Civil Rights Events

Robert F. Kennedy Visits Mississippi's Delta

Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination … still reverberates in American life. One reason his standing as a political leader endures is the genuineness of his concern for the most disadvantaged Americans. A child of privilege, Bobby Kennedy was a perhaps unexpected champion of the poor and the marginalized. But living out his strong Catholic faith, he was determined to go to the margins of society—and was always empathetic with the people he met there.

Through 1967 and 1968, in the runup and course of his campaign for president, Robert Kennedy traveled to some of the places in the United States hardest hit by poverty and racism. In the midst of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, the U.S. senator from New York wanted to see how change was playing out and what still remained to be done.

Over the course of what became known as his “poverty tour,” Kennedy visited the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky and western Pennsylvania, California’s Central Valley and the Mississippi Delta. Among whites, blacks and Latinos alike, Kennedy found a nation within our nation in need of aid and wrongs that needed righting (De Loera-Brust 1).

Robert Kennedy consistently related to the underdog. He made a point of witnessing first-hand the hunger of children in the Mississippi Delta as well as the hardship of those living in urban ghettos and on Native American reservations. He was relentless in his efforts to provide for improved circumstances for those who were hungry and poor.

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After a visit [in 1996] to Harlem in New York City, RFK described the experience: “I have been in tenements in Harlem (New York) in the past several weeks where the smell of rats was so strong that it was difficult to stay there for five minutes, and where children slept with lights turned on their feet to discourage attacks…”

Robert Kennedy believed that the best way to help the poor was not have them rely on government bureaucracy, rather to give them the means by which they could work their own way out of poverty. After touring a highly run-down area of New York City known as Bedford-Stuyvesant – riddled with crime, unemployment and deteriorated housing – Kennedy was challenged to find a way to help the community to rebuild itself. He met with community activists, who were cynical of his interest. They claimed that he was just another ‘white politician who was out visiting for the day and would never be heard from again’. But Kennedy was a man of action. His response was to launch the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project, a joint venture between residents and businesses. The project was designed to revitalize and rebuild businesses within the community and, in doing so, restore hope for its residents (Baldes, Gould, and Marien (1-3).

Robert F. Kennedy was two years into his first term as a U.S. senator from New York when [in 1967] he visited the Mississippi Delta. At the time, many were already eying him as a presidential candidate, someone who could carry on his brother’s political legacy. But at that moment, Kennedy was trying to carve out his own political identity. Still grieving over his brother’s assassination, he threw himself into trying to make a change in issues that he cared about.

Although many accounts hold that Kennedy’s interest in poverty arose after his brother’s death, former aides link it to work he did as attorney general on juvenile delinquency in the early 1960s. Kennedy believed delinquency was a product of economic inequality, linked in part to the racial tension that was beginning to erupt all over the nation.

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Though the local officials he traveled with had planned where to take him, Kennedy often ordered the entourage to pull over for unscheduled stops so that he could talk to families at random. He didn’t simply want to rely on what his tour guides wanted to show him. “It was more like a fact-finding mission,” [Ellen] Meacham [a University of Mississippi journalism professor accompanying the tour] said. “He was much more interested in finding the truth of the matter and connecting with people than creating a photo op.”

For hours, Kennedy and his entourage traveled by car from one dusty town to another, visiting families who lived in terrible conditions. The senator peeked in refrigerators and cupboards, often finding them empty. He quizzed adults on whether they had heard of any of the government assistance programs created as part of the War on Poverty — and many had not. But it was the children he was most moved by.

In Cleveland, he asked the television people to wait outside while he, [NAACP activist Marian] Wright and [longtime aid Peter] Edelman went into a darkened home. Inside, they found a small baby on the dirty floor, listlessly picking at scattered pieces of rice and cornbread — the day’s meal. As Meacham recounts in her book [Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi], Kennedy became fixated on the child, who wasn’t much younger than his son Max, who had just turned 2. Kennedy ignored the stench of the open toilet in one corner of the room and despite the sores on the baby’s arms and legs crouched on the dusty floor, trying to coax a response from the dazed child, whose belly was swollen from malnourishment. Kennedy touched the boy’s face and cheeks again and again, softly saying, “Baby … hi, baby.”

According to Edelman, Kennedy tried for at least five minutes to get some reaction from the child, but the baby never acknowledged him or made a sound. “It was an incredibly awful but powerful moment,” he said (Bailey 1-4).

A reporter for the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi, covering civil rights, the courts, and municipal affairs, witnessed part of the first morning of Kennedy’s tour. His observations were printed in 2002 in American Heritage.

Kennedy decided he wanted to see how bad things really were in the Delta, and he asked [Marian] Wright to find a pocket of poverty that the entire subcommittee could visit the next day.

He may not have realized that finding pockets of poverty in the Mississippi Delta in the late spring of 1967 was as easy as finding pockets in a pool hall.

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At about 10:00 A.M. we reached a black community lost in a sea of cotton fields. The few average-income whites and better-off blacks had separated their houses from the much poorer blacks we were visiting with a cyclone fence. The poorer people had outhouses and used big tanks for water storage. There were some indoor bathrooms but very few phones or television sets.

