Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "marian-wright"
Civil Rights Events -- Grenada County Freedom Movement -- Recollections
From 1963-1967 Bruce Hartford was a full-time civil rights worker for the Congress of Racial Equality and then on the Alabama and Mississippi field staff of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). After attending UCLA and San Francisco State he became a freelance journalist covering military and political affairs in Asia during the Vietnam War. For 30 years starting in 1980 he worked as a technical writer for Silicon Valley software firms. He was a founding member and officer of the National Writers Union (NWU). Today he is webspinner for the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website (http://www.crmvet.org) and continues to be active in social justice causes (Bruce 1).
Interviewed by Shiela Michaels of Oral History in February 2002, Bruce Hartford recalled the following:
I was in Grenada from the summer of '66 until the spring of '67. And the Grenada movement was amazing. In many ways it was equal to Selma in terms of the popular support. Didn't get the publicity, but we did things in Grenada that just —
We had marches every day. Sometimes day, sometimes night marches. And the Klan would mobilize mobs against us. And we would be doing these marches at night. Very dangerous.
…
Grenada became so intense at times that when SCLC field staff who had led demonstrations in places like St. Augustine — which was also very heavy — came to Grenada, they were taken aback. One guy — I won't call his name — the first demonstration he was assigned to lead in Grenada he saw the mob and he turned us around. He didn't know what we were used to facing. He didn't think we could — I mean, he was right from his point of view. I'm not criticizing him. He made the call to protect the people. Later, everyone lit into him because to us it was just the ordinary mob. We were used to it. No big deal. After that he led marches into the teeth of it. [laughing].
…
I'm not philosophically nonviolent. But you know, I'm definitely down with the tactic. I saw us do nonviolent things in Grenada that to this day are just unbelievable to me. Every night, we had these marches of two or three hundred people circling the square. On several occasions there were periods of three or four nights in a row when violence against the Movement would peak, and surrounding us would be mobs of 500 or more Klansmen. These weren't your typical spur-of-the-moment pick-up mobs, they had been mobilized by the KKK from all over the state to come to Grenada to do business. Some of the time — not always — we could literally hold them off by the quality of our singing. We could create a psychic wall that most of the time they could not breach, even though they wanted to. And on those times when they did attack, our nonviolent response minimized their injuries to us.
…
Another time, I was walking one day towards Bellflower Church which was our headquarters. A pickup truck pulls alongside me. A guy leaps out and just starts to beat the crap out of me. So of course I drop down on the ground, curl up, like we were trained to do. He knocked my glasses off. Now I had special industrial glasses, the kind somebody working welding or a machinist uses — unbreakable. And the guy's kid, a boy, I don't know maybe 10, 12, something like that, he starts jumping up and down on the glasses. He yells, "Daddy, Daddy, they won't break! They won't break!" So eventually they both got tired and walked off, and I wasn't hurt because of the nonviolent training.
…
So the first day of school, I think we screwed up. For some reason we didn't really anticipate serious trouble. We sure should have though. So we're in Bellflower Baptist Church, and this TV reporter comes running in — national network TV. I won't call his name, but he was major known. He covered the South for ABC, or NBC, or CBS. He's totally freaked. His face is beat up, his shirt is torn. He runs to the pay phone, and he dials — I guess his boss or someone — and he's shrieking. He's not going to leave the church! They're trying to kill him! Call the Govenor, turn out the National Guard!
And then suddenly the little children are coming in. Screaming. Bloody. Elementary school kids. Been beaten the shit out of —
…
Anyway, that first day, Joan Baez, the singer, was in Grenada. She was heavy into nonviolence then. And she was with nonviolent teachers, Ira and Sandy Sandperl. They had some sort Non-Violent Institute or something, and they were in town to help. So that day, Joan Baez, she said she was going to go down to the school and chain herself to the flagpole as a protest. And we had a hell of a time arguing her out of that, because we were certain she would have been killed.
But I'll say this for her, she stayed and helped for weeks and was with SCLC in other places too — it wasn't just a photo-op for her. We used to have a simple test for who was part of the Movement and who wasn't. It wasn't an ideology test, or a test of rhetoric and jargon. If you showed up and put your body on the line, you were part of the Movement, and it didn't matter what your political beliefs were, and by that test Joan Baez was a Movement sister.
