
The Mississippi Delta’s state of poverty and health insecurity will be viewed and assessed Wednesday by Marian Wright Edelman and a host of others, following the footsteps of Robert F. Kennedy 50 years ago.
In 1967, Edelman, the founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, along with then-U.S. Sen. Kennedy and a group of other officials, including physicians and journalists, toured the Delta to evaluate the devastating conditions of its residents.
In a recent Op-Ed, Edelman wrote about the plague of “poverty, hunger and hopelessness in rich America.” She described a hostility against black citizens, displaced sharecroppers (many of whom were illiterate with no skills or income), and free federal food sources that were many of the citizen’s only food choice.
Fifty years later, the conditions of the Delta haven’t improved much according to journalists who accompanied Edelman and Kennedy on the tour.
“I don’t think there’s much of the leadership in the governor’s office who give a damn about the Delta – no indication that they do,” Curtis Wilkie said. “It looks like we’re reverting back to where we were 40 years ago.”
Wilkie, 77, is one of the journalists who went on the original tour and will accompany Edelman on this year’s journey. He’s reported across the globe and said even in comparison to other poverty stricken places around the world, “the Delta is pretty sad.” He said in many ways it’s worse today than when Kennedy visited.
Wilkie, a retired Boston Globe reporter who now teaches at the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss, said poverty definitely still exists there but he hopes the hunger doesn’t. He said he’s seen the poverty in stores boarded up with plywood, disappearing business and in the vanishing of white people.
Wilkie’s longtime friend and fellow journalist who was also on the 1967 tour, Hodding Carter, III, agrees with his thoughts on legislation. Carter teaches at the University of North Carolina and formerly was a PBS correspondent and U.S. State Department spokesman during the Iranian hostage crisis.
“Let’s be honest about it – it’s not just poverty, it’s black poverty in the state run by white people for whom doing something about the idea of black poverty is never been strong or on the high list,” Carter said.
Carter said being “in a country in the middle of retreat from many of its commitments about the idea of equity and decency” adds to the issue.
Wilkie and Carter say they hope Edelman’s visit will help to revive some outside (or national) interest in helping the region, much of which they believe was lost after Kennedy’s assassination in 1968.
“I hope that someone with the dynamism of Marian Wright Edelman could once more inspire somebody, as certainly she did with Bobby Kennedy, to start kicking some things around again as Boddy did,” Carter said.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.