In 1967, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) traveled to Mississippi to check on the progress of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, better known as the War on Poverty. What he found, writes Peter Edelman in his book So Rich, So Poor, was “children, thousands of them, hungry to a point very near starvation.” Kennedy was “deeply moved and outraged,” Edelman writes, and made relieving hunger a top priority. These photos illustrate the lives of poor African-Americans in rural Mississippi around the time of Kennedy’s visit — images likely similar to the ones that inspired him.
