Roger guenveur smith kids1/22/2024 ![]() 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.Smith was speaking by phone from Portland, Ore. In 1975, the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. 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. 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. In the end, though, the public visibility of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders to feed children before school. Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black Panthers broke up the program. “The night before was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.” ![]() In San Francisco, writes historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected with venereal disease sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and participating children were photographed by Chicago police. FBI agents went door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP members would teach their children racism. He called the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte blanche to law enforcement to destroy it. ![]() Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war against them in 1969. Straeter/AP Photo)įree food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head J. ![]() Newton Story, a 2001 film in which he portrays Newton.īill Whitfield, member of the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City, serving free breakfast to children before they go to school. “I mean, nobody can argue with free grits,” said filmmaker Roger Guenveur Smith in A Huey P. (Food wasn’t the only part of the BPP’s social programs they expanded to cover everything from free medical clinics to community ambulance services and legal clinics.)įor the party, it was an opportunity to counter its increasingly negative image in the public consciousness-an image of intimidating Afroed Black men holding guns-while addressing a critical community need. At its peak, the Black Panther Party fed thousands of children per day in at least 45 programs. Soon, the program had been embraced by party outposts nationwide. “They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps.” “The school principal came down and told us how different the children were,” Ruth Beckford, a parishioner who helped with the program, said later. School officials immediately reported results in kids who had free breakfast before school. The program was simple: party members and volunteers went to local grocery stores to solicit donations, consulted with nutritionists on healthful breakfast options for children, and prepared and served the food free of charge. It began in January 1969 at an Episcopal church in Oakland, and within weeks it went from feeding a handful of kids to hundreds. (Credit: Bill Ingraham/AP Photo)įree Breakfast For School Children was one of the most effective. ![]() Brad Jones, member of the Philadelphia Black Panthers Organization, helping serve breakfast to youngsters. ![]()
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