Free Breakfast For Children
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.
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. [2] 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. [3]
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.[4]
Chicago
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 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.[5]
Legacy of Free Breakfast Program
Oakland Community Gardens
Sources
- ↑ https://www.aaihs.org/the-black-panther-party/
- ↑ https://www.eater.com/2016/2/16/11002842/free-breakfast-schools-black-panthers
- ↑ https://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/actions/actions_survival.html
- ↑ https://www.eater.com/2016/2/16/11002842/free-breakfast-schools-black-panthers
- ↑ https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/cointelpro-teaching-the-fbi-s-war-on-the-black-freedom-movement/