He kept his word to help Mississippi’s hungry children. Upon returning to Washington he went the next day with his legislative assistant Peter Edelman to see Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman to tell him what he’d seen and to “get the food down there.” Anticipating and hearing Freeman’s and other agriculture officials’ skepticism that there were people in America with no income, he sent Peter Edelman back to Mississippi immediately with agriculture officials to see for themselves the penniless people with empty pantries he had visited. And so the Edelman family got its start. My husband and I often quip that we fell in love over hungry children.
Robert Kennedy’s pushing, passion, and visibility set in motion a chain of events that culminated years later in the virtual elimination of hunger in America during the Nixon years. These included a series of expansions of child and family nutrition programs including the food stamp program that now reaches over twenty million Americans, a majority of whom are children. Agriculture Secretary Freeman, with confirmed documentation from his own staff that there were indeed people with no income, immediately changed regulations to permit this penniless group to get food stamps without charge. The Field Foundation of New York City, headed by a compassionate southerner, Leslie Dunbar, who gave CDF’s parent organization its first grant, assembled a team of distinguished doctors including Dr. Robert Coles and Dr. Raymond Wheeler from Charlotte, North Carolina, who visited and examined hundreds of poor southern children and found not only hungry children but children suffering from diseases thought to exist only in underdeveloped countries: marasmus, rickets, kwashiorkor, pernicious anemia. Their subsequent testimony about their findings before Senator Clark’s subcommittee in Washington prompted even Mississippi Senator Stennis to propose a token antihunger emergency measure of $10 million. More Senate subcommittee field hearings, including one in South Carolina in which Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings participated, and with the help of Dr. Donald Gatch of Beaufort, South Carolina, produced more evidence of child malnutrition and garnered a significant southern senator’s support for expanding nutrition programs. CBS’s “60 Minutes,” at Robert Kennedy’s urging, sent brilliant young documentary-maker Martin Carr to film hunger in America. Carr captured on camera a baby dying while being born to a malnourished mother. The powerful documentary which aired after Robert Kennedy’s death helped build momentum to address hunger as did Senator George McGovern’s Select Senate Committee hearings around the nation to investigate hunger in America.
Robert Kennedy, in addressing the hunger emergency, always understood that the real culprit was poverty and lack of good jobs. Decent wages, training, and education were necessary to provide hope for restless youths and unskilled older men and women left behind by a changing economy. We need to act on this understanding today. How sad that hunger returned to America as a result of sustained efforts initiated in the Reagan years to dismantle or cut safety-net programs for the poor including food stamps and remains at a time when the economy is booming.
THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN
On one of my trips to Washington which included a visit with my by now very special friend Peter Edelman, Peter and I visited Hickory Hill to chat with Robert Kennedy. Sitting around the pool, I updated him on what was happening in Mississippi and shared my frustrations with the continuing unjust system of government and White resistance to change. I told him I was stopping by Atlanta to visit with Dr. King before returning home to Jackson, Mississippi.
Robert Kennedy told me to tell Dr. King to bring the poor to Washington to make their plight visible to the American people and to put pressure on President Lyndon Johnson to respond to their needs. A few hours later I sat talking with Dr. King in his unprepossessing SCLC office on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. He was depressed and uncertain about where to go next. When I told him what Robert Kennedy had said, Dr. King’s eyes lit up and he called me an angel sent by God. Thus the idea of the Poor People’s Campaign for which I was honored to serve as messenger was born. Dr. King immediately began the hard work of convincing the SCLC staff that a Poor People’s Campaign was a good idea and of putting together the massive recruitment efforts required to bring the poor to Washington. I brought over some poor people from Mississippi to meet with Dr. King and his SCLC staff which included Andy Young, Hosea Williams, and James Bevel, to help convince them of the merits of such a bold and demanding move to garner the attention of America to address poverty. Dr. King listened as his colleagues argued back and forth and then decided to proceed. Among the places he visited to urge people to go with him to Washington was muddy, unpaved Marks, Mississippi in Quitman County, where the pavement began where White folks lived and ended where Black folks lived.
On March 31, 1968 Dr. King gave a sermon, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” at Washington’s National Cathedral in which he told us: “We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.” He cited technology, weaponry, and human rights as the three revolutionary changes requiring us to develop a world perspective and said: “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” “Somewhere,” Dr. King preached, “we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God” and that “the time is always ripe to do right.” He reminded us of the story of “the rich man Dives and the beggar Lazarus. There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich … Dives went to hell because he passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible … Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.” Just as Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity, he said America—the richest nation in the world—could make the same mistake. He said that the Poor People’s Campaign “is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.” That is still the real and urgent question in an $8.6 trillion American economy that has quadrupled in wealth since Dr. King spoke but lets fourteen million children live in poverty.
