As special assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy from 1961–64, played a key role in the desegregation of the Prince Edward County, Va., school system, an action which expanded the scope of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Vanden Heuvel was appointed ambassador to the United Nations' European Offices in 1977, and became U. S. deputy representative to the United Nations in New York in 1979. His current public service includes the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, the Council on Foreign Relations, International League for Human Rights and the Institute for Democracy Studies.

"Kennedy believed that poverty was at the basic core of America's problems," vanden Heuvel told the teachers working on the lesson plans for grades 4, 8 and 11.

"One of his favorite words was 'unacceptable.' And so this poverty became 'unacceptable.' He used his public and political power to address that problem for the rest of his career."

-- Kara Smith

John Siegenthaler, retired newspaper editor, publisher and renowned reporter on the Civil Rights Movement, left journalism briefly in the early 1960s to serve in the U.S. Justice Department as administrative assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

He served as chief negotiator with the governor of Alabama during the Freedom Rides. While attempting to aid safe passage for the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Siegenthaler was attacked by Klansmen and hospitalized.

Seigenthaler served for 43 years as an award-winning investigative reporter for The Tennessean, Nashville's morning newspaper. At his retirement, he was editor and publisher. In 1982, Seigenthaler became founding editorial director of USA Today and retired in 1991.

Seigenthaler, now in his 80s, suggested RFK would have pushed the media to more fully address the intersection between race and poverty. "I believe if he'd been alive during these last 40 years we would've not been allowed to forget that intersection and it wouldn't have taken a hurricane blowing a roof off a building in New Orleans to expose to the media the brutality of that intersection."

-- Sylvia Saunders

Peter Edelman was an idealistic civil rights advocate just a few years out of Harvard Law School when he went to work for Robert F. Kennedy's 1964 Senate campaign.

For four years, Edelman was at RFK's side on a "journey of discovery" into poverty and a nation in racial tumult. He witnessed the "riveting scene" when Kennedy first met Cesar Chavez, the farmworkers organizer, in a parking lot in California. He traveled with Kennedy to the Mississippi Delta, investigating hunger and malnutrition that existed in much of the rural south at the time. Edelman, who teaches constitutional, poverty and public interest law at Georgetown University Law Center, is author of Searching for America's Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope. In a telephone interview over the summer, Edelman shared his memories of several remarkable visits he made with RFK to America's poor and disenfranchised.

"We met people who were suffering horribly, where the children had bloated bellies and something you couldn't believe could exist in the United States. They had sores on their legs that wouldn't heal ... It became a national story. These children were on CBS news that night and it had a powerful effect in the country. Kennedy was very deeply moved by what he had seen and went home shaken. He told his own children the story -- his older ones remember it vividly. 'We just have to help them' he said."

-- Sylvia Saunders