Childhood Hunger

Bill Shore’s Letters

Letter From the Site of MLK’s Last Tears

March 1994

Dear Friend,

I recently came across an interview that Martin Luther King gave on March 25, 1968, just ten days before he was killed. He spoke about poverty in America: "I was in Marks, Mississippi the other day and I found myself weeping before I knew it. I met boys and girls by the hundreds who didn't have any shoes to wear, who didn't have any food to eat in terms of three square meals a day. I literally cried when I heard mean and woman saying that they were unable to get any food to feed their children." Although Dr. King happened to be speaking of Marks, he could have been talking about the poverty in any one of many towns across America.

Ten days later Dr. King was dead. It occurred to me that although little distinguishes Marks from any other small town in the Mississippi Delta, it looks like it was the place of Martin Luther King's last tears, tears shed more than 25 years ago, tears shed over hunger. That seemed reason enough to go. And because this season marks the 10th anniversary of Share Our Strength's founding it seemed like a good time and a good way to renew my own understanding of and commitment to the difficult work that engages us.

I called the public library in Marks and asked for information about Dr. King's last trip.

"Well you should probably talk to Miss Lucy Turner," the librarian explained. "She used to be the high school librarian and she's the one we go talk to about such things."

"Has she lived in Marks long?" I was curious.

"Well, we've all lived here all our lives," the librarian said somewhat indignantly.

"How big is Marks, anyhow?"

"We've got seventeen hundred and twenty... twenty one... twenty two...," she thought aloud, "seventeen hundred and twenty-three people."

Before I knew it I was in a rental car driving through the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. Since I was thinking about 1968 and a town of 1,723 people, I could only visualize it in black and white. But as I got closer I realized that this is 1994 and there are no more Mayberrys. There would probably be McDonald's and Blockbuster Video stores and all the rest. But I was wrong. Marks is untouched. Many of the homes could still fit right into a vintage Walker Evans photograph. Narrow shoe-box shacks, trailers and shanties. Broken down cars, pick-ups and bicycles dot the yards. The air is dusty. Dogs run loose.

I met Miss Lucy Turner in her living room on Maple Street. She said to put her down as a "Doubting Thomas."

"Watch who you give your money to. There's lots of families that when they met Dr. King they took their kids' shoes away and had them run around on the street so he'd think they were poor." The phone rang while I was sitting with her. She picked it up, listened, and then said curtly: "I know, he's sitting right here in my living room." Marks is a very small town. Miss Turner recommended some other people for me to see.

Everybody remembered Martin Luther King coming to town, but many remembered other visits. The protest march of the mule train. Or the time King attended the funeral of Mr. Phipps who meant to accompany him on the march to Selma but died en route.

I went over to the office of the newspaper, the Quitman County Democrat, and asked the editor if they kept papers going back as far as 1968.

"We sure do. But they're pretty fragile. What're you looking for anyway?"

"I'm interested in the times Martin Luther King came through town, especially March of 1968 just before he was killed."

"Well, we got the papers but you won't find nothing ‘bout that."

"Really?"

"The theory at the time was: Ignore it long enough and hopefully it will just go away. I should know. My daddy was the editor then. He bought the paper in 1937. I've been editor since he died in '72."

She did know. The front-page headline on the day after King came to town was: "Mrs. June Sneed Wins Treasure Hunt." The paper also had front page stories on the next Boy Scout meeting, the Marks Senior Class play, and even a column listing the schedule for picking up food stamps. There was not a word about Martin Luther King having been to town.

Coincidentally, on the very day I visited Marks the current paper did have a story of interest, explaining the WIC program that provides special food packages to pregnant, postpartum and breast-feeding woman, infants and children at nutritional risk. In Mississippi 103,000 moms and babies receive WIC though 125,000 are eligible. Of all Mississippi babies, 71 percent use WIC, but less than one-third of the pregnant woman in Mississippi get on the program during the first three months of pregnancy. Even worse, one in five doesn't enroll in the program until the last three months. This, despite studies that clearly demonstrate that mothers who get WIC earlier have healthier babies.

Today, Mississippi ranks 50th in child poverty rates by the American Public Health Association. It has the highest percentage of hungry people, 19.86 percent, of any state in America. Statistics available for nearby Humphries County, where Share Our Strength funds a community health advisors program as it does in Quitman Count, indicate that about one half of the country's population lives below the poverty line. The infant mortality rate is 26.4 deaths for 1,000 live births, more than twice the high state rate of 12.2 per thousand. Only 39 percent of the population has a high school degree. Less than 9 percent has a college diploma.

The poverty line here is in many ways dramatic, but it is mostly heartbreakingly ordinary, endless, almost hopelessly passed on from generation to generation. The overwhelming majority of Quitman County babies are born to teenage moms. But they have to be born somewhere else. There's not one obstetrician in all of Quitman County. By the way, there's not a single bookstore in the county either.

Down the road from Marks, in Oxford, is the home of William Faulkner, which I'd always wanted to see. It's tucked away in a beautiful, peaceful setting and I stood at the fence staring at it through the trees, thinking of that poor little town just down the highway, and so many other similarly impoverished rural towns and inner city neighborhoods across the country, and taking hope from Faulkner's own words, delivered when he'd won the Nobel Prize many years earlier: "I believe that man will not only endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

Upon this, Share Our Strength's 10th anniversary, I know Faulkner was right. So many of our supporters, organizers, volunteers and friends have shown exactly those qualities: Compassion, sacrifice, endurance, and especially soul.

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