharecroppers were illiterate and had no skills or income.
Free federal food commodities like cheese, powdered milk, flour, and
peanut butter were all that stood between them and hunger and
malnutrition — even starvation. At the hearing, I invited the Senators
to come to Mississippi and hear directly from local people about the
crucial and positive impact the anti-poverty program was making and the
state’s actions to encourage people to leave. Four of the nine
subcommittee members agreed to come: Senators Joseph Clark (D-PA), Jacob
Javits (R-NY), Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY), and George Murphy (R-CA).

So fifty years ago this month, on April 10,
1967, I testified alongside local community leaders at a follow up
hearing held by the Senate subcommittee in Jackson, Mississippi, sharing
again the desperate plight of hungry people. I urged the visiting
Senators to go one step further and visit the Mississippi Delta with me
to see and experience for themselves the hungry poor in our very rich
nation, and to visit the shacks and look into the deadened eyes of
hungry children with bloated bellies — a level of hunger many people did
not believe could exist in America. “They are starving and someone has
to help them,” I said. Senators Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark
responded positively to my plea.

Early the next day we flew from Jackson to
the Greenville airbase in the Mississippi Delta and drove from
Greenville to Clarksdale, stopping in Cleveland guided by one of the
great unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement — Amzie Moore. We
visited homes where the Senators asked respectfully what each family had
for breakfast, lunch, or dinner the night before. Robert Kennedy opened
their empty ice boxes and cupboards after asking their permission. I
watched him hover, visibly moved, on a dirt floor in a dirty dark shack
out of television camera range over a listless baby boy with bloated
belly from whom he tried in vain to get a response as he lightly touched
the baby’s cheeks. When we went outside again he asked the older
children clad in ragged clothes standing outside their shack “What did
you have for breakfast?” They responded saying “We haven’t had no
breakfast yet,” although it was nearly noon. And he gently touched their
faces and tried to offer words of encouragement to their hopeless and
helpless mothers.

When we traveled to another Delta town, our
motorcade ran over the dog of a small White boy watching from the
sidewalk. Senator Kennedy stopped the motorcade and got out to comfort
the boy and tell the police escort to slow down.

From this trip and throughout the fifteen
months I knew him until his assassination June 6, 1968, I came to
associate Robert Kennedy with nonverbal communications that conveyed far
more than words, touching a child’s cheek, head or shoulders. And his
capacity for genuine outrage and compassion was palpable.

He kept his word to try to help
Mississippi’s hungry children and he and Senator Clark went the very
next day to see Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman and urged him
to “get the food down there” and to eliminate any charges for food
stamps for people who had no income. The state had changed from free
food commodities to food stamps which cost $2 jobless poor people did
not have. Secretary Freeman did not believe there were people in the
United States with no income even after the Senators told him
they had seen them. Secretary Freeman said he would send Department of
Agriculture staff to Mississippi to verify. He sent his staff back to
Mississippi the next day and Robert Kennedy sent Peter Edelman back with
them to lead them through the same desolate shacks and meet some
desolate families. Robert Kennedy’s pushing, passion, and visibility
helped activate a range of important people and set in motion a chain of
events that led to major activities and reforms being adopted over
ensuing months and years.

In May 1967 the Field Foundation, headed by
a great Southerner Leslie Dunbar, sent a team of doctors to examine
poor children in Mississippi who reported back to the Senate
Subcommittee that they found not just severe malnutrition but children
suffering from diseases thought to exist only in underdeveloped
countries. Their report, Hungry Children, was published by the
Southern Regional Council. In August 1967 a Citizens’ Board of Inquiry
into Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States, supported by the
Citizens’ Crusade against Poverty and the Field Foundation, began a
nationwide study of the hunger crisis.

I came to Washington to visit my now
special friend Peter Edelman and went out to Hickory Hill to see Robert
Kennedy and share my frustration with the slow pace of progress in
helping the hungry poor. When I told him I was stopping in Atlanta to
see Dr. King on the way back to Jackson, he told me to tell Dr. King to
bring the poor to Washington and make poverty and hunger visible in the
nation’s capital. When I sat down in Dr. King’s modest Auburn Avenue
office he was visibly depressed but his eyes lit up when I conveyed the
Kennedy message as the Vietnam War had overshadowed the needs of poor
people at home. Earlier that spring, Dr. King had been widely condemned
for criticizing the Vietnam War at Riverside Church by Black and White
leaders who thought he should segregate his conscience about the related
violence of war and the violence of poverty. After robust and
cantankerous Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staff
debates in ensuing weeks and months, Dr. King decided to launch a Poor
People’s Campaign and began planning for it. He convened meetings of the
Black, Latino, Native American, and White poor over the ensuing months
and I began planning to move to Washington to serve as federal policy
liaison.

Dr. King’s April 4th, 1968
assassination was an incredibly huge blow to the Poor People’s Campaign,
but his staff proceeded to gather the poor of all races including
organizing a Mule Train from Marks, Mississippi to travel to
“Resurrection City” in Washington, D.C. We made visits to many federal
agencies for which I had the privilege of helping prepare policy papers
and supporting Dr. King’s successor Rev. Abernathy and SCLC staff. A key
demand was an end to hunger. In later April 1968, the Citizens’ Board
of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition released their report Hunger, U.S.A.,
which identified 282 “hunger counties” in 23 states where emergency
action was needed. Another report by the Committee on School Lunch
Participation, Their Daily Bread, found “generally speaking,
the greater the need of children from a poor neighborhood, the less the
community is able to meet it.” In May 1968 CBS Reports produced a
powerful documentary on “Hunger in America” that shocked and outraged
the nation including showing a malnourished mother giving birth to a
severely malnourished dying baby.