Four days after his impassioned plea for America to help the poor he was dead—assassinated in Memphis trying to help striking sanitation workers. I will never forget the surreal days that followed, especially the funeral cortege behind the simple pine pauper’s box carrying his body; Dr. Mays’ moving eulogy to our slain young prophet; and the haunting voices of Morehouse College’s choir saluting their departed brother with “Dear Old Morehouse,” the same school song they had serenaded him with as his plane had departed three years earlier for Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
Robert Kennedy slipped quietly into Ebenezer Church to view Dr. King’s body the night before the funeral and walked in the procession from Ebenezer to the campuses of Atlanta University and Morehouse after the funeral the next day. He had recently announced his decision to run for president and had been campaigning in Indiana when news came of Dr. King’s assassination. He movingly shared the terrible news with the waiting crowd of mostly Black citizens, urging them not to hate and reminding them that a White man had killed his brother too.
Our dark, deep despair at Dr. King’s death was leavened only by the fact that we still had Robert Kennedy who if elected president might not only end the war in Vietnam but finish the needed war against poverty. And we had the tasks of carrying out the Poor People’s Campaign without Dr. King. But two months and two days later, Robert Kennedy died from an assassin’s bullet on my birthday, June 6, 1968. I never wore the lovely bracelet my fiancé Peter Edelman had bought at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as a birthday present.
As I walked into St. Patrick�
��s Cathedral in New York City where Robert Kennedy’s body lay in state, a weeping Charles Evers, slain Medgar’s brother, clung to me asking over and over, “What are we going to do now?” Riding on the train from New York City to Washington, D.C. bearing Robert Kennedy’s body, I was deeply moved by the stricken faces of young and old, Black and White who lined the funeral train route who mirrored my stricken heart. The single most poignant moment for me was when the hearse carrying Robert Kennedy’s body to rest beside his brother John Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery moved towards Memorial Bridge. It paused for a moment to allow the poor people remaining in muddy Resurrection City from the Poor People’s Campaign who were standing at attention near the Lincoln Memorial to bid farewell. It was Robert Kennedy’s last campaign.
On April 5, 1968, in Cleveland, Ohio, following Dr. King’s assassination, Robert F Kennedy spoke about “the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives. It is not,” he said, “the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are most important of all, human beings who other human beings loved and needed. No one—no matter where he lives or what he does—can be certain who will suffer from some senseless action of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.”
Since Robert Kennedy spoke those words, he and over 936,000 American men, women, and children have been killed by guns. Another 550,000 Americans have died violent deaths by other means in America’s undeclared twentieth-century civil war. This twenty-nine-year 1.4 million death toll of American against American and of Americans who, unable to face life or find love, hope, purpose, or safe haven in family, community, faith, or democratic civic life, took their own lives, is more than three times the number of reported American battle deaths in all of the wars in the twentieth century. Between 1968 and 1996, fewer than 32,000 American soldiers died in military conflicts in other countries. We Americans were forty-four times more likely to kill each other and ourselves than to be killed by an external enemy.
Gun violence has never been and is not now just or primarily an inner-city Black problem as Littleton, Colorado, Pearl, Mississippi, Jonesboro, Arkansas, Paducah, Kentucky, Springfield, Oregon, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and Conyers and Atlanta, Georgia have reminded us. Approximately half of the 405,176 gun homicide victims between 1968 and 1996 were White (196,041) and half were Black (201,808), and 92 percent of the 465,661 (428,408) gun suicide victims were White. Most of these gun deaths were not caused by strangers but by neighbors or acquaintances or were self-inflicted. Guns have lethalized our moments of despair and anger and turned temporary bouts of emotional instability into tragic permanent losses.
Most shamefully, between 1979 and 1996, over 75,000 American children have been killed and 375,000 children have been wounded by guns. Twenty thousand more American children died and 225,000 more children were wounded by firearms on the killing fields of America than American soldiers died and were wounded on the killing fields of Vietnam.
What has happened to us that the morally unthinkable killing of innocent children has become routine not only in Bosnia and Brazil, Rwanda and Kosovo but in New York City, Detroit, and Chicago? Nearly 13 children in our country are killed by guns daily—a class-roomful of children every two days. American children under fifteen are twelve times more likely to die from gunfire than their peers in twenty-five other industrialized countries combined, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. How many little ones is it going to take for America to stand up and stop the killing of children? What is it going to take for you to say enough and to act?
Even our youngest children cannot escape gun violence. Between 1979 and 1996, three times more children under five (1,875) were killed than American soldiers in action (505). In 1996, 55 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty while 4,600 children were gunned down. Homicide is now the third leading cause of death among children five to fourteen years old, the second leading cause of death among children and young adults ten to twenty-four, and the leading cause of death among Black teen males and females. More young Black males are killed by guns each year than died from all the lynchings throughout American history. Where is our antiviolence campaign, Black community and America?