…
One night, Hosea Williams from SCLC was leading the mass meeting in Bellflower and it was packed. Standing room only. Somebody comes pushing inside, "The cops have the church surrounded, and they just arrested so- and-so." (I don't remember who.) So we scout it out, and the cops are out there all right, and anyone who leaves the church, they're being arrested. Later we found out they had a bunch of warrants, and people for whom they didn't have a warrant, they let go. But we didn't know that then.
Hosea said, "Okay, everybody line up at every door and every window -- back door, front door, all the windows. At a given signal, everyone leave at the same time so that they can't catch all of us." Which was a good plan.
So we did that. The signal was given, and we all run out. Of course, the plan was good for most folk, but not for me and the other two white civil rights workers because we stood out in the crowd, so to speak. I got maybe 20 yards before they grabbed me. They took us to the jail, roughed us up a bit, nothing really serious — you know, the normal. And so we're in jail.
…
Well, Grenada went up and down about four times, in terms of mass activity, and eventually, like all of the mass movements, people got wore out. But we did get a lot of people registered. Towards the end I was trying to form a welfare rights group that would last, but it didn't. … Late '66, early '67. We also tried to form an ASCS group, to protest the agriculture, the crop subsidy issue. … Anyway by then I was burned out. I was just like totally fried. … You know, my stomach was in knots. I couldn't eat, I was down to 120 pounds. I'm now 215. I haven't grown any taller. I've just grown taller from side to side, as Yenta put it in Fiddler on the Roof.
So I left the South in Feburary of '67. I went up to New York to work for Bevel on the Spring Mobilization Against the War, the first big mass mobilization against Vietnam, in New York, a march to the United Nations. The "Spring Mobe" it was called. So I signed on as staff for them, and I was on the Spring Mobe staff from around April of '67 until September when — under pressure from my parents — I went back to school, to San Francisco State (Interview 36-40)
Grenada Today
Today when you drive the back roads of Grenada County today, almost all the old sharecropper shacks are gone, burned or bulldozed down. Grenada's Black neighborhoods are now filled with empty lots where once impoverished rental dwellings were jam-packed side by side on muddy lots. The narrow Union Street block where Chat & Chew used to do business and voter rallies were squeezed into the narrow street by slum shacks is now open and empty. And with commercial trade now drawn away to outlying strip malls and a giant Walmart center, "downtown" Grenada around the square has fallen on hard economic times.
In the years after 1966, Afro-American voter registration and turnout rose steadily. But with many Blacks economically driven out of the city, county, and state, white voters managed to maintain and increase their numeric superiority. Nevertheless, in 2018 two of the five county supervisors in Grenada were Black as were four of the seven city council members. Now that they have a voice in civic government, their streets are paved and many have sidewalks. There are Black men and women working in government offices and wearing badges in patrol cars. The schools are fully integrated, though the children of the white middle and upper class attend well-financed private academies rather than desperately under-funded public schools.
Yet though legally-enforced, mandatory segregation is now a thing of the past, whites and Blacks in Grenada still live largely separate lives. The economic disparities between the races still remain as does a culture that in some ways is still seems rooted in the history of white-supremacy. But the brutally segregated Jim Crow "southern way of life" was permanently ended in Grenada Mississippi — killed by the nonviolent Afro-American Freedom Movement (Grenada 1).
A third year White & Case associate from New York, Peter Eikenberry arrived in Mississippi on the 4th of July weekend of 1966. One week later, he was assigned to work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He was asked to go from Jackson to Grenada to interview black people who had been beaten in Grenada by local police officers and members of the Mississippi State Highway Patrol. Most of the victims were merely spectators watching SCLC organizers picket the local jail to protest the arrest of others of their members. Thereafter, he was present full time in Grenada for over three weeks, including his trying of his first jury trial case.
NAACP lawyers Marian Wright and Henry Aronson were able to obtain federal injunctions mandating that the various police organizations protect the marchers from the hundreds of white Ku Klux Klan members and others who were massed at the town square adjacent to the sheriff’s office determined to stop the marchers. Eikenberry monitored compliance with the federal court’s orders.
