In 1967, Senator Robert Kennedy took a tour of the Mississippi Delta to assess how President Lyndon Johnson's then-three-year-old War on Poverty was working. Our two-part series (read part 1 and 2) about race, poverty and income inequality in Cleveland, Mississippi, focused on what Kennedy saw and what the Delta is now like 50 years later. But for two people, Kennedy's tour wasn't just a historical moment, it was a serendipitous one. Marian Wright was a civil rights activist and also the first African American woman to pass the Mississippi bar and become a lawyer in the state. She helped launch Head Start, an initiative that helps provide financial, educational and health services to low-income families, and through her work got a first-hand view of just how bad poverty was in the deep South. She was the one who encouraged Senator Kennedy to visit the Delta, serving as his tour guide when he came.Alongside Kennedy on the trip was one of his closest aides, a young lawyer by the name of Peter Edelman. Peter had been tasked with coordinating the trip for his boss, and in the process met Marian. "I had an image of what a Kennedy assistant would be like, but he turned out to be a nice man," Wright — now Mrs. Marian Wright Edelman — said of their first encounter. "We were talking about poverty and we were talking about the serious malnutrition that we saw, but the result of meeting there was that here we are today," Mr. Edelman said. The couple has been married for 40 years and they have become two of the most prominent advocates in the country campaigning to end poverty. Marian Wright Edelman started the Children's Defense Fund in 1973, and Peter Edelman went on to work in law and politics, most prominently for President Bill Clinton in the Department of Health and Human Service. Mr. Edelman resigned over Clinton's passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, known more broadly as welfare reform.He said we would have twice as ma...