‘The Greatest Threat to the Internal Security of the USA’: The Black Panther Free Breakfast for Children Program

15 min readMar 30, 2021

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the legacy of The Black Panther Party amidst the contemporary, neoliberal context in which we find ourselves, here in the UK. In particular, the paper will focus on the Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children Program, and the response in 1969 by the then former FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, calling it ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the USA’. The reasons for this response will be examined through a critical theory lens; namely, Herbert Marcuse. The legacy of this program will be explored, and it is hoped that this paper rekindles interest in the Panthers, and how they serve as an example of the power of community organisation and activism in the face of state and corporate injustice.

The Socialist Sikh tradition

I was born and raised between West London and Gloucestershire. A Sikh by birth (although I’ve read too much Nietzsche to believe in much of anything, anymore, unfortunately) I grew up going to the temple, or Gurdwara, most Sundays. Here, following the customary prayers, all attendees would partake in the practice of ‘langar’.

This formative experience is crucial to the discussion, as from a young age I saw socialist practices enacted. The community kitchen serves free meals to all visitors irrespective of religion, race, gender, caste or socio-economic status. The food items are all procured via donation, and cooked by volunteers. My gran would take me most Saturday mornings at 4am to help prepare the meals for the day. Cutting bags of onions at that time is a sure-fire way to wake up the senses! Attendees all sit on the floor and eat together. For inclusivity, meals are always vegetarian, although Sikhs don’t have to be.

The practice was first enacted by a Sufi order in C12th. It was then adopted and popularised by the founder of Sikhism, Nanak, in the C15th. Sikhism itself emerged as a response to rampant casteism and racism, prevalent within northern India at the time. Still under Moghul rule, Sikhism, through practices like langar, sought to enact the principle of social equality. The Gurdwaras became known as places of rest and refuge, where travellers, as well as local inhabitants, could always receive a free meal in a communal setting.

In the UK, Sikhs primarily reside in London and Birmingham, with smaller communities in the likes of Manchester, Newcastle and Cardiff. They attract a large number of homeless individuals, who volunteer and partake in meals.

So, with this legacy and practice imbued in my bones from a young age, it’s no surprise that it’s an area of interest to me to this day. As a young adult, I would organise Saturday night soup runs in the Charing Cross regions of London, serving food items and tea to those on the streets.

Later, whilst residing in The Bahamas for a couple of years (long story!), I worked full time as a volunteer coordinator for a food rescue charity, Hands for Hunger (H4H). Taking inspiration from an organisation called City Harvest, founded in New York, who daily rescue and redistribute 1,000lbs of food that would otherwise go to waste, at H4H I was responsible for recruiting volunteers to assist in the rescue and redistribution process, as well as fundraising activities. As a small team of only four, we had our work cut out!

Everyone thinks of The Bahamas as an island paradise, but behind the all-inclusive resorts is incredibly unjust poverty. With corruption rife, a lack of government support, as well as gross inequality, our work was crucial in mitigating the damage inflicted upon those disenfranchised. I would drive a truck around collecting food from many of the islands hotel resorts, and deliver it to agencies such as The Red Cross, who would then cook and serve the items to their local community.

This discussion of serving the local community to compensate for the lack of state support, and in the face of corporate greed, is an opportune moment to segue onto a discussion of The Black Panther Party.

The Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party (BPP) was founded in October 1966, in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. To put that into context, Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam in February 1965, and Martin Luther King murdered in April 1968, just days after rethinking his doctrine of non-violence. Unapologetically Communist in its organisation and aims, the BPP enacted militant self-defence of minority communities in the face of social injustice administered by the capitalist state apparatus. Their goal was Communist: economic, social and political equality irrespective of race, gender or sexual orientation.

Combining the tenets of later Malcolm X’s work through the Pan-Africanist Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), as well as a militant Maoist reading of Marxist theory, the Panthers sought to take control of the means of material production within their community. For example, in 1968, the Panthers sold copies of Mao’s Red Book to university students in order to fund the purchase of shotguns. ‘By any means necessary’. It’s on this note that Marcuse argues, in 1967, in The Problem of Violence that:

‘I have in no way equated humanitarianism and nonviolence. To the contrary I have spoken of situations in which it is precisely the interest of humanitarianism which leads to violence’.

