To Feed the Revolution: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Food

Mary Potorti Boston University

A May 1969 issue of Newsweek quoted a California police officer’s assessment of the

Black Panther Party’s recently instituted Free Breakfast for School Children programs. “How can anyone be against feeding kids?” he wondered. The stealth criticism, resistance, and outright opposition the programs soon encountered, however, made plain the reality that many, especially those in positions of legal and political authority, were against the idea, and adamantly so. In her memoir A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown surmised, “The success of the Panther free breakfast programs for the poor…as much as Panther guns triggered J. Edgar Hoover’s targeting of the party for the most massive and violent FBI assault ever committed” (10). Indeed, Bureau records indicate that one FBI head instructed rank and file agents at a San Francisco lecture,

“…The BPP is not engaged in the ‘Breakfast for Children’ program for humanitarian reasons,

[but for others,] including their efforts to create an image of civility, assume community control of Negroes, and to fill adolescent children with their insidious poison.”i According to David

Hilliard, “Police raided the Breakfast for Children Program, ransacked food storage facilities, destroyed kitchen equipment, and attempted to disrupt relations between the Black Panthers and local business owners and community advocates, whose contributions made the programs possible.”ii But why?

This paper addresses the question voiced by that well-meaning but perhaps naïve

California police officer. First, it examines the practical functions of the Party’s food programs in winning the confidence and trust of the urban poor and in ensuring their “survival pending revolution.” Second, it pushes beyond the food programs to situate the food politics of the

1 organization as both a natural extension of and a crucial prerequisite for achieving its aim to uproot the joint power of capital and public policy to perpetuate the physical vulnerability of

America’s racial underclasses. Originally organized for the immediate goal of self-defense from abusive agents of local law enforcement, the Black Panther Party broaden its conceptualization of state violence to include all state-sanctioned or –permitted systems that worked to weaken and destroy black bodies. In the Party’s estimation, the federal government (namely, the FBI and the

Department of Agriculture) colluded with American food industries to carry on the tradition of

American genocide against peoples of color by starving or poisoning them en masse. In other words, the BPP came to see its food programs as defensive measures to counteract centuries of abuse and neglect. Finally, an investigation of the BPP’s food politics reveals the efficacy of the

Party’s shift toward a philosophical strategy of “intercommunalism,” conceptualized and espoused by Huey P. Newton, which became central to the Party’s new understanding of African

American oppression as more fundamentally rooted in a class oppression than transcended both race and nation.

Historian Ryan Kirkby rightly contends that “community activism and revolutionary violence operated in tandem as part of the same strategy for Black liberation.” Kirkby demonstrates that survival programs themselves “were designed to underline the injustices of

American capitalism and stimulate the Black masses into revolting against the American government” and, in doing so, to “lay the groundwork for the insurrection” necessary to bring about a new racial order.iii When asked by a Swedish journalist about the defensive tactics of the

Black Panther Party, Angela Davis, one of the most eloquent and infamous of Black Power intellectuals, succinctly encapsulated the rationale behind the Party’s survival programs. “[I]f you’re gonna talk about a revolutionary situation you have to have people who are physically

2 able to wage revolution, who are physically able to organize and physically able to do all that is done.” Quite simply, before revolutionary changes in resource distribution and race relations could be possible, the oppressed masses must work to strengthen themselves physically and psychologically. Davis’ statement implicitly recognized the function of bodily weakness and vulnerability in preventing the oppressed from organizing. Revolution may be mandated and justified by the starving masses, but it certainly could not be waged successfully by them.

Indeed, the food programs created sites both physical and discursive, in which the practical needs of the community fused with the political imperatives of the Party.

But why did the party start with food, and why did opponents find the food programs so intolerable? Manipulating the want and promise of food has historically worked both to maintain the social and political advantage of the ruling classes and to empower and entice the most oppressed to organize to achieve immediate ends. The centrality of food to personal expression, cultural identity, and group association is tightly connected to the essential need of all living beings to eat. Eating as an exercise of personhood—and hunger as a marker of one’s exclusion from a polity with the most abundant food supply in world history—is an ongoing imperative, a constant reminder of one’s place in the social order. Although concerns of food (of what one is willing to eat and with whom) are among the most intimate considerations, they are fundamentally shaped by public policies, economic systems, and global realities. The Black

Panthers implicitly understood and on occasion explicitly articulated the politics of food—here defined as personal, organizational, local, and federal power struggles centered around the fundamental concern of who can eat, what, and under what conditions—to be both a crude and intolerable tool of social control for those in a position to inflict hunger upon others and,

3 conversely as a call to arms to recruit the hungry—both literally and figuratively—for political organization at its most basic level.

Started at Oakland’s St. Augustine Church in January 1969, the Free Breakfast for School

Children program began with a simple agenda: to feed hungry children before school. It was the first community program initiated by the Party and mandated by Minister of Defense Huey P.