Forty eight years later, in early July 2014,
Eikenberry returned to Grenada in the company of Reverend Jerome Robinson to interview 1966 civil rights activists. “Jerome … and I interviewed close to 20 people over four days.” The following stories contain highlights from some of the interviews.
Dianna Freelon-Foster stated that she was 14 in the summer of 1966 and was employed hoeing cotton for the summer. She said, “I put down my hoe, and I never turned back after I heard Martin Luther King. I joined the marches at night to the sheriff’s office. I felt better about us as a collective after the night marches happened – we were in a secluded world. I knew who I was. I did not need to be with white folks to survive. My father Felix Freelon was involved. His barber shop was across the street from the church where the activities were centered. My participation shaped my life as to what I was to become. In September, I was a member of the ninth grade class who integrated the Grenada high school. I and the other black students were constantly failed by the white principal and teachers.
“After the ninth grade was integrated, I did not want to be there, but I had committed to do it, so I wanted to ‘see it through.’ Some of the teachers were horrible including one who became superintendent of schools. Once, we walked out of school because of harsh treatment; it was almost unbearable. Parents led the walk out and we went to court the same day. We received so many demerits that we often failed. I went to summer school to pass my senior year – I was one of maybe two black students that graduated in their right year.
…
“People told me that no one wanted to go to Grenada – it was too ‘tough a nut to crack.’ One of our activists, Annie Lee Stewart, died from injuries she received on what we called Bloody Sunday in Grenada. On one occasion the police used tear gas on the people on their way back from the march downtown. At that time, another woman had a heart attack and died after the tear gas attack. I am a believer of non-violence after protesting in 1966-67, but it was very hard to believe in it when we were protesting.”
In 1966, Toll Stewart was 32 years old and employed by the Baily Brothers Laundry together with over 30 other black employees. His employer “was a racist but did not threaten [his] job when [he] marched.” “When demonstrators were arrested in Grenada, they were just loaded on cattle trucks and carted away to the penitentiary. I made sure that my entire squad of 20 in the march was comprised of my fellow workers at Baily Brothers – so if they got arrested we would all have to be released to avoid closing the laundry down.” (The federal judge had mandated the marchers to be in squads of 20, marching two by two.)
“My mother, Annie Stewart, my sister, and I fed the SCLC organizers every day: pork chops, chicken, and steak – more food than they had seen elsewhere. Annie opened her house for those who wished to sleep there every night. I just realized recently that the Lord provided the food because we did not have the resources to buy it. We bought the food in Greenwood, 30 miles away, because the black people in Grenada were boycotting the white merchants.
“In the summer of ’66 – early on in the first days of the protests – there were often violent events. Once there was a rally across from my mother’s home. The Police Chief, Pat Ray, told people to disperse, and Annie invited the people at the rally onto her property. The police chief said, ‘I told you people to disperse,’ and Annie said, ‘I told them not to, they’re on my land, I pay the taxes.’ The captain cocked his shotgun and Annie said, ‘You are a yellow dog if you do not shoot me.’ I was standing inside the front door in the dark with my shotgun pointed at the chief’s head. If the chief had brought his gun down to shoot, I would have killed him. But the chief turned and walked away.
“Everything became better after the 1966-67 civil rights uprising because before, the police could do anything to you they wished, black people did not have the vote, the schools were not integrated, and the economy was worse. I have never missed a vote in the almost 50 years since the time I received it.”
Gloria James Lottie Williams was 21 in July 1966 and had completed three years of study at Valley College. “I was trained as a typist in high school and was hoping for a secretarial position at the hosiery mill where I worked that summer in Grenada. Rather, they employed me as a folder. That summer, I marched with the demonstrators every night to the courthouse and one morning I was called in by my boss to ask if I had marched. I told my boss that I had and I was told not to do that again. I, however, did continue to march and I was not fired or ever even questioned again.”