COINTELPRO

It was around this time that Hoover founder COINTELPRO, or, the ‘counterintelligence program’, with the explicit aim of breaking up the increasing unity amongst revolutionary groups representing those disenfranchised: people of colour including Native Americans, the LGBT community, as well as Left leaning students. The term ‘counterintelligence’ itself speaks volumes about the anti-intellectualism propagated from the state. The program assassinated members of the Panthers, imprisoned others, and undercover agents introduced a program of psychological warfare in order to split the party from within.

Concerned with controlling the means of production, and the holistic health of their community in terms of material wealth, physical and mental health, as well as education, the Panthers ran self-defence programs, reading groups, common financial wealth initiatives, as well as, of course, the Free Breakfast for Children Program (FBCP).

In the Spring of 1969, in response to their growing nationwide influence, most notably through the FBCP, Hoover publicly declared the Panthers to be ‘the greatest threat to the internal security’ of the entire nation. Just considering how huge the USA is, pre-an age of social media and cell-phones, it’s quite incredible to think that they managed to create a nationwide, community chapter based organisation, and in such a short space of time, without state assistance.

Overseer to officer

In December of 1969, one of the leading lights of the party, a 21-year-old Fred Hampton, was leading five different breakfast programs over 2,000 miles away from California, in Chicago. Hampton also helped to create a free medical centre, as well as a door-to-door program of health services. He was also engaged in working to dissolve the rampant gang culture amongst the communities of those disenfranchised by the state apparatus. It was this party member that the Chicago police, through an FBI informant, shot dead whilst he was asleep, and also attempted to murder his 8-month pregnant wife, who was also shot, but survived. His son, Fred Hampton Jr., has gone on to become a community activist, and continually campaigns to free political prisoners such as former Panther party members Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, as well as Assata Shakur, who was granted political asylum in Cuba.

As James Baldwin acutely observed in 1960, and which was incorporated by Huey P. Newton in this 1973 text, Revolutionary Suicide:

‘The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive. None of the Police Commissioner’s men, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people they swagger about in twos and threes controlling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place’ (Baldwin in Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, p.114).

This theme of police brutality and control, which all too sadly describes the US in 2021, was developed by former party member and contemporary academic and activist, Angela Davis, who argues that:

‘The announced function of the police, ‘‘to protect and serve the people’’, becomes the grotesque caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and serving us nothing but injustice’ (Davis, The Angela Y. Davis Reader, p.49).

Praxis

As the self-declared vanguard party of the revolution, the Panthers sought to fight fire with fire. Combining the power of their armed community activist projects, with that of the written word, in 1970, Bobby Seale published Seize The Time, a history of the Panthers and Huey P. Newton. This led to an increase in mass awareness about the party. As a result, the Panther’s newspaper circulation reached a quarter of a million by 1971. By 1973, Bobby Seale even ran for mayor of Oakland, and despite receiving 40% of the vote, was ultimately defeated.

During the mid-1970s, the party began to lose steam through internal disputes. Huey, as the intellectual core of the party, became disillusioned and went into exile in Cuba for three years. Returning to the US, he obtained a PhD in Social Philosophy in 1980 with a thesis entitled: War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America. Nonetheless, in the 1980s he spiralled into a cocaine, heroin and alcohol fuelled abyss before being shot dead during a drug dispute on the streets of Oakland, 1989. Despite splitting from the party in 1974, Bobby Seale went onto, and still, resides and works as a community activist in Oakland.

The Panthers did not merely engage in endless theory, although they certainly did not shun formal analysis of their predicament through publishing newspapers and organising reading groups and classes, but, rather, they engaged in a, literally, militant mode of socially engaged praxis; that is, theoretically informed practice. Angela Davis observes that the society you’re looking to build is already reflected in the nature of the struggle that you’re carrying out (Davis, The Angela Y. Davis Reader, p.20). The FBCP is a shining exemplar of this praxis.

The Free Breakfast for Children Program

Founded in January 1969 in a St. Augustine’s church in Oakland, Ruth Beckford-Smith, a parishioner who taught Haitian dance at the church, volunteered to be one of the program’s co-organizers. Eleven children ate at there on the first day. By the end of the year the Panthers had set up community kitchens, and were feeding over 20,000 children in 19 cities across the country in the morning before they went to school. The ethos behind the program was simple: children who have a nourishing breakfast every morning are more likely to learn better. One of the children they fed would grow to become the Public Enemy frontman, Chuck D.

The program also disrupted gender norms by featuring male cooks. One such community organiser, Melvin Dickson, observed in 2016 that

‘one thing you can guarantee in an oppressed community is that you’re going to find hunger. The fact that the United States has more food than we need, and folks are still going hungry is a shame, it was a shame then, and it’s a shame now’.

Between 1969 and 1971, the Panthers established 36 breakfast programs across the country, and it’s estimated that they fed 50,000 daily across the country through their program. Indeed, during this period, one US government official admitted ‘the Panthers are feeding more kids than we are’.

With each mouth fed, it became increasingly difficult for government officials like Hoover to portray the Panthers in a negative light. Hoover is quoted as stating that:

‘The BCP (Breakfast for Children Program) promotes at least tacit support for the Black Panther Party (BPP) among naive individuals and, what is more distressing, it provides the BPP with a ready audience composed of highly impressionable youths. Consequently, the 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’.

Declaring war upon the party, Hoover’s criticism of what the Panthers ‘stood for’ is highly telling. They stood for social justice and equality, something inimical to the capitalist, neoliberal ‘American Dream’ founded upon rampant consumerism and ‘free market’ competition. Hoover essentially stated that grits, not guns, were the greatest threat to the internal security of the State. No one can feasibly argue against feeding children, for free, so Hoover saw this particular program almost as an insult, and indeed referred to it explicitly as an ‘infiltration’. How absurd, right? How were disenfranchised, marginalised people of colour, born and raised within, and serving, their own communities ‘infiltrating’ these said communities? ‘How dare you get your house in order without our permission or control’ seemed to be the message from the government.

The Panthers were tangibly achieving where the government was failing. The breakfast program, along with the Panthers’ 59 other ‘Serve the People’ programs that provided clothing, free medical care, and legal aid, ultimately made them ‘dangerous’ to government control, because they were becoming highly influential and embedded into mass public awareness.

In the BPP newspaper in March 1969, Huey P. Newton wrote:

‘These Breakfasts include even nutrient that the children need for the day. For too long have our people gone hungry and without the proper health aids they need. But the Black Panther Party says that this type of thing must be halted, because we must survive this evil government and build a new one fit for the service of all the people. This program is run through donations of concerned people and the avaricious businessmen that pinch selfishly a little to the program. We say that this is not enough, especially from those that thrive off the Black Community like leeches. All of the avaricious businessmen have their factories etc. centered in our communities and even most of the people that work in these sweat shops are members of the oppressed masses […] The Breakfast Program has already been initiated in several chapters, and our love for the masses makes us realize that it must continue permanently and be a national program. But we need your help and that means money, food, and time. We want to turn the programs over to the community, but without your efforts and support we cannot.’

A Marcusian turn

In the late 1960s Marcuse was working at the University of California, San Diego. Mentor to Angela Davis, in 1969’s An Essay on Liberation he deemed that Black communities like that of Oakland’s, were a ripe revolutionary force. This is because:

‘Confined to small areas of living and dying, it can be more easily organized and directed. Moreover, located in the core cities of the country, the ghettos form natural geographical centres from which the struggle can be mounted against targets of vital economic and political importance; in this respect, the ghettos can be compared with the faubourgs of Paris in the eighteenth century, and their location makes for spreading and ‘‘contagious’ upheavals’’’ (Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p.63).

We can see in the example of the success and rapid spread of the FBCP that Marcuse’s observation was not without foundation.

Marcuse also helps shed light on the government response and demonization of the Panthers. For, in 1972’s Counterrevolution and Revolt, he argues that

‘violence is primarily directed against powerless but conspicuous minorities who appear as disturbing aliens to the established system, who look different, speak and behave differently, and who are doing things (or are suspected of doing things) which those who accept the social order cannot afford to do. Such targets are black and brown people, hippies, radical intellectuals’ (Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, p.28).

Herein lies the hope that Marcuse placed in groups such as the Panthers, in subversive grass roots movements that could disrupt the apparent technical and economic integration of the system at large, thereby revealing the whole to be false (Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, p.42).

Through their self-directed community activism, based upon health, education and social wealth, and eschewing engagement with the mainstream party political system, the Panthers exemplified the following Marcusian line of thought:

‘The slogan ‘‘let’s sit down and reason together’’ has rightly become a joke. Can you reason with the Pentagon on any other thing than the relative effectiveness of killing machines — and their price?… This is incestuous reasoning; they are all in agreement about the basic issue: the strengthening of the established power structure’ (Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, p.133).

The threat that the Party thereby held to the State apparatus is clear to see, and helps to explain the thought process behind Hoover’s absurd reaction to something as noble as a FBCP.

Legacy

The FBCP ultimately inspired amendments to the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 and served as the blueprint for the government’s School Breakfast Program as a permanent, nationally embedded one in 1975. I find this a highly problematic outcome: if a government demonise grass roots activists, infiltrate and disband community groups, only to co-opt their ideas and administer then centrally from top to down, what implications does this have for those within activist communities? Is this a desired end? If so, for whom, and why?

The legacy of the Black Panthers can be seen not just in government reforms, but also in pop culture. For example, in 1991, in a 5m bit at the end of his ‘Black or White’ video, Michael Jackson, the biggest star on the planet at the time, is depicted as morphing from a black panther to a man, and back to a panther again. In human form he performs highly expressive dance to no music, in a scene of urban decay, smashing the racist graffiti abound. The political statement is explicit and evident to see.

A couple of month’s back* Marvel released a film entitled ‘The Black Panther’. This character was first written in a comic published in July 1966, and thus pre-dated the forming of the party. The writer, Stan Lee, claims the shared name was pure coincidence. In 1972 the character’s name was changed to ‘The Black Leopard’ to avoid any connection to the Party that, by this point, had entered mass public consciousness.

Continuing the neo-Marxist legacy of the Panthers, the Zapatistas have created an autonomous zone of indigenous resistance to the colonial, imperialist and neoliberal central Mexican government. They have been in the public eye since 1994, and whilst emulating the Panthers in their holistic, community based activism, have done away with the notion of being the vanguard, and wear ski masks to eschew personal identities being revealed, which could lead to infiltration and subversion by government agencies. As a former spokesman of the party, Subcomandante Marcos, reflects:

‘Don’t surrender! Resist! Don’t sell out! Resist! […] The government doesn’t want democracy in our land. We will accept nothing that comes from the rotting heart of the government, not a single coin not a single dose of medication, not a single stone nor a single grain of food. We will not accept the hand-outs that the government offers in exchange for our dignity’ (Subcomandante Marcos, Ya Basta, p.50).

Whilst the demise of the BPP was tragic, their legacy is clear to see, and the success and amount of influence they were enable to engender in such a relatively short time, in an age before social media etc., is to be admired. The question remains then, how to use their example, if at all, in the manner in which we attempt to address social injustice from the top down, here, in the UK? During a session on neoliberalism a couple of months ago, one scholar mentioned how when they once held a free food event, that attendees didn’t know what to make of it, and were almost unsettled amidst the normative discourse of monetary exchange for ‘services’! What is to be done? It is clear that a radical and imaginative rethinking of possibility, and alternative way of organising, is crucial to a better future for those disenfranchised by the status quo.