What Britain’s Community Food Sector Can Learn From The Black Panther Party’s Community Meals

A tumultuous moment for America from which sprung a community food initiative worth revisiting during Black History Month.  

1968, in the United States of America, was turbulent. The year’s unrest included the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, violence at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, the iconic black power salutes at the Mexico Olympics, and on-going protests over the Vietnam war. From this chaotic context emerged a grassroots initiative in Oakland, California, with a simple yet somehow groundbreaking offer – free breakfasts for children.  

These meals were launched in January 1969 by Rev. Earl Neil, a key player in organising the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and held at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland where he served as pastor. He ran the breakfasts under the banner of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), a radical black power political organisation infused with communist ideology, recently founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The BPP’s reputation centres on their militia style confrontation the police and armed patrols of Black neighbourhood, however their social mission to support the Black community is less well known about. 

The Community Survival programmes that the BPP ran were geared around empowerment for African Americans and reclaiming power at the social and economic level. As well as food these initiatives included providing transportation, education and healthcare services, alongside connecting people around cultural and sporting activities. “The food component of the BPP was a big part of our organizing.” Melvin Dickson, an organiser for the Oakland breakfast program said, “this included our free breakfast program. Because one thing you can guarantee in an oppressed community is that you’re going to find hunger.” Within a few months of the launch in Oakland, the Breakfast for Children Programme (BCP) was rolled out across the country by the BPP, feeding over 20,000 children in 19 cities by the end of 1969. 

On a basic level the meals addressed the self-evident truth that “children can’t learn on an empty stomach,” but going deeper, it’s clear the breakfast clubs successfully embodied an ethic of grassroots organising and anti-oppressive practice. Cooking and eating were entry points for discussions about racism, capitalism, and the possibility of revolutionary change. Corporate power was challenged too – after organisers unsuccessfully attempted to get the support of businesses to donate food, the Black community in Oakland boycotted dairy products at Safeway and forced the supermarket to get behind the effort to feed kids.   

Perhaps the clearest indicator that the meals made waves is seen from the way in which the authorities identified them as a threat. In an internal FBI memo, Hoover wrote: “[BCP] represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for”. In 1975, in a move widely considered to be influenced by the BPP, the US government started offering free breakfast in public schools. 

Image Credit: It’s About Time / BPP

So what lessons can Britain learn today from the BPP’s free breakfast programme? 

The Black Panther Party made food central to their political action because food, and hunger, have always been political issues. All too often in modern Britain, food support for hard up members of society has failed to face up to home truths about entrenched structural inequality, and instead treats the provision of food to those in need as apolitical acts of charity. In 2012, then prime minister David Cameron spoke in Parliament of ‘welcoming-the-work’ of food banks at the same time as his government’s austerity project pulled away the rug of social support for those in poverty. Since then, there has been a 10-fold increase in the number of food parcels being provided by food banks, and yet ministers have praised the effort required to meet the need as ‘uplifting’. This chasm between the political conditions of food poverty and the feel-good food philanthropy carried out by the political elite was epitomised last Christmas, as Rishi Sunak was photographed serving hot food at a London shelter. In these instances and many other moments in modern Britain, philanthropic food provision risks becoming political cover for structural inequality which is remedied and repeated without addressing root causes.  

The Black Panther Party also shows us how food is a chance for us to come together. Community meals are by definition collective moments that provide the chance for relational power to build – contacts to be made, background stories of others to be better understood and shared visions for a better future to be discussed.  Any grassroots campaign is stronger by placing food at the centre – as much as anything it makes it easier for people to attend if they don’t need to squeeze in a meal before or afterwards. On top of nourishment a shared meal is a chance for a conversation and connection, a hook for forming better relationships in the public realm. 

Additional resources: 

BBC World Service History Hour (2021) Black History: The Black Panthers 

Huffington Post (2016) The Black Panther Party: A Food Justice Story 

The Guardian (2019) ‘One of the biggest, baddest things we did’: Black Panthers’ free breakfasts, 50 years on 

Vox (2016) The most radical thing the Black Panthers did was give kids free breakfast 

Wikipedia entry on Black Panther Breakfast for Children

[Feature Image Credit: William P. Streater, Granger/Rex/Shutterstock. Bill Whitfield of the Black Panther party serves breakfast To local children in Kansas City, April 1969]