“My mother, Lottie Williams, was badly beaten on ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Lottie worked for the owners of the Dalton’s Department Store in Grenada and was fired as a household maid for having marched with the demonstrators. After the marches in July 1966, we all went to the Bell Flower Church for hymn singing, reporters’ interviews, etc. At some point, Stokely Carmichael came to Bell Flower, where he was interviewed in a room behind the sanctuary by 10 or 12 reporters but he was not permitted to take his ‘Black Power’ message to the assembled throng in the main body of the church. The Bell Flower Church had a very dynamic young pastor at the time, S.T Cunningham (27 years of age), which is the reason that Bell Flower became the center for the movement’s activities in 1966 and 1967.”
Jerome Robinson and Eikenberry interviewed Eva Grace Lemon at the Senior Center in Grenada where she was the receptionist/secretary. She was one of the black children who integrated the first grade of a Grenada elementary school in 1966 – shown in a historic photograph with Martin Luther King. She said she was “very scared.” She said, “Dr. King said, ‘come on, little girl, we are going to go inside now.’ I and the other black children were repeatedly failed in our courses for the first few years and after the first year, all of the black children in the school had black teachers and the white children had white teachers.” (Eikenberry 1-10).
In determining to return to Grenada to interview activists from 1966, the biggest question I had was whether all the organizers, lawyers, marchers, court orders, etc., had made a difference in the lives of the citizens of Grenada, especially in the lives of those who participated. Would they say, on the other hand, that they had been deserted when we collectively left little more than a year later? The answer was almost universal that the town was better off, that things had changed for the better, and just about all the people interviewed felt that their lives had been changed for the better in a very substantial way. This was true of Dianna Freelon-Foster, Toll Stewart, and Gloria Williams (Eikenberry 11).
Works cited:
“Bruce Hartford – Webspinner: Civil Rights Movement Veterans.” Huffpost. Web. https://www.huffpost.com/author/bruce...
Eikenberry, Pete. “Return to Granada.” Federal Bar Council Quarterly. March/April, May 2016. Web. http://federalbarcouncilquarterly.org...
“Grenada Today.” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...
“Oral History/Interview” Conducted by Sheila Michaels. Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. February 2002. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/bruce1.htm
Interviewed by Shiela Michaels of Oral History in February 2002, Bruce Hartford recalled the following:
I was in Grenada from the summer of '66 until the spring of '67. And the Grenada movement was amazing. In many ways it was equal to Selma in terms of the popular support. Didn't get the publicity, but we did things in Grenada that just —
We had marches every day. Sometimes day, sometimes night marches. And the Klan would mobilize mobs against us. And we would be doing these marches at night. Very dangerous.
…
Grenada became so intense at times that when SCLC field staff who had led demonstrations in places like St. Augustine — which was also very heavy — came to Grenada, they were taken aback. One guy — I won't call his name — the first demonstration he was assigned to lead in Grenada he saw the mob and he turned us around. He didn't know what we were used to facing. He didn't think we could — I mean, he was right from his point of view. I'm not criticizing him. He made the call to protect the people. Later, everyone lit into him because to us it was just the ordinary mob. We were used to it. No big deal. After that he led marches into the teeth of it. [laughing].
…
I'm not philosophically nonviolent. But you know, I'm definitely down with the tactic. I saw us do nonviolent things in Grenada that to this day are just unbelievable to me. Every night, we had these marches of two or three hundred people circling the square. On several occasions there were periods of three or four nights in a row when violence against the Movement would peak, and surrounding us would be mobs of 500 or more Klansmen. These weren't your typical spur-of-the-moment pick-up mobs, they had been mobilized by the KKK from all over the state to come to Grenada to do business. Some of the time — not always — we could literally hold them off by the quality of our singing. We could create a psychic wall that most of the time they could not breach, even though they wanted to. And on those times when they did attack, our nonviolent response minimized their injuries to us.
…
Another time, I was walking one day towards Bellflower Church which was our headquarters. A pickup truck pulls alongside me. A guy leaps out and just starts to beat the crap out of me. So of course I drop down on the ground, curl up, like we were trained to do. He knocked my glasses off. Now I had special industrial glasses, the kind somebody working welding or a machinist uses — unbreakable. And the guy's kid, a boy, I don't know maybe 10, 12, something like that, he starts jumping up and down on the glasses. He yells, "Daddy, Daddy, they won't break! They won't break!" So eventually they both got tired and walked off, and I wasn't hurt because of the nonviolent training.
