Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Kuralt

Kuralt’s sentence lands like a quiet indictment delivered in a reporter’s plain voice: he noticed what the system trained others not to see. The power is in the contrast between the banal detail - kids “hungry in the morning” - and the moral enormity behind it. Hunger isn’t framed as an abstract social problem; it’s a morning routine, as ordinary as the school bell. That choice makes deprivation feel less like a tragic exception and more like an operating condition.

The subtext is about segregation as a machine for selective reality. “Racially segregated schools in the South” isn’t just setting; it’s an explanation for how ignorance becomes plausible. Kuralt isn’t claiming his contemporaries were individually monstrous. He suggests they were insulated, socially and physically, from the consequences of poverty that ran along racial lines. “Didn’t think very much about” is a devastatingly mild phrase, the kind that lets the reader do the accusing. It implies a collective failure of attention - the most common American sin.

Context matters: Kuralt came of age in the Jim Crow South, then built a career turning everyday lives into national stories. This reads like an origin story for that sensibility. He’s pointing to the moment when witnessing became ethics: seeing hunger in your peer group turns “objective” journalism into a reckoning with what gets normalized, what gets hidden, and who is expected to carry the cost of everyone else’s comfort.