Newton in chapters nationwide. Why? A breakfast program was a smart place to start the

Party’s community efforts for several reasons. First and foremost, its goal—to feed hungry children—was morally, if not politically, unobjectionable. Black, white, liberal, or conservative, few could speak out against the premise and objective of the program. Said Seale, “there’s not even a preacher in any church (preachers have always brainwashed the black people) who can deny a breakfast for children program. There’s not a businessman nor a demagogic politician around who can deny a breakfast for children program and get away with it…”iv Free breakfasts aimed to meet the most basic need of the most vulnerable Americans, the truly deserving poor.

And even more importantly, as pressing as the need was, it could realistically be met.

Quite simply, the program was possible. The free breakfasts and later free food programs permitted the BPP a regular and ongoing opportunity to prove it was in tune with the needs of the people and concerned and committed to meeting those needs. More importantly, food programs required that the Party and its communities deliver regularly and consistently. This served two purposes: First, it gave party members a chance to interact with members of the community, including mothers, businessmen, and church leaders, in a context outside its infamous police patrols. Second, in the spaces thus created (the breakfast rooms, survival conferences, and food giveaways), Party leaders could spread the underlying ideology of the group that tied revolutionary struggle to bread and butter issues of daily survival. In addition to learning history

4 lessons and joining in revolutionary songs, schoolchildren could interact every school morning with young adults in a positive, ideally safe space and come to associate individual Panthers with personalized service, sacrifice, and work to help communities grow strong to wage the struggle ahead. Perhaps most drastically, as the Black Panther regularly emphasized, the free breakfasts aimed to quell the hunger pains of black youth that so often incapacitated them during school hours. One member asked Party members and supporters, “How can a person be expected to pay attention and learn about history, math, science and other subjects that are abstract to his reality when his mind is concentrating on a very real and concrete problem? Where is the next meal coming from?” Thus, nourishing the body made it possible for children to feed their minds at school, to establish fundamental skills in math and reading necessary not only for socio- economic mobility but for political mobilization as well.

While the labor needed to make and serve the food each morning was voluntary, provisioning the foods to be served was often a matter of coercion and manipulation. Party members, parents, and sometimes the children themselves, solicited donations from local grocery stores and businesses, either in cash or in kind. While some businesses, immediately and willingly contributed to the program, others, including chains such as Safeway and Mayfair and independent operations like black-owned and –operated Bill Boyette’s liquors, refused to do so.

The BPP counted not on the goodwill of donors so much as their fear of economic retribution in the form of boycotts of businesses called out by the Party’s newspaper. In this way, the breakfast program underscored the division between the have’s and have-nots. It became easier for people to understand the persistence of hunger, for example, when a store such as Safeway could be castigated for withholding food from hungry children. In this way, the politics of food were given concrete locations and sites for resistance. The BPN regularly listed those stores who

5 refused to participate, shaming them by stating that those businesses profited from the communities and then refused to give anything in return. In April 1969, the Panther stated that the breakfast “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 of the Black Community like leeches.” Not only did the

Party then blame “avaricious businessmen” for creating the problem of hunger by overcharging for food commodities but also demanded that they be part of the solution, or suffer immediate and direct economic consequences. As a result, the Party fostered a view of urban hunger predicated on the belief that capitalism was responsible for the people’s suffering, but that ironically also relied on the imperative of capitalism to sell to get businesses in line with the program. In this way, the breakfast programs had the potential to awaken revolutionary consciousness of the people to see the connection between material deprivation, physical vulnerability, political marginalization, and state-sanctioned violence.

The free breakfast program is certainly the most well-known of the Panthers’ food campaigns, and arguably the most popular and successful of its survival programs; however, it represented only the most concrete manifestation of its understanding that the most basic human right to live boils down to the right not merely to eat, but to eat regularly, healthfully, affordably, and responsibly. In calling attention to the shortcomings of the War on Poverty by literally counting the numbers of children who showed up to receive food each morning, the free breakfasts showed the people the possibilities of collective action, in contrast to the seemingly impossible policies of the government. Numerous cartoons and articles highlight the absurdity of continuing to fund federal studies to determine if hunger existed rather than spend that money on food for the hungry. The BPP believed the government to be sinister rather than simply inept.

6 A 1973 Black Panther cartoon illustrated the so-called “Food Conspiracy,” “a plan agreed upon” to deprive the masses of “any substance taken into and assimilated…to keep it alive and enable it to grow.” The solution, according to the paper, was simple: “[W]hen high prices threaten the community, the poor [must] unite, cut costs, in order to survive.” Regardless of the form or function of food-related protest and resistance, the actions of Panther members, supporters, and others implicitly acknowledged and challenged the systematic biases of local and federal policies and the white American capitalist food industry, deeming them not merely symptomatic of racial oppression, but crucial tools in the maintenance of social inequality. Tellingly, the Party repeatedly asserted that to have food was not enough. Rather, African Americans must mobilize to ensure that the food available to them was fit for human consumption (i.e. safe to eat, fresh, and free of toxins), affordable for everyone, and purchased only from individuals and businesses that recognized and fulfilled their responsibility to the communities that supported them by treating customers fairly and respectfully.

The Panther made abstract theoretical questions of economic justice and distribution of resources concrete by, first, calling attention the class injustