Joseph S. Clark's and Robert F. Kennedy's tour of the Mississippi Delta

Senator Joseph S. Clark's and Senator Robert F. Kennedy's tour of the Mississippi Delta occurred on April 10, 1967. At the behest of civil rights lawyer Marian Wright, Clark and Kennedy, together with two other Senators, traveled to Mississippi to investigate reports of extreme poverty and starvation. Following a field hearing, they drove from Greenville to Clarkesdale, stopping and touring impoverished communities as they went. Deeply disturbed by what they saw, the senators returned to Washington D.C. and began pushing for a series of reforms to alleviate the situation. Extensive media coverage of the event exposed the American public to real instances of malnutrition and starvation. The country was shocked and hunger became an important topic nationwide as people began looking for solutions. Efforts by the government and political action groups ultimately resulted in the problem being largely reduced by the 1970s.

In March 1967, the United States Senate Committee on Labor's Subcommittee on Poverty held a series of hearings, as part of the ongoing "War on Poverty." One of the testifying witnesses was Marian Wright, a 27 year-old Yale Law School graduate working with the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund in Mississippi. She told the subcommittee that increased mechanization and requirements that cotton fields lie fallow under federal subsidy stipulations had put thousands of black sharecroppers out of work in the Mississippi Delta. In addition to this, two-parent families were ineligible for many welfare benefits, and most counties in Mississippi had switched welfare programs from one that distributed surplus food to an alternative that required a monthly purchase of food stamps. With little to no income, most households could not produce the necessary funds. As a result, Wright argued, Mississippians were "starving. They're starving, and those who can get the bus fare to go north are trying to go north... I wish that [the senators] would have a chance to go and just look at the empty cupboards in the Delta and the number of people who are going around and begging just to feed their children."

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