Still Hungry in America
Marian Wright Edelman
President, Children's Defense Fund
Huffington Post
February 10, 2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marian-wright-edelman/hunger-in-america_b_1269450.html

	"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," 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 Subcommittee on
Employment, Manpower, and Poverty 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 program, I told the committee I had
become increasingly concerned about the growing hunger
in the Mississippi Delta. The convergence of efforts to
register Black citizens to vote, Black parents'
challenges to segregated schools, the development of
chemical weed killers and 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 which no longer needed their cheap labor.
Many displaced sharecroppers were illiterate and had no
skills. Free federal food commodities like cheese,
powdered milk, 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 making. They did.

I testified again with local community leaders in their
subsequent hearing in Jackson -- again sharing the
desperate plight of hungry people and urged the Senators
to visit the Mississippi Delta with me to experience 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 Senator 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 Mississippi's hungry
children and went immediately to see Secretary of
Agriculture Orville Freeman the next day and urged him
to get some food down there and to eliminate any charges
for food stamps for people who had no income. Robert
Kennedy's pushing, passion, and visibility helped set in
motion a chain of events including a 60 Minutes
documentary 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 Foundation and visits by doctors,
including Robert Coles, to examine poor children in
Mississippi and other southern states documented 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
positively and immediately, and began planning for the
campaign. After Dr. King's assassination, 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 positive steps that led to major
expansions of the federal food safety net programs so
many depend on today. After Robert Kennedy's
assassination, the bipartisan McGovern committee
continued hearings around the country, a range of hunger
activists kept pushing the Nixon administration 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 in our rich land. A
prod towards these steps was a second quiet Poor
People's Campaign delegation, which came to Washington
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 contentious 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, breakfast 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 million or 1 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
Americans 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, and
whether there are really so many children out there who
might otherwise go hungry. 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 Mississippi 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 Jane but very real children like Jane
Soliternik, a New York City high school senior and the
recent recipient of a Children's Defense Fund's Beat the
Oddsr scholarship award. Jane has overcome many odds in
her young life, including cardiac surgery, her father's
death, and poverty -- especially after her widowed
mother was laid off from her job as a medical assistant
during the Great Recession and couldn't find another job
for more than two years. When unemployment benefits were
exhausted, Jane and her mother lived on the Social
Security payments Jane received following 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."

This makes Jane just 1 of 14 million children who
participate in free or reduced price school lunch
programs during the year and are often "at nutritional
risk" and go hungry when those meals aren't provided.
Without this vital safety net, we might return to the
scenes Senator Kennedy witnessed. Hunger in America is
real and widespread and pretending hungry children do
not exist or that families should be ashamed of their
needs is shameful. Unemployed parents unable to find a
job when jobs are scarce should not be blamed for their
inability to put food on the table. Robert Kennedy
always understood that in addressing the hunger
emergency the real culprit was poverty, and lack of
jobs, wages, training, and education to provide hope for
restless youths trapped into failure and jail rather
than given opportunities. The same is true now. Until we
solve that crisis, we will still have jobless parents,
poor families, and hungry children in America. For now,
when more than 16 million American children, one of
every four children, are not sure where the next meal
will come from, we have urgent work to do.

The Food Research and Action Council (FRAC) did release
one small piece of good news in January: a new poll
showing American voters overwhelmingly oppose cutting
food stamp assistance as a way to reduce government
spending. "What this poll tells us is that, despite
rhetoric and false claims about the program, Americans
across the country see food stamps as a program that
works and that is making a real difference for people,"
said FRAC President Jim Weill. "American voters won't
tolerate hunger in our midst, and across party lines
they support this valuable program." You and I need to
make sure our leaders hear this message loudly and
clearly.

___________________________________________

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