An Important Day In The Life of Robert F. Kennedy

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson enacted his war on poverty. Three years later Robert Kennedy knelt in a crumbling shack in Mississippi, watching a toddler pick rice and beans off of a dirt floor. What Robert Kennedy saw on that trip would impact him personally and in part, drive is run for the Presidency one year later.

While Vietnam was the seminal issue of the day, poverty and its nexus with the civil rights movement, were very much on Kennedy’s mind.

Ellen Meacham takes us back to this transformative moment for RFK in Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Ellen Meacham: 

James Meredith, Civil Rights and the rise of Black Power

The recent debate and court challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reminds us of what was the once and future fragility of registering black voters in the south. Back in 1966, a year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, James Meredith, who became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi, set out on an almost solitary march from Memphis to Jackson Mississippi to register black voters.

At the end of that march, which started on June 5 1966, the civil rights movement would be forever transformed. The movement's twin goals of the dream of integration and of nonviolence, would be replaced by black power and impatience.

It's a story that's not as famous as the Selma to Montgomery march a year earlier, but its impact was everlasting and its tensions still relevant today. This is the story that Aram Goudsouzian tells in Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.

My conversation with Aram Goudsouzian: