Nobody had to tell Senator Robert F. Kennedy that the world was filled with starving children. He’d met them — toddlers with the telltale swollen bellies, oozing sores, and persistent listlessness — in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. But surely not in America’s richly fertile Mississippi Delta, whose sugar, rice, and soybeans fed the world. Not after the billions we’d spent waging a War on Poverty, a war that the Kennedys helped kick-start. Not our babies.
What he heard about hunger at a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill in March 1967 so alarmed him that a month later he flew to a field hearing in Jackson, where his airport greeting party included a gauntlet of KKK protesters shrieking “n----- lover” and carrying a sign reading, "let lbj send rfk to hanoi, not to mississippi." The next day he and fellow senators listened intently as witnesses gave human faces to the figures recited in Washington. Black sharecroppers were surrendering their jobs to crop-picking machines, then being chased out of the state by white oligarchs who were petrified they’d lose power now that Negroes had the vote. Two-parent families were ineligible for welfare and, with zero income, could not scrape together the monthly fee of $2 per person for food stamps. Bobby knew better than to take seriously Mississippi governor Paul Johnson’s sneer that “all the Negroes I’ve seen around here are so fat they shine!” But surely Marian Wright, the young civil rights activist, was being equally hyperbolic in testifying that scores of her fellow Mississippians were “starving. They’re starving, and those who can get the bus fare to go north are trying to go north. ... I wish that (senators) would have a chance to go and just look at the empty cupboards in the Delta and the number of people who are going around begging just to feed their children.”
“I want to see it,” Bobby said. The following day, while other senators on the Poverty Subcommittee flew home to the perquisites of Washington, he and Chairman Joe Clark ventured into the region that once was the dominion of King Cotton. Their first stop was a black outpost in the bowels of the Delta, at a shotgun shack where daylight shone through cracks in the floor and ceiling and the only item in the refrigerator was a jar of peanut butter. Fifteen people called it home. The stench was a nauseating brew of mildew and outhouse. Children huddled out front, clad in rags that barely covered the open sores on their arms and legs. “What did you have for breakfast?” Bobby asked a young boy. “Molasses.” he said. “For supper?” “Molasses.” “For lunch?” “Don’t have no lunch.” A large, ancient-looking woman in baggy clothes thanked the senators for their offer of help but explained that she was too old to wait. How old was she? Bobby asked. “I’m thirty-three.”
“I’ve been to third-world countries and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bobby whispered to his aide Peter Edelman as they trekked across a field of uncut grass to another weather-beaten hovel. Clotheslines crisscrossed one room. Bricks propped up a bed where an infant sucked on a bottle. An open toilet out back had no plumbing. There were no tables in the house, nor any knives, forks, or spoons. Annie White, mother of seven, was in the kitchen doing laundry over a washboard and zinc tub that could have been her grandparents’. Her twenty-month-old son sat nearby in a tattered diaper, his tummy bloated from too little food rather than too much. The boy picked at bits of cornbread and rubbed spilled kernels of rice in circles, around and around in a hypnotic motion. Bobby knelt beside him on the dirt floor, silently stroking his cheek. It was the way this tactile senator communicated — a pat and tickle delivered at the child’s eye level, where adults seldom ventured. A minute went by, then four more. The boy remained transfixed by his scraps, oblivious to the flies swarming overhead or the senator with tears streaming down his cheeks, trying desperately to make a human connection.
Quietly shattered, Bobby stepped through the back door and told those within hearing, “We spend $75 billion a year on armaments and $3 billion a year on dogs. We have to do more for these children who didn’t ask to be born into this.” Cliff Langford, editor of the local weekly newspaper and a longtime Kennedy hater, shouted back that the two senators were being brainwashed and “I don’t know of anybody starving down here.” Bobby: “Step over here and I’ll introduce you to some.”
The reassembled motorcade — a pair of senators, a dozen reporters from state and national newspapers and the three TV networks, along with a squad of U.S. marshals, state highway patrolmen, and local police — headed toward Clarksdale, where a crowd of a thousand young blacks waited. But Bobby wasn’t quite ready. He insisted on stopping at one more roadside shack, where he was greeted by an out-of-work farmer named Andrew Jackson, who invited him in, unsure who he was. Jackson said he was supporting his family of six on $12 a month. His house had no electricity, running water, or toilet. On the wall were two photographs — of the Glorybound Singers and John F. Kennedy. “Is you really Mr. Bobby Kennedy?” Jackson inquired. “Yes,” said Bobby, as he grinned and clasped his host’s hand, “and are you really Mr. Andrew Jackson?”
That trip to the Delta is often cited as Bobby’s epiphany regarding the depth of poverty in America, and proof of his ability to focus a laserlike spotlight on a hidden issue like starvation.
I shudder at the thought of the savages we would've become if we had to do for ourselves because lard knows white Jesus didn't have that in mind for us 
meanwhile more of us are in jail or felons than ever 
and our youth is the most unemployed in the nation 
I really don't know how we would've made it without you good fellas help 
Yeah lets act like pre tax income is the ONLY measure of "better off"...love that liberal reductionism
Total separation from the white man.
Not necessarily from the white women, tho.
..get this money and let that shyt work for you...clowns are backwards as hell...like if you really knew...
The documentaries are so depressing
