Opinion
The Great Recession: Still Hungry in America
T
here were some times where,
you know, we wouldn’t have
that much food, and I would
tell my mom, ‘I’m not hungry, don’t
worry about it,’ and I lost a lot of
weight. I remember I used to be a size
five, and I went from a size five to a
size zero,” a New York high school
senior said in December.
In 1967, as a young civil rights
lawyer in Mississippi, I was asked to
testify before the Senate Subcommit-
tee on Employment, Manpower, and Pover-
ty in Washington about how the
anti-poverty program in Mississippi was
working. The Head Start program was
under attack by the powerful Mississippi
segregationist delegation because it was
operated by church, civil rights, and Black
community groups after the state turned it
down. After defending the Head Start pro-
gram, I told the committee I had become
increasingly concerned about the growing
hunger in the Mississippi Delta. The con-
vergence of efforts to register Black citizens
to vote, Black parents’ challenges to segre-
gated schools, the development of chemical
weed killers and farm mechanization, and
recent passage of a minimum wage law cov-
ering agriculture workers on large farms
had resulted in many Black sharecroppers
being pushed off their near feudal planta-
tions which no longer needed their cheap
labor. Many displaced sharecroppers were
illiterate and had no skills. Free federal food
commodities like cheese, powdered milk,
no
income.
R
o
b
e r t
C HILD W ATCH
Kennedy’s push-
Marian Wright ing, passion, and
visibility helped
Edelman
set in motion a
chain of events
including a 60
Minutes docu-
mentary
on
“Hunger
in
America” that
led to reforms. But change was slow and
incremental. Secretary Freeman did not
believe there were people in Mississippi
with no income who could not afford to pay
$2 for food stamps and sent his own staff
back with Peter Edelman, Robert
Kennedy’s legislative assistant, to retrace
the Senators’ trip. A series of reports in
ensuing months funded by the Field Foun-
dation and visits by doctors, including
Robert Coles, to examine poor children in
Mississippi and other southern states docu-
mented that hunger was widespread not just
in Mississippi but throughout the south and
elsewhere in America.
But as more months passed without
enough federal response, I complained in
frustration during a visit with Senator
Kennedy in Washington. When I told him I
was stopping in Atlanta to see Dr. King, he
urged me to tell Dr. King to bring the poor
people to Washington to make hunger and
poverty visible since the country’s attention
had turned to the Vietnam War and put
poverty and hunger on the back
burner. Dr. King responded posi-
tively and immediately and
began planning for the cam-
paign. After Dr. King’s assassi-
nation, the Poor People’s
Campaign was carried on by his
staff and I moved to Washington
to help as Counsel and federal
policy liaison. It was a watershed
coming together of White,
Black, Native American, and
Latino poor seeking jobs and adequate
income and an end to hunger.
Many have pronounced it a failure but I
differ and believe it made hunger a national
issue and set into motion a number of posi-
tive follow on steps that led to major expan-
sions of the federal food safety net
programs so many depend on today. After
Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the biparti-
san McGovern committee continued hear-
ings around the country, a range of hunger
activists kept pushing the Nixon administra-
tion and Congress to improve the nutrition
safety net, and President Nixon appointed a
task force headed by Pat Moynihan, his
Domestic Policy Advisor, which affirmed
hunger was a major problem. President
Nixon gave a speech saying hunger had no
place our rich land. A prod towards these
steps was a second quiet Poor People’s
Campaign delegation which came to Wash-
ington in 1969 and met with President
Nixon and his Cabinet in the White House.
In that meeting, Rev. Ralph Abernathy and
other leaders urged action to end hunger and
President Nixon kept responding by saying
he was seeking peace in Vietnam. A con-
tentious press conference followed and a
series of Congressional visits criticizing the
President’s weak response helped catalyze a
series of steps including a White House
conference on nutrition and incremental
expansions of child and family nutrition
programs that made a huge difference for
millions until they came under attack from
Reagan Administration budget assaults and
attempts to eliminate a range of federal
safety net programs.
Today, crucial programs like food stamps,
the Women, Infants and Children (WIC)
nutrition program, and school lunch, break-
fast and summer feeding programs continue
working to combat child and family hunger.
Their implementation could be significantly
improved but in the current recession, they
have proved to be indispensable lifelines for
the millions of jobless families with no cash
income in our rich nation—about six mil-
lion or one in 50 Americans, the New York
Times reported in 2010—for whom food
stamps are the only defense against the
wolves of hunger. Last year more Ameri-
cans relied on food stamps to eat than at any
time since the program began in 1939—46
million. Yet once again some voices are
starting to wonder whether we really need
robust anti-hunger programs in America,
Jane but very real children like Jane
Soliternik, a New York City high school
senior and the recent recipient of a Chil-
dren’s Defense Fund’s Beat the Odds®
scholarship award. Jane has overcome
many odds in her young life, including car-
diac surgery, her father’s death, and pover-
ty—especially after her widowed mother
was laid off from her job as a medical assis-
tant during the Great Recession and could-
n’t find another job for more than two years.
When unemployment benefits were
exhausted, Jane and her mother lived on the
The quiet pangs of hunger and the
documented signs of chronic malnutrition are
still here
and whether there are really so many chil-
dren out there who might otherwise go hun-
gry. A recent skeptical Wall Street Journal
article was titled “The Myth of Starving
Americans.”
The safety net has indeed made it harder
to find starving children with bloated bellies
like those Senator Kennedy met in Missis-
sippi in 1967—thank God. But the quiet
pangs of hunger and the documented signs
of chronic malnutrition are still here, from
rural Mississippi to inner cities to middle
class suburbs where families have fallen on
hard times. Hungry boys and girls are not
imaginary figures like the fictional Dick and
Social Security payments Jane received fol-
lowing the death of her father. Jane was
already facing multiple challenges, and then
hunger was added to the list: “There were
some times where, you know, we wouldn’t
have that much food, and I would tell my
mom, ‘I’m not hungry, don’t worry about
it,’ and I lost a lot of weight. I remember I
used to be a size five, and I went from a size
five to a size zero. So, you know, I try to not
eat too much. I try to eat in school. They
give me free lunch in school.”
Read the rest of this story online at
Last year more Americans
relied on food stamps to eat
than at any time since the
program began in 1939—46
million
flour, and peanut butter were all that stood
between them and starvation. I invited the
Senators to come to Mississippi and hear
directly from local people about the positive
impact the anti-poverty program was mak-
ing. They did.
I testified again with local community
leaders in their subsequent hearing in Jack-
son—again sharing the desperate plight of
hungry people and urged the Senators to
visit the Mississippi Delta with me to expe-
rience for themselves the hungry poor in our
very rich nation, 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.
Senator Robert Kennedy responded as did
Senator Joseph Clark and Republican Sena-
tor George Murphy. So in April 1967 they
visited homes in Cleveland, Mississippi,
asking respectfully of each dweller what
they had had for breakfast, lunch, or dinner
the night before. Robert Kennedy opened
their empty ice boxes and cupboards after
asking 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 with bloated belly from whom
he tried in vain to get a response. He lightly
touched the cheeks, shoulders, and hands of
the children clad in ragged clothes outside
who responded to his question “What did
you have for breakfast?” saying “We
haven’t had breakfast yet,” although it was
nearly noon. And he tried to offer words of
encouragement to their hopeless mothers.
He kept his word to try to help Mississip-
pi’s hungry children and went immediately
to see Secretary of Agriculture Orville Free-
man the next day and urged him to get some
food down there and to eliminate any
charges for food stamps for people who had
February 15, 2012 The Seattle Skanner Page 5