…
So the first day of school, I think we screwed up. For some reason we didn't really anticipate serious trouble. We sure should have though. So we're in Bellflower Baptist Church, and this TV reporter comes running in — national network TV. I won't call his name, but he was major known. He covered the South for ABC, or NBC, or CBS. He's totally freaked. His face is beat up, his shirt is torn. He runs to the pay phone, and he dials — I guess his boss or someone — and he's shrieking. He's not going to leave the church! They're trying to kill him! Call the Govenor, turn out the National Guard!
And then suddenly the little children are coming in. Screaming. Bloody. Elementary school kids. Been beaten the shit out of —
…
Anyway, that first day, Joan Baez, the singer, was in Grenada. She was heavy into nonviolence then. And she was with nonviolent teachers, Ira and Sandy Sandperl. They had some sort Non-Violent Institute or something, and they were in town to help. So that day, Joan Baez, she said she was going to go down to the school and chain herself to the flagpole as a protest. And we had a hell of a time arguing her out of that, because we were certain she would have been killed.
But I'll say this for her, she stayed and helped for weeks and was with SCLC in other places too — it wasn't just a photo-op for her. We used to have a simple test for who was part of the Movement and who wasn't. It wasn't an ideology test, or a test of rhetoric and jargon. If you showed up and put your body on the line, you were part of the Movement, and it didn't matter what your political beliefs were, and by that test Joan Baez was a Movement sister.
…
One night, Hosea Williams from SCLC was leading the mass meeting in Bellflower and it was packed. Standing room only. Somebody comes pushing inside, "The cops have the church surrounded, and they just arrested so- and-so." (I don't remember who.) So we scout it out, and the cops are out there all right, and anyone who leaves the church, they're being arrested. Later we found out they had a bunch of warrants, and people for whom they didn't have a warrant, they let go. But we didn't know that then.
Hosea said, "Okay, everybody line up at every door and every window -- back door, front door, all the windows. At a given signal, everyone leave at the same time so that they can't catch all of us." Which was a good plan.
So we did that. The signal was given, and we all run out. Of course, the plan was good for most folk, but not for me and the other two white civil rights workers because we stood out in the crowd, so to speak. I got maybe 20 yards before they grabbed me. They took us to the jail, roughed us up a bit, nothing really serious — you know, the normal. And so we're in jail.
…
Well, Grenada went up and down about four times, in terms of mass activity, and eventually, like all of the mass movements, people got wore out. But we did get a lot of people registered. Towards the end I was trying to form a welfare rights group that would last, but it didn't. … Late '66, early '67. We also tried to form an ASCS group, to protest the agriculture, the crop subsidy issue. … Anyway by then I was burned out. I was just like totally fried. … You know, my stomach was in knots. I couldn't eat, I was down to 120 pounds. I'm now 215. I haven't grown any taller. I've just grown taller from side to side, as Yenta put it in Fiddler on the Roof.
So I left the South in Feburary of '67. I went up to New York to work for Bevel on the Spring Mobilization Against the War, the first big mass mobilization against Vietnam, in New York, a march to the United Nations. The "Spring Mobe" it was called. So I signed on as staff for them, and I was on the Spring Mobe staff from around April of '67 until September when — under pressure from my parents — I went back to school, to San Francisco State (Interview 36-40)
Grenada Today
Today when you drive the back roads of Grenada County today, almost all the old sharecropper shacks are gone, burned or bulldozed down. Grenada's Black neighborhoods are now filled with empty lots where once impoverished rental dwellings were jam-packed side by side on muddy lots. The narrow Union Street block where Chat & Chew used to do business and voter rallies were squeezed into the narrow street by slum shacks is now open and empty. And with commercial trade now drawn away to outlying strip malls and a giant Walmart center, "downtown" Grenada around the square has fallen on hard economic times.
In the years after 1966, Afro-American voter registration and turnout rose steadily. But with many Blacks economically driven out of the city, county, and state, white voters managed to maintain and increase their numeric superiority. Nevertheless, in 2018 two of the five county supervisors in Grenada were Black as were four of the seven city council members. Now that they have a voice in civic government, their streets are paved and many have sidewalks. There are Black men and women working in government offices and wearing badges in patrol cars. The schools are fully integrated, though the children of the white middle and upper class attend well-financed private academies rather than desperately under-funded public schools.
