really really not enough people in the united states understand that the reason there is a free breakfast and lunch program in US schools is because of the Black Panther Party’s Breakfast for Children program. it’s so important to know this. you can’t be educated about US history or about the relationship between the US government, US poverty, US formal education, and Black resistance movements without knowing this.
I don’t want to be unclear. When I say “because of the BPP’s Breakfast for Children program” I do not mean that the Panthers had some sort of lobbying program that advocated for children to be fed breakfast at schools which was met with some kind of positive recognition by the United States government. I mean that the Panthers had a program that fed Black children breakfast before school, and J Edgar Hoover described the Black Panther Party as “the greatest threat to internal security of the country” and the Breakfast for Children program as “the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.” Media coverage of the Breakfast for Children program exposed U.S. child hunger on an international scale, and the program itself nurtured Black revolutionary community, and in order to ameliorate the former and undermine the latter, the United States federal government was forced to institute a program to feed children breakfast in schools. Almost 80 years later there remains in the United States an assumption that children should and will have access to breakfast and lunch at school and it is because of how much Hoover feared the Panthers.
(Quotes are findable various places including this article.)
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