Black panther party free breakfast children program

One major business that consistently refused to donate to the FBP was Safeway, the largest grocery store chain in the West Coast. Outtakes and b-roll footage believed to be taken as part of the California Newsreel film May Day Panther a. May Day Newsreel Edgar Hoover, worked to criminalize and discredit the Panthers' activities and ultimately to destroy the organization completely.

It is widely accepted that the strength of the program contributed to the adoption by the Federal government of a breakfast program for children. By providing necessary services the programs intentionally created and sustained a platform to underline the injustices produced by American capitalism. They shed light on how the federal government consistently refused to address the prevalent poverty in Black communities and justified this refusal by incessantly criminalizing poor urban Black folks.

Meeting the needs of the community was a concrete means of raising consciousness and building a political base to resist the hegemonic repression of the American government and its capitalist interests. Overall the survival programs functioned as a tool to recruit community members to revolt against the American government and materialize a new society separate from capitalism and institutional racism.

The Panthers started the Free Breakfast Program because hunger and poverty made it difficult for many poor black children to learn in school. In , most poor children went to school hungry and stayed hungry. The national School Lunch Program provided reduced-price, but not free lunches for poor children, and the national School Breakfast Program was limited to a few rural schools.

Bobby Seale planned the program with Father Earl Neil and Parishioner Ruth Beckford-Smith, who coordinated the program and recruited neighborhood mothers. The Breakfast Program quickly spread to chapters in 23 cities by the end of the year. Local businesses, churches and community-based organizations donated sometimes with community pressure space for the program and nutritious food like eggs, grits, toast, and milk.

The Panthers fed more than 20, children nationally in From then on there were three meals a day. At its peak the nationwide Free Breakfast Program fed thousands of children daily, with at least 45 chapters in major cities from Los Angeles to Boston, and in rural communities throughout the South. Fifty years later the Free Breakfast Program serves as an enduring model for numerous initiatives that address food insecurity, particularly in the wake of the pandemic—programs such as D.

More broadly, the Panthers laid the groundwork for such obvious descendants as the Black Lives Matter Movement and for current calls to defund the police.

Huggins is 73 now and lives close to the site of the Oakland Community School, home to a program that helps formerly incarcerated men reenter society.