Poverty and Starvation in Mississippi

from David Robinson Orville Freeman, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, has been forced to announce new measures to provide food for millions of poor Americans. This is the result of a physicians' report published by the Southern Regional Council of Atlanta, Georgia, which said: "In child after child we saw: evidence of vitamin and mineral deficiencies; serious, untreated skin infections and ulcerations; eye and ear diseases, also unattended bone diseases secondary to poor food intake; the prevalence of bacterial and parasitic disease, as well as severe anaemia, with resulting loss of energy and ability to live a normally active life; diseases of the heart and the lungs - requiring surgery - which have gone undiagnosed and untreated; epileptic and other neurological disorders; severe kidney ailments, that in other children would warrant immediate hospitalization; and finally, in boys and girls in every county we visited, obvious evidence of severe malnutrition, We saw children afflicted with chronic diarrhoea, chronic sores, chronic leg and arm (untreated) injuries, and deformities, We saw homes without running water, without electricity, without screens, in which children drink contaminated water and live with germ-bearing mosquitoes and flies everywhere around, We saw homes with children who are lucky to eat one meal a day - and that one inadequate so far as vitamins, minerals, or protein is concerned, Their parents may be declared ineligible for commodities, ineligible for the food stamp programme, even though they have literally nothing, We saw children fed communally that is, by neighbours who give scraps of food to children whose own parents have nothing to give them. In sum, we saw children who are hungry and who are sick - children for whom hunger is a daily fact of life and sickness, in many forms, an inevitability. We do not want to quibble over words, but 'malnutrition' is not quite what we found: the boys and girls we saw were hungry - weak, in pain, sick; their lives are being shortened; they are in fact, visibly and predictably losing their health, their energy, their spirits. They are suffering from hunger and disease and directly or indirectedly they are dying from them - which is exactly what 'starvation' means," One of the physicians, Dr. Raymond Wheeler, of Charlotte, North Carolina, told a congressional sub-committee today that Mississippi was virtually a prison for poor Negroes. Those seeking help were harassed and discriminated against by state officials. "There is an unwritten but generally accepted policy by those who control the state to eliminate the Negro, either by driving him out or starving him to death."