Free Breakfast For Children: Difference between revisions

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Though the [[USDA]] had piloted free breakfast efforts since the mid 1960s, the program only took off in the early 1970s—right around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975, the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it helps feed over 14.57 million children before school—and without the radical actions of the Black Panthers, it may never have happened.<ref>https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party</ref></blockquote>
Though the [[USDA]] had piloted free breakfast efforts since the mid 1960s, the program only took off in the early 1970s—right around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975, the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it helps feed over 14.57 million children before school—and without the radical actions of the Black Panthers, it may never have happened.<ref>https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party</ref></blockquote>


As documented by Garrett Broad in More than Just Food:
In response:
<blockquote>The BPP saw such actions as an unfair co-option on the part of establishment actors who looked to minimize the BPP’s importance and to move the control of community program development and management away from low-income Black communities themselves. Such co-option represented another factor that led to the slow demise of the BPP’s influence in communities across the nation.<ref>Garrett Broad, "More than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change"</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>The BPP saw such actions as an unfair co-option on the part of establishment actors who looked to minimize the BPP’s importance and to move the control of community program development and management away from low-income Black communities themselves. Such co-option represented another factor that led to the slow demise of the BPP’s influence in communities across the nation.<ref>Garrett Broad, "More than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change"</ref></blockquote>


Revision as of 09:40, 6 January 2023

Free Breakfast Program flyer, 1968

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for self-defense in 1966 in Oakland, California. The organization would grow and open branches across the so called United States. They would begin their free breakfast for children program in January, 1969, at Father Earl A. Neil’s St. Augustine Episcopal Church in Oakland, California, feeding 11 children the first day and growing to 135 children by the end of the week.[1] Less than two months later a second location for feeding children would open in San Francisco at Sacred Heart Church. As the Black Panther Party proliferated across the country they made the free breakfast program a mandatory staple of each branch. At its peak, approximately forty-five chapters across the country participated in the Breakfast Program, feeding thousands of children every day.[2]

The free breakfast program was a response to the United States federal government's War on Poverty, which was supposed to be providing food, housing, and safety to impoverished people across the country. The Black Panther party felt as though the so called War on Poverty was not taking care of the Black Community, so they chose to take matters into their own hands. [3] The free breakfast program was one of the many Black Panther Party Survival Programs, which included education programs, health clinics, shoe giveaways, clothing giveaways, and prison busing program, which helped bring family members to prisons to visit their loved ones, sickle cell anemia testing (they tested over half a million people,) and a free ambulance service in Winston Salem, North Carolina; All of the Black Panther Party survival programs were free, and were all pieces of the party's goals of Black self-determination, and liberation from the constraints of capitalism and the legacies of slavery. [4]

Food Sovereignty

Party Branches

Oakland and San Francisco

The free breakfast programs in Oakland and later San Francisco garnered support from people from various walks of life and resulted in many donations to the program and general support from moderate white people. President Hoover, in a memo to a San Francisco surveillance officer in 1969, stated

One of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the [Black Panther Party] is to keep this group isolated from the moderate black and white community which may support it ... ... This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for Children Program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support from uninformed whites and moderate blacks.[5]

Chicago

Fred Hampton talking to children during a free breakfast program feeding. Credit: Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum

Los Angeles

New York

COINTELPRO

The Black Panther Party was victim to the FBI's violent, covert and illegal operation known as COINTELPRO, or Counter Intelligence Program. According to a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover the goal of COINTELPRO was

... to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.[6]

Hoover called the free breakfast program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and authorized extremely grotesque police counter-measures to destroy it. These operations ranged from disinformation campaigns telling parents in San Francisco that the food was infected with venereal disease, to the Chicago police breaking into a Church the night before its first food services to mash up and urinate on the children's breakfasts.[7]

Legacy of Free Breakfast Program

Oakland Community Gardens

USDA School Breakfast Program

According to History.com:

the public visibility of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member Norma Amour Mtume told Eater, was the government expanded its own school food programs. Though the USDA had piloted free breakfast efforts since the mid 1960s, the program only took off in the early 1970s—right around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975, the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it helps feed over 14.57 million children before school—and without the radical actions of the Black Panthers, it may never have happened.[8]

In response:

The BPP saw such actions as an unfair co-option on the part of establishment actors who looked to minimize the BPP’s importance and to move the control of community program development and management away from low-income Black communities themselves. Such co-option represented another factor that led to the slow demise of the BPP’s influence in communities across the nation.[9]

It was not until a new set of waivers were established in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that a complicated and often stigmatizing bureaucratic application process was eliminated, and free lunches were provided for all students. Before this new expansion, as many as 75% of U.S. school districts had unpaid "student meal debt."[10] After the federal breakfast programs were established, noticeable improvements in students' levels of focus, energy, and reduced stress were observed by teachers, while schools no longer had to deal with unnecessary paperwork.[11]

This expansion proved short-lived. In 2022, federal school meal programs faced a "perfect storm" according to Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association.[12]. Even though a poll in 2021 found that "74% of Americans support making universal free school meals permanent nationwide," bipartisan policy failure led to the expiration of this wildly popular policy, once again excluding tens of millions of students from receiving free meals.[13][14]

Sources

  1. ↑ https://www.aaihs.org/the-black-panther-party/
  2. ↑ https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party
  3. ↑ https://www.eater.com/2016/2/16/11002842/free-breakfast-schools-black-panthers
  4. ↑ https://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/actions/actions_survival.html
  5. ↑ https://www.eater.com/2016/2/16/11002842/free-breakfast-schools-black-panthers
  6. ↑ https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/cointelpro-teaching-the-fbi-s-war-on-the-black-freedom-movement/
  7. ↑ https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party
  8. ↑ https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party
  9. ↑ Garrett Broad, "More than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change"
  10. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/04/us-school-hunger-crisis-federal-waivers-end
  11. ↑ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/free-school-lunches-are-ending-house-passes-deal-summer-meals-child-nu-rcna34745
  12. ↑ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/free-school-lunches-set-end-creating-perfect-storm-high-inflation-rcna33688
  13. ↑ https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/black-panthers-free-breakfast-program
  14. ↑ https://www.npr.org/2022/10/26/1129939058/end-of-nationwide-federal-free-lunch-program-has-some-states-scrambling
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