Free Breakfast for School Children

Two women serving breakfast to group of students before school
Panthers serving children free breakfast, Sacred Heart Church, San Francisco.2
The free breakfast programs provided an immediate and vital service to the country’s most vulnerable group, the truly deserving poor. The programs could benefit all of the poor and working class families in the area. By providing the first meal of the day for their children, the families could then focus on providing one or two meals per day for their families as opposed to making the decision between ensuring their children had enough to eat or sending them hungry to school in order to keep a roof over their heads.1

According to a report by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Research committee, an estimated one-third to half of the nation’s poorest experienced hunger that resulted in psychological damage.1

The BPP’s Free Breakfast for School Children bypassed all of the roadblocks and limitations of the federal programs by relying on volunteers, donations, and community spaces. At the time, federal programs such as the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program faced many bureaucratic issues and were largely unsuccessful in addressing hunger among the nation’s poorest. 

July 25, 1969: Black Panthers serve breakfast to children at Christ of King Catholic Church in San Diego.

Man serving breakfast to group of children sitting at a table.

Creating safe spaces.

The breakfast programs created social spaces and opportunities for the Panthers to interact with the community. Party leaders could spread the underlying ideology of the group, tying the revolutionary struggle to issues of daily survival. It provided a space for children to learn about black history and interact with young adults in a positive and safe space, thus uniting and making the community grow stronger for future struggles.1
Man sitting with children at the free breakfast program.
Children at the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program, 1971.3

More than free food.

The Panthers believed that by keeping young children fed every morning, they would be provided ample nutrition to feed their minds at school. By ensuring that children did not go to school hungry, they could establish key fundamental skills in math and writing for both socioeconomic mobility and political mobilization. Their work sought interrupt generational patterns of hunger that have long kept poor communities stunted intellectually and physically, thus keeping them marginalized in society.1

References:

1. Potorti, M. (2017). “Feeding the Revolution”: the Black Panther Party, Hunger, and Community Survival. Journal of African American Studies, 21(1), 85–110. https://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2137/10.1007/s12111-017-9345-9

2. Ducho, D. (2010) Panthers serving children free breakfast. [Photograph]. Blackpast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-panther-partys-free-breakfast-program-1969-1980/

3. (1971). Children at the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program, 1971. [Photograph]. Oregon Encyclopedia. https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/black_panthers_in_portland/