Escalating violence against and by children and youth is no coincidence. It is the cumulative, convergent, and heightened manifestation of a range of serious and too-long neglected and denied problems. Epidemic poverty; increasing economic inequality; racial, religious, and gender intolerance and hate crimes; rampant drug and alcohol abuse; violence in our homes and glorification of violence in our popular culture, toys, and video games; large numbers of teen and adult out-of-wedlock births and divorces; and overly busy and stressed-out parents have all contributed to the disintegration of the family, community, and spiritual values and supports all children need. Add to these crises easier and easier access to deadlier and deadlier firearms; hordes of lonely and neglected children and youths left to fend for themselves by absentee parents in all race and income groups; gangs and cliques of alienated inner-city and suburban youths relegated to the margins of family, school, and depersonalized community institutions without enough sound home training, education, purpose, jobs, or hope; and political leadership in all parties and at all levels that pays more attention to foreign than domestic enemies, to the rich than to the poor, to their own political survival than to our children’s survival, and you face the social and spiritual disintegration of American society that I believe we are witnessing today.
What are the real family values in the richest nation on earth that lets one in five of its children live in poverty and allows children to be the poorest group of Americans? What must God think about citizens and leaders with a booming nearly $9 trillion economy that lets children suffer hunger, homelessness, sickness, illiteracy, injury, and death that we have the means but not the will to prevent?
What does national security mean to millions of children who witness violence at home and in the streets every year and to the million children who themselves are abused and neglected?
I wonder how many of the fifteen-year-old murderers today were born without adequate prenatal care and nutrition because our nation claimed we could not afford to give them a Healthy Start? How many sixteen-year-old teen mothers having babies today entered school not ready to learn because we would not invest early in a Head Start for them? How many eighteen-year-old murderers witnessed and suffered abuse and neglect at home from parents who were never nurtured themselves, taught to parent, trained to work, or able to earn enough to escape poverty when they did work? Seventy percent of poor children live in a household where someone works. How many nineteen-year-old youths abusing and pushing drugs today are children who saw the adults in their lives abusing or pushing drugs and who lacked positive community alternatives to dysfunctional families and dangerous streets? How much competition are our religious congregations and community institutions providing youths to combat the drug dealers and gun sellers and gangs and violent video, movie, and television wares available to our children twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week that desensitize our children to the consequences of violence? Where are the parental and community mentors to lure restless youths into fun, learning, and service and away from the crass exploitation of children as consumers?
All adults are responsible for protecting children and contributing public safety. It is time to pierce the NRA myths about Second Amendment protection of private gun ownership and to organize to protect children instead of guns. There is no excuse for the unbridled trafficking in nonsporting handguns, assault weapons, and ammunition. It is insane that a gun is produced or imported in America about every eight seconds and that more than 200 million guns are legally in the hands of Americans—many concealed. It makes no sense that our nation regulates the safety of countless products including children’s toy guns, teddy bears, blankets, and pajama
s and does not regulate the safety of a product that killed over thirty thousand American children and adults in 1996 and injured many more. Why are guns the only unregulated consumer product in America? Why do we require a license to drive a car and registration to own a car but not to own a gun?
Our failure to control the proliferation of arms and to confront the plague of violence which permeates our culture has weakened the moral thresholds which hold societies together. The traditional rules and boundaries of war have disappeared in Rwanda, Kosovo, and in the United States as innocent civilians, humanitarian workers, and women and children are slaughtered indiscriminately by guns and bombs. Even a mother’s womb no longer shields babies against violent assault. A Detroit pediatrician wrote in 1993: “We have seen 22 pregnant adolescents with gun shot wounds in two small inner-city hospitals in Detroit.”
Dr. King and Robert Kennedy lived and died trying to address these plagues of physical and spiritual poverty. It is time for us to hear and act.
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MOVEMENT TIME
ANDREW YOUNG called Dr. King “a very reluctant and reactive prophet.” He did not initiate the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, the student sit-ins, the march from Selma to Montgomery, or the Poor People’s Campaign. But he melded them all together with other campaigns into a powerful movement which he embodied and symbolized.
Dorothy Cotton, the charismatic education director for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says, “Movement is people in motion for a particular purpose.” A movement is a dynamic ragged eruption that bubbles up over time in the consciousness of many people from many different places who feel a common grievance or need or shared suffering. It is like lava in a volcano that finally erupts. World War I and World War II’s Black soldiers like my Daddy came home from defending our democracy in Europe too restless and changed to accept the old ways at home. Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall and a small brilliant band of Black lawyers began carefully and methodically to conceptualize and implement a legal strategy to end public education apartheid. Beginning with Sweatt v. Painter, they challenged grossly unequal and segregated higher education for Blacks in Texas. Their legal odyssey culminated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 outlawing racially segregated public schools.
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