opinion
Child Poverty: Still an epidemic in the u.S.
D
uring her research for the
Children’s Defense Fund’s
recent
report
“Held
Captive: Child Poverty in
America,” Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Julia Cass visited the
Mississippi Delta; New Orleans
and Baton Rouge, La.; and subur-
ban Long Island, NY, to profile
three different kinds of child
poverty. Her trip to Quitman
County, Miss. covered sadly
familiar ground: Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. visited the Black share-
cropping community in Marks, the
seat of Quitman County, in the
summer of 1966 to preach at the
funeral of a friend, and Marks was
later chosen as the starting point of
the mule train that left Mississippi
for Washington, D.C. during the
Poor People’s Campaign.
Cass describes the community
Dr. King saw: “Quitman was one
of the poorest counties in America
in 1960. Many Black families
lived in rented houses or in shacks
on the plantations where they
worked, subject to eviction at any
time. The White side of town had
paved streets; the Black side was
unpaved. The Black schools,
housed in inferior, poorly ventilat-
ed buildings and using out-of-date
books from the White schools,
held split sessions so the children
could help plant, weed, and pick
cotton at different times of
C hiLd W atCh
Marian Wright
Edelman
year. Many families could not pay
the 25 cents it cost for a lunch at
school.”
Dr. Ralph Abernathy accompa-
nied Dr. King on that trip, and in
his autobiography he recalled how
deeply their visit with children at a
“fledgling” Head Start program
affected Dr. King: “We looked
around the primitive schoolhouse
and saw them watching us, wide-
eyed and silent, having been told
who we were. They seemed bright
and alert, but something bothered
me about them. Then I realized
what it was: virtually all of them
were under weight, a condition
that lent a special poignancy to
their enormous eyes.” After
watching the teacher divide a sin-
gle apple into quarters for four
hungry children at lunchtime, Dr.
King uncharacteristically broke
down in tears and had to leave the
room. Later, he said to Dr.
Abernathy, “I can’t get those chil-
dren out of my mind… We can’t
let that kind of poverty exist in this
country. I don’t think people real-
ly know that little school children
are slowly starving in the United
States of America. I didn’t know
it.” Making this poverty visible to
the whole nation became the goal
of the Poor People’s Campaign.
Senator Robert Kennedy had a
similar reaction when I accompa-
nied him on a trip to Mississippi
the next year so he could see the
poverty and hunger there first-
hand. His profound shock and
sadness motivated him to act
too.
Cass says, “Senator
Mississippi Delta), did succeed in
expanding the availability of food
commodities, food stamps and
free school lunches and break-
fasts. This basic safety net is still
helping long-time poor families,
and newly poor families losing
jobs and homes during the current
recession, avoid the kind of utter
destitution, hunger, malnutrition,
and starvation that shocked Dr.
King, Senator Kennedy and the
nation.” In the current debate over
After watching the teacher divide a
single apple into quarters for four
hungry children at lunchtime, Dr. King
uncharacteristically broke down in
tears and had to leave the room
Kennedy’s visit put hunger on the
national agenda and sparked a
coalition of individuals and groups
that produced reports on child
hunger, malnutrition, illness, and
death and pointed out the callous-
ness of the federal school lunch
program that had no place at its
table for six million needy chil-
dren whose families could not
afford to pay… The spotlight on
poverty, which shone for about a
decade (following Dr. King and
Senator Kennedy’s visits to the
the federal budget, some pieces of
the safety net are once again under
attack—yet this is one of the many
places where our nation has made
progress in fulfilling Dr. King’s
dream.
But is the safety net enough? “It
is hard,” Cass says, “not to think
about how Dr. King would
respond to the place 42 years after
the Poor People’s Campaign,
when its signature mule train
departed from Marks. He would
not see a teacher having to quarter
an apple to feed hungry children…
since the vast majority meets the
poverty requirements [for free
meals at school]. This alone
reveals what has changed and
what has not… [T]he safety net set
up in the 1960s and 1970s—food
stamps, school lunches and break-
fasts, Medicaid, housing pro-
grams, Head Start—has ameliorat-
ed some of the awful effects of
poverty in Quitman County. But
education and support systems to
pull the next generation—the chil-
dren—out of poverty are vastly
insufficient and spotty. The inade-
quacy of federal, state, and local
support for poor children in
Mississippi is underlined by this
startling fact: The after-school
tutoring and reading programs in
Quitman and three other Delta
counties are financed by what is
essentially foreign aid, The
Bernard van Leer Foundation of
the Netherlands”—which focuses
on children and families in what it
refers to as oppressed societies.
Despite the critical immediate
solutions to the pervasive child
hunger Dr. King saw, the underly-
ing crisis—pervasive child pover-
ty—persists in the Mississippi
Delta and across the country.
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march 30, 2011 The Seattle Skanner page 5