Partly in reaction to this obvious problem, the new Food Stamps program was started several years ago. In theory, it looked ideal: depending on their incomes, families could get food stamps worth up to $100 for as $3 or $4. The stamps could then be used in grocery stores to buy what the family wanted, freeing them from the limitations of a commodities diet.

When the Food Stamps program began, counties were given the option of choosing between it and Surplus Commodities. Most Alabama counties chose Food Stamps. But that wasn't good; because whatever its drawbacks, the Surplus Commodities plan had one indisputable advantage for poor families--it was free. No matter how little money the family had, it could always count on getting some food.

It didn't work that way with food stamps. Three dollars isn't much, but many families were unable to come up with those three dollars every month. White county administrators took careful note of the fact that the number of families receiving Food Stamps was only about a third of the number that had lined up for Commodities. And the white administrators knew that it wasn't because the other two-thirds didn't need help anymore.

And so the hunger continues. There have been sporadic efforts to solve it--the most recent by the Southern Rural Research Project (SRRP). SRRP workers, working from their headquarters in the black section of Selma, Ala., spent the summer of 1967 making a quantitative survey of just how many people were hungry, why they were hungry, and what could be done about it. Their work led to the production of several reports and to the CBS television special 'Hunger In America."

This summer, SRRP undertook a more direct assault at the program. Workers in the Black Belt counties spent all day, every day, travelling through the rural "niggertowns" finding people who had been denied the Food Stamps and welfare they were entitled to, by discriminatory white officials. Constantly aware that their work had to continue beyond the summer that the Northern students working for SRRP could spend in Alabama, SRRP tried to build local welfare rights organizations to carry on the fight against the white officials.

Raw Hamburger

But welfare rights is obviously a stop-gap approach, and SRRP director Don Jelinek was trying for a frontal attack on the welfare and food systems. His aim was to change programs like Commodities and Food Stamps into realistic plans based on the rural families' needs, and not on the needs of the Agriculture Department.

Jelinek based his attack on the technique that has so often been successful in the South--mobilization of Northern sentiment. After the CBS special, SRRP received 20,000 pounds of raw hamburger from a Northern donor. The hamburger itself might be of some help--it could give perhaps a tenth of the poor families one wholesome meal. But it would obviously be only a token effort, unless SRRP could exploit it to change the national programs.

After SRRP workers had spent two days in a refrigerator truck packing the beef into one-pound sacks, they drove off to give it to poor families. But their major purpose was to be arrested: Jelinek had a dream of making white Northern families ask themselves, "Why do they have to give out more food to people who already are getting help?" If the SRRP workers could only be arrested--for handling food without a license, for trespassing, for just about anything--Jelinek thought that the pitiful absurdity of the arrests would change Northern minds.

Unfortunately, Southern police have goten shrewder since the old days of marches in Selma and Birmingham. Police chiefs have learned that brutality, arrests, tear gas and fire hoses offer at best a temporary solution, because there is no way for the Old South to hold out against the Northern press and its hated film clips of marchers being gassed. The police knew that they could beat SRRP by leaving it alone; SRRP was beaten. The 20,000 pounds didn't last long, and without national press coverage, SRRP returned to its old local tactics.

Poverty is only a part of the black misery in the South, but it is--right now--the most important part. Some of the other phases of discrimniation--the black schools that keep churning out under-educated children, the employers who won't hire Negroes--contribute to the poverty, and other parts--segregated night clubs, "No Niggers" signs at YMCA's--almost seem superfluous compared to the poverty. As Silas Miller said, "It wouldn't be so bad if we just wasn't all the time poor.