The galvanizing effect of one politician on changing the food stamp program and encourages someone to do the same for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina
Mills, Nicolaus
IN APRIL 1967, Robert Kennedy and three other members of the Senate Subcommittee on Poverty traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to hold hearings on the problems the poor in the South were having...
...IN APRIL 1967, Robert Kennedy and three other members of the Senate Subcommittee on Poverty traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to hold hearings on the problems the poor in the South were having with a government food program that required them to purchase food stamps they could not afford...
...Kennedy got nowhere with Freeman...
...It took another hearing in Washington, this one featuring testimony on hunger in Mississippi from Robert Coles, a Harvard physician with deep roots in the civil rights movement, before the Johnson administration and the Senate's Democratic leadership felt enough pressure from the media to change their stance on what Kennedy and the Subcommittee on Poverty wanted: free food stamps for the neediest, cheaper food stamps for all the poor, and an investigation into how DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 5 COMMENTS & OPINIONS local officials distributed federal food...
...But with the Democrats a minority rather than a majority party in the House and Senate, and the Bush administration bent on lowering taxes and domestic spending to deal with a $400 billion deficit, the odds are remote that a congressional committee would travel south to take testimony from the poorest victims of Hurricane Katrina...
...But he was the member of the Subcommittee on Poverty who drew the most media coverage, and it was upon him that the burden of making hunger a visible political issue fell...
...Today, as recovery from Hurricane Katrina languishes, while the state and federal governments fingerpoint, Kennedy's actions in Mississippi offer us an important lesson about the capacity of a single politician, angry and determined, to change the way the poor are seen...
...Kennedy met hostility on this day as well...
...But the Johnson administration, by 1967 focused on the war in Vietnam and worried about inflation, was unwilling to increase its spending on the poor...
...The dark, windowless shack of the woman and her family, with its smell of mildew and urine, was overwhelming...
...Kennedy tried caressing and tickling the baby, but nothing he did could make her respond...
...She had no money to pay for food stamps, she told Senator Clark...
...She was feeding her family rice and biscuits made from leftover surplus commodities...
...NICOLAUS MILLS is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial...
...The Mississippi hearings, which were a follow-up to hearings held earlier in Washington, marked the start of a process that would change the way the nation's food stamp program was run...
...More likely is a repeat of the president's first visit to New Orleans since the new year—a rushed trip for a meeting with political and business leaders in the Garden District, far from the city's hardest-hit neighborhoods...
...If Gulf Coast relief is going to change, if in the near future mending broken lives is going to achieve the status of mending broken levees, then Louisiana and Mississippi must be put under the kind of legislative spotlight Robert Kennedy paved the way for so many years ago...
...Held in the ballroom of the Hotel Heidelberg, they drew powerful testimony about the level of hunger in Mississippi, but media reports were overshadowed by an angry attack from Mississippi Senator John Stennis on the poverty program money being spent on Head Start in Mississippi...
...These days, as a president with an unpopular war and a failed hurricane relief effort on his hands turns an indifferent eye to the suffering of the Gulf Coast poor, the parallels between 1967 and 2006 seem striking...
...A problem that the president had wanted to bypass had been made impossible to ignore...
...The hearings in Jackson turned out to be less than Kennedy hoped for...
...She kept her eyes turned downward as if in a daze...
...The real question is, who, if anyone, representing the progressive wing of today's Democratic Party, has the stomach for such a battle...
...In November, the House approved the Senate bill, and in 1968, after more delays by the Johnson administration, angry with being upstaged by Kennedy, the emergency food aid Congress had mandated at last got distributed along with authorization for a national nutrition survey among the poor...
...He had only won election from New York in 1964...
...Robert Kennedy had no significant Senate seniority in 1967...
...It is for this reason that the example of Robert Kennedy becomes all the more important to recall...
...For Kennedy and the reporters following him, it was an indelible moment...
...I've seen bad things in West Virginia, but I've never seen anything like this anywhere in the United States," Kennedy whispered...
...But what mattered most for Kennedy on his second day in Mississippi was his encounter with a mother and her six children...
...Back in Washington, Kennedy and Clark went immediately to Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman to seek emergency help for the hungry of Mississippi...
...Before he left Jackson, a bystander handed him a pamphlet with a headline that predicted, "Bobby Kennedy will be Murdered...
...Finally, in July, the Senate Subcommittee on Poverty reported out an emergency food and medical bill, which the Senate passed in ten days...
...On that day Kennedy and Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania traveled to the Mississippi Delta to see firsthand the poverty and hunger they had been hearing about...
...Kennedy was moved, but his deepest attention, as Nick Kotz, who was covering the trip for the Des Moines Register would write, went to the youngest of the children, a twoyearold baby sitting on the dirty floor...
...It was Kennedy's second day in Mississippi that changed his trip and the coverage it received...
Vol. 53 • April 2006 • No. 2