Yet though legally-enforced, mandatory segregation is now a thing of the past, whites and Blacks in Grenada still live largely separate lives. The economic disparities between the races still remain as does a culture that in some ways is still seems rooted in the history of white-supremacy. But the brutally segregated Jim Crow "southern way of life" was permanently ended in Grenada Mississippi — killed by the nonviolent Afro-American Freedom Movement (Grenada 1).
A third year White & Case associate from New York, Peter Eikenberry arrived in Mississippi on the 4th of July weekend of 1966. One week later, he was assigned to work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He was asked to go from Jackson to Grenada to interview black people who had been beaten in Grenada by local police officers and members of the Mississippi State Highway Patrol. Most of the victims were merely spectators watching SCLC organizers picket the local jail to protest the arrest of others of their members. Thereafter, he was present full time in Grenada for over three weeks, including his trying of his first jury trial case.
NAACP lawyers Marian Wright and Henry Aronson were able to obtain federal injunctions mandating that the various police organizations protect the marchers from the hundreds of white Ku Klux Klan members and others who were massed at the town square adjacent to the sheriff’s office determined to stop the marchers. Eikenberry monitored compliance with the federal court’s orders.
Forty eight years later, in early July 2014,
Eikenberry returned to Grenada in the company of Reverend Jerome Robinson to interview 1966 civil rights activists. “Jerome … and I interviewed close to 20 people over four days.” The following stories contain highlights from some of the interviews.
Dianna Freelon-Foster stated that she was 14 in the summer of 1966 and was employed hoeing cotton for the summer. She said, “I put down my hoe, and I never turned back after I heard Martin Luther King. I joined the marches at night to the sheriff’s office. I felt better about us as a collective after the night marches happened – we were in a secluded world. I knew who I was. I did not need to be with white folks to survive. My father Felix Freelon was involved. His barber shop was across the street from the church where the activities were centered. My participation shaped my life as to what I was to become. In September, I was a member of the ninth grade class who integrated the Grenada high school. I and the other black students were constantly failed by the white principal and teachers.
“After the ninth grade was integrated, I did not want to be there, but I had committed to do it, so I wanted to ‘see it through.’ Some of the teachers were horrible including one who became superintendent of schools. Once, we walked out of school because of harsh treatment; it was almost unbearable. Parents led the walk out and we went to court the same day. We received so many demerits that we often failed. I went to summer school to pass my senior year – I was one of maybe two black students that graduated in their right year.
…
“People told me that no one wanted to go to Grenada – it was too ‘tough a nut to crack.’ One of our activists, Annie Lee Stewart, died from injuries she received on what we called Bloody Sunday in Grenada. On one occasion the police used tear gas on the people on their way back from the march downtown. At that time, another woman had a heart attack and died after the tear gas attack. I am a believer of non-violence after protesting in 1966-67, but it was very hard to believe in it when we were protesting.”
In 1966, Toll Stewart was 32 years old and employed by the Baily Brothers Laundry together with over 30 other black employees. His employer “was a racist but did not threaten [his] job when [he] marched.” “When demonstrators were arrested in Grenada, they were just loaded on cattle trucks and carted away to the penitentiary. I made sure that my entire squad of 20 in the march was comprised of my fellow workers at Baily Brothers – so if they got arrested we would all have to be released to avoid closing the laundry down.” (The federal judge had mandated the marchers to be in squads of 20, marching two by two.)
“My mother, Annie Stewart, my sister, and I fed the SCLC organizers every day: pork chops, chicken, and steak – more food than they had seen elsewhere. Annie opened her house for those who wished to sleep there every night. I just realized recently that the Lord provided the food because we did not have the resources to buy it. We bought the food in Greenwood, 30 miles away, because the black people in Grenada were boycotting the white merchants.