Momentum continued to build following
coverage of the crisis. A Senate hearing with representatives from
Resurrection City and Dr. Abernathy and Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a key
District of Columbia SCLC leader, told the story of pervasive hunger,
poverty and joblessness among poor Native Americans, African Americans,
Mexican Americans, and White Americans. Before the hearing, I had many
Resurrection City residents line up and stand along the sides of the
Senate subway to the Capitol so the Senators could see them when they
went to vote. One Senator came up to congratulate me on “your people’s
costumes.” I was shocked and told him, “These are not costumes Senator,
these are their real clothes.”

Following Robert Kennedy’s assassination in
June and the moving stop of his hearse and funeral procession on the
way to burial at Arlington Cemetery where the poor sang him farewell
with the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Resurrection City was dismantled
immediately. But copies of Hunger, U.S.A. and a range of
specific demands to both the Department of Agriculture and the White
House continued. The Senate approved the creation of the Senate Select
Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by Senator George
McGovern (D-SD) with eight Democrats and five Republicans and they began
conducting hearings on the status of hunger, food assistance and
nutrition that continued over the next several years.

The poor returned home bereft after Robert
Kennedy’s assassination but I stayed in Washington and founded the
Children’s Defense Fund (CDF)’s parent organization – the Washington
Research Project, a public interest law firm created to serve the
federal policy demands for the campaign and monitor the implementation
of federal laws. Rev. Abernathy and SCLC representatives and a group of
poor people from the Campaign returned to Washington later for an
accountability session. We met with President Richard Nixon and his
entire cabinet in the White House and asked for reports on progress made
to the Campaign’s early demands at federal agencies. President Nixon
answered most of our queries with his efforts to end the Vietnam War.
But in January 1969 the President established the Council on Urban
Affairs headed by Pat Moynihan, his Domestic Policy Advisor, which soon
affirmed hunger was a major problem and the President released a Special
Message to Congress Recommending a Program to End Hunger in America in
May. President Nixon convened a December 1969 White House Conference on
Food, Nutrition and Health, and declared hunger had no place in our rich
land. The bipartisan McGovern Congressional Committee continued with
hearings documenting hunger and pushing for adequate federal response as
a growing number of anti-hunger groups demanded reforms to end hunger. A
range of positive follow up policy steps led to the beginning of a
series of expansions of the federal food safety net programs that so
many tens of millions depend on today.       

The significant visibility and incremental
progress begun by the Poor People’s Campaign spawned major progress over
time and paved the path for the indispensable child and family
nutrition safety net today that helps millions of Americans beat back
the wolves of hunger. The major gains in significantly reducing child
and family hunger through expanded federal investments and pressure from
Congress during the Nixon years came under attack from Reagan
Administration. The Reagan budget proposed to dismantle almost the
entire federal safety net and to block grant and dismantle a range of
crucial programs for low income children and families — threats we face
again today with the Trump Administration. CDF issued a quick and sharp
analysis of the Reagan budget and its proposed devastating impact on the
poor and convened a spate of congressional briefings and tried to wake
up the country to the looming threats. Although we lost tens of billions
of dollars in federal budget cuts, we succeeded in keeping the
framework of the crucial federal laws for children and families in place
and laboriously got back the dollars cut year by year. We now are at
risk of the same massive destruction of our nation’s federal safety net.
We must stand together and say no — we will not go backwards!

Today, fifty years after Robert Kennedy’s
and Martin Luther King’s trips to the Mississippi Delta, President
Trump’s first full budget next month is expected to try to take much of
the safety net away again by capping funding, proposing block grants and
enacting deep cuts to programs like food stamps, now called the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other nutrition,
child and family health supports, crucial early childhood programs,
education and housing investments and accountability protections for
disadvantaged and disabled children. Stand up and fight back with us
with all your might everybody!

SNAP helps feed 19.9 million American
children — 1 in 4 — preventing children and families from going hungry
and improving their overall health. SNAP kept 8.4 million people out of
poverty in 2014, including 3.8 million children, and is the most
responsive means tested program during economic downturns. In fiscal
year 2015, there were 4.9 million households with no income but SNAP, including
1.3 million households with children. That year SNAP benefits averaged
only $1.41 a person a meal and more than half of all families receiving
SNAP were still food insecure. The Urban Institute determined in
research commissioned for CDF’s 2015 Ending Child Poverty Now
report that an increase in SNAP of about 30 percent, when combined with
other modest policy changes, would decrease hunger for an estimated 12.6
million families with children and reduce child poverty 16 percent. The
report found that the SNAP improvement and other policy reforms could
reduce overall child poverty 60 percent and Black child poverty 72
percent for $77.2 billion, less than the cost at the time of closing tax
loopholes that allow U.S. corporations to dodge $90 billion each year
in federal income taxes by shifting profits to subsidiaries in tax
havens.

Robert Kennedy, in addressing the hunger
emergency, always understood the real culprit was poverty and lack of
good jobs. Today, jobs with decent wages, training, and education are
critical to providing hope for restless youths and unskilled older men
and women left behind by a changing economy. I hope everyone in America
will stand up and say no to the political budget meanness running amok
on Capitol Hill and resist all efforts to dismantle and cut child
health, child nutrition, child care, education, child welfare and
juvenile justice investments serving our most vulnerable children and
youths. And to do what? Add $54 billion more to the defense budget and
increase tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires? What Bible do these
leaders read?!

The day he was assassinated, Dr. King
called his mother to give her his next Sunday’s sermon title: “Why
America May Go to Hell.” He warned that “America is going to hell if we
don't use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all
of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.” I think we
are going there fast.