The houses were probably 40 years old, unpainted and sparsely furnished but in good repair. They were bunched together higgledy-piggledy in what anyone raised in Mississippi would have recognized as “quarters,” around a central tamped-earth court where women washed their clothes in huge pots of boiling water, stirring the laundry with short paddles just as they had in the 1850s.

I introduced myself to Kennedy, who was shorter than I had imagined and seemed frail. His nose was more hooked than it appeared in photographs, he was deeply tanned, and he kept trying to brush his thick, longish hair out of his face when the wind kicked up. His blue suit didn’t look much better than mine. He spoke in a low, breathy voice, and at times we reporters and the blacks we had inflicted ourselves upon had to strain to hear him. Most of all, he just looked terribly, terribly tired. I knew that he had played football for Harvard and still played touch football with his family. I knew he didn’t smoke or drink. But he seemed worn out, chastened, by something that had to be more than fatigue.

Then we began moving through the houses. The people in the small crowd we had attracted ranged in age from 3 to 63, yet none appeared to be between 15 and about 50. When you saw Third World population distribution like that, you knew that those in the middle, the employables, had gone off to the cities—the ones that had burned that year and the year before. No one here had a job, and very few had decent clothes.

The first house we walked into had a refrigerator in a big room. Kennedy opened it. The only item inside was a jar of peanut butter. There was no bread. We walked outside, and he held out his hand to a bunch of young, filthy, ragged but thrilled kids. In a minute or two he was stopped by a short, aging, very heavy black woman in old, baggy clothes. I regret to say that I’d become inured to poverty by a childhood and young adulthood in the Delta, but this poor woman was in awful shape even for Mississippi.

She thanked Senator Kennedy for coming to see them and said that she was too old to be helped by any new program but she hoped the children might be. Kennedy, moved, softly asked her how old she was. “I’m 33,” she said. Both he and I recoiled.

We moved into the central courtyard, where the local weekly editor interrogated Kennedy almost belly to belly, lighting into liberals of every stripe. Kennedy would patiently reply and then touch his neck right above the collar with his right hand. It got to be eerie; it reminded me of his brother’s reaction to the first shot that had hit him.

I had my deadline to meet, so after a while I thanked Kennedy and drove to a pay phone to call in my story. I never saw him again… (RFK 2-5).

It’s been a long time since Charlie Dillard went to bed hungry, but he still chokes up thinking about it. Growing up poor in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, there were days when he and his eight brothers and sisters had only a slice of cornbread or a spoonful of syrup apiece, and that was it.

Sometimes there was no food at all, and he would go to bed face down on the dusty floor of his grandparents’ old shotgun house pressing his hollow belly into the wood hoping it would somehow ease the sharp pains of hunger that pulsed through his skinny body and kept him up at night.

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Dillard’s mother was a farm worker. She picked cotton, soybeans and vegetables, depending on the season. And like many black children in the Delta at the time, Dillard was often with her, working 12-hour shifts, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., for five dollars a day. He only sporadically attended school. When he wasn’t in the fields, he and his siblings were doing odd jobs — mowing lawns or raking leaves for white families on the other side of town — anything to help make ends meet. His father was out of the picture, so it was up to the whole family to work to survive.

But in 1967, jobs were hard to find in the Delta, especially for blacks. Farmers were increasingly turning to machines to harvest and process their crops, eliminating the need for manual labor. Dillard’s mother had gone to Florida in search of work, leaving her children behind in circumstances that seemed to grow more desperate by the day. His grandparents didn’t have enough money or food to take care of all the kids, a group that had grown to include some of his cousins. On any given night, there were 15 people or more, mostly children, crammed into a tiny three-room shack where there was no heat or air conditioning.

One Tuesday afternoon in April 1967, when Dillard was just 9, he was playing outside with his siblings when he saw a crowd of people walking up the street. He stopped and stared. He had never seen anything like it. There were men with giant television cameras on their shoulders, and while there were a couple of blacks, most in the group were white, which was unusual because white people rarely came to their blighted part of town with its unpaved streets and decrepit homes.

Suddenly, a white man in a dark suit emerged from the crowd and made a beeline for Dillard and his siblings. To the boy’s surprise, the man walked up and offered his hand — an unusual gesture at the time in racially charged Mississippi. The man introduced himself as Robert Kennedy — a name that didn’t mean much to Dillard, who didn’t have a television. Only later did he learn that the man was the brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, a former attorney general and a U.S. senator from New York.

“He was the first white person I ever shook hands with,” Dillard recalled.

Glancing over the kids, who were filthy and dressed in tattered, ill-fitting hand-me-downs, Kennedy had a somber air about him. He spoke quietly, asking Dillard why he wasn’t in school. The child explained that he wasn’t enrolled. Looking distressed, Kennedy asked the boy what he had eaten that day. “Molasses,” Dillard replied.