“In the summer of ’66 – early on in the first days of the protests – there were often violent events. Once there was a rally across from my mother’s home. The Police Chief, Pat Ray, told people to disperse, and Annie invited the people at the rally onto her property. The police chief said, ‘I told you people to disperse,’ and Annie said, ‘I told them not to, they’re on my land, I pay the taxes.’ The captain cocked his shotgun and Annie said, ‘You are a yellow dog if you do not shoot me.’ I was standing inside the front door in the dark with my shotgun pointed at the chief’s head. If the chief had brought his gun down to shoot, I would have killed him. But the chief turned and walked away.
“Everything became better after the 1966-67 civil rights uprising because before, the police could do anything to you they wished, black people did not have the vote, the schools were not integrated, and the economy was worse. I have never missed a vote in the almost 50 years since the time I received it.”
Gloria James Lottie Williams was 21 in July 1966 and had completed three years of study at Valley College. “I was trained as a typist in high school and was hoping for a secretarial position at the hosiery mill where I worked that summer in Grenada. Rather, they employed me as a folder. That summer, I marched with the demonstrators every night to the courthouse and one morning I was called in by my boss to ask if I had marched. I told my boss that I had and I was told not to do that again. I, however, did continue to march and I was not fired or ever even questioned again.”
“My mother, Lottie Williams, was badly beaten on ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Lottie worked for the owners of the Dalton’s Department Store in Grenada and was fired as a household maid for having marched with the demonstrators. After the marches in July 1966, we all went to the Bell Flower Church for hymn singing, reporters’ interviews, etc. At some point, Stokely Carmichael came to Bell Flower, where he was interviewed in a room behind the sanctuary by 10 or 12 reporters but he was not permitted to take his ‘Black Power’ message to the assembled throng in the main body of the church. The Bell Flower Church had a very dynamic young pastor at the time, S.T Cunningham (27 years of age), which is the reason that Bell Flower became the center for the movement’s activities in 1966 and 1967.”
Jerome Robinson and Eikenberry interviewed Eva Grace Lemon at the Senior Center in Grenada where she was the receptionist/secretary. She was one of the black children who integrated the first grade of a Grenada elementary school in 1966 – shown in a historic photograph with Martin Luther King. She said she was “very scared.” She said, “Dr. King said, ‘come on, little girl, we are going to go inside now.’ I and the other black children were repeatedly failed in our courses for the first few years and after the first year, all of the black children in the school had black teachers and the white children had white teachers.” (Eikenberry 1-10).
In determining to return to Grenada to interview activists from 1966, the biggest question I had was whether all the organizers, lawyers, marchers, court orders, etc., had made a difference in the lives of the citizens of Grenada, especially in the lives of those who participated. Would they say, on the other hand, that they had been deserted when we collectively left little more than a year later? The answer was almost universal that the town was better off, that things had changed for the better, and just about all the people interviewed felt that their lives had been changed for the better in a very substantial way. This was true of Dianna Freelon-Foster, Toll Stewart, and Gloria Williams (Eikenberry 11).
Works cited:
“Bruce Hartford – Webspinner: Civil Rights Movement Veterans.” Huffpost. Web. https://www.huffpost.com/author/bruce...
Eikenberry, Pete. “Return to Granada.” Federal Bar Council Quarterly. March/April, May 2016. Web. http://federalbarcouncilquarterly.org...
“Grenada Today.” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...
“Oral History/Interview” Conducted by Sheila Michaels. Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. February 2002. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/bruce1.htm
Civil Rights Events -- RFK Visits Mississippi 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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
...
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.”
…
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...
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-hur...
De Loera-Brust, Antonio. “Infographic: Revisiting R.F.K.’s Poverty Tour.” America: The Jesuit Review. June 1, 2018. Web. https://www.americamagazine.org/polit...
“With RFK in the Delta.” American Heritage. Volume 53, Issue 2, 2002. Web. https://www.americanheritage.com/rfk-...
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
...
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.”
…
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...
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-hur...
De Loera-Brust, Antonio. “Infographic: Revisiting R.F.K.’s Poverty Tour.” America: The Jesuit Review. June 1, 2018. Web. https://www.americamagazine.org/polit...
“With RFK in the Delta.” American Heritage. Volume 53, Issue 2, 2002. Web. https://www.americanheritage.com/rfk-...
