'Still Hungry in America': A Return to Mississippi [audio 13min]

If you are of a certain age, you may well remember your parents urging you to eat all the food on your plate with the following admonishment:"Don't you know there are starving children in Africa or somewhere in the world?" A book proved the point: Still Hungry in America. In the spirit of Walker Evans' Depression-era photographs, it chronicled poverty in the American South during the 1960s, a time when the mass mechanization of farming had pushing thousands of sharecroppers out of work. The book -- with photographs by Al Clayton and text by the eminent psychiatrist Robert Coles -- challenged the notion that the United States was a land of plenty, with its grim portrait of malnourished children and families crowded in tarpaper shacks. Are people still hungry in America? What happened in the places where those photographs were taken? To find out, we had to go back to where this story begins, back to the spring of 1967, when fierce debate was under way in the Senate over funding for anti-poverty programs. Michele Norris reports. ~Website offers photo galleries, bonus interview.