As Dillard walked up the wooden steps of the house to go inside and tell his grandmother about their visitors, Kennedy and his entourage followed. Inside the house, the senator questioned the woman about what she had fed the kids that day. Just bread and syrup, she replied. And they wouldn’t eat again until the evening because there just wasn’t enough food. The cupboards were empty. “I can’t hardly feed ’em but twice a day,” the woman told Kennedy, who could not conceal his shock.

As he turned to go, Kennedy, a father of 10 at the time, including a boy just three weeks old, smiled sadly at Dillard and his siblings. He touched their heads and gently caressed their cheeks. They looked up at him with sad, worried eyes. “It wasn’t like a politician kissing babies,” said Ellen Meacham … He touched those children as if they were his own.”

Traveling abroad, the senator had seen poverty and hunger first hand in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. But as his… aide Peter Edelman recalled, Kennedy seemed more shaken by what he had seen in Mississippi. He was disturbed to see so many children suffering in a way they weren’t in other places stricken by poverty.

“I remember he came out of one of the houses, and he was just … he couldn’t believe it. He told me this was the worst poverty he had ever seen, worse than anything he’d ever seen in a Third World country,” Edelman recalled. “That might have been a little bit of an overstatement, but it was shocking to see that in the United States. He couldn’t stop thinking of those hungry kids, those children in rags and [with] swollen bellies and running sores on their arms and legs that wouldn’t heal. It was horrific.”

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Hours later, Kennedy arrived back at Hickory Hill, his family’s stately brick home in the rolling countryside of McLean, Va. It was his wife Ethel’s birthday, and she and the kids had stayed up late to welcome the senator back from Mississippi.

But as Kennedy crossed the threshold to the dining room, where his family awaited, his kids later recalled how their father had suddenly halted, looking anguished as he surveyed his opulent home and his happy, healthy children. It was a stark contrast to what he’d seen in Mississippi earlier in the day. “He looked haunted and started talking to me, shaking his head in distress as he described the people he’d met in the Delta,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, his oldest daughter, who would later serve as the lieutenant governor of Maryland, wrote in the New York Times. “‘I was with a family who live in a shack the size of this dining room,’ he told me. ‘The children’s stomachs were distended and had sores all over them. They were starving.’ He was outraged that this could happen in the world’s richest country.”

The senator slammed his fist on the table and looked around at his children, who sat stunned at their father’s outburst. “Do you know how lucky you are?” Kennedy asked them. “Do you know how lucky you are? You have a great responsibility. Do something for these children. Do something for our country.”

In Clarksdale, Kennedy had stood atop a car, vowing he would not forget the people of the Mississippi Delta. And he did not. He moved quickly to make differences where he could, including getting meals to the struggling families. He called wealthy friends and charity organizations, soliciting help. Within hours of Kennedy’s visit, food showed up at his grandparents’ house, Dillard recalled. Not much later, after images of Kennedy’s visit had aired on national television, the city of Cleveland suddenly decided to pave the roads in his neighborhood and throughout the poor black section of town. “I think they were probably shamed or something,” Dillard said.

The morning after he arrived back in Washington, Kennedy and [Pennsylvania Senator Joseph S.] Clark began lobbying the Agriculture Department to get additional food aid into the Delta — a push that federal officials initially resisted. Among other things, he successfully argued for changes in the food stamp program, which was then operating as a pilot program. Under the old policy, individuals had been required to buy food stamps, but Kennedy successfully lobbied to expand the program to allow families with no income to qualify for assistance.

The senator petitioned private groups for help. The Field Foundation sent doctors to investigate medical conditions in the Delta and confirmed reports of malnourishment. Meanwhile, the Senate held fiery hearings on the plight of the Delta. Embarrassed by the revelations about the struggles of poor blacks in his state, Sen. John Stennis, who had initially suggested that Kennedy had exaggerated his interactions in the Delta, set up a $10 million emergency fund for food and medical help for impoverished residents in his state.

Eventually, the federal government would dramatically expand its aid programs into the region, including offering school lunches. But Kennedy saw the need for more transformative change. He didn’t believe the solution to the Delta’s problems could be solved by government alone. As he had in Brooklyn, he pressed for community partnerships and incentives that would help attract skilled jobs to the region, offering residents hope and opportunity. But those efforts ended with his death a little over a year later (Bailey 5-8).

Works Cited:

Baldes, Tricia, Gould, Katie, and Marien, Dr. Joanne. “Poverty.” RFK Legacy Education Project. Web. https://rfklegacycurriculum.wordpress.com/poverty/

Bailey, Holly. “Hunger 'Hurt So Bad': How Robert Kennedy Learned about Poverty from a Boy in the Delta.” Yahoo! May 30, 2018. Web. https://www.yahoo.com/news/hunger-hurt-bad-robert-kennedy-learned-poverty-boy-delta-090025735.html

De Loera-Brust, Antonio. “Infographic: Revisiting R.F.K.’s Poverty Tour.” America: The Jesuit Review. June 1, 2018. Web. https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/01/infographic-revisiting-rfks-poverty-tour

“With RFK in the Delta.” American Heritage. Volume 53, Issue 2, 2002. Web. https://www.americanheritage.com/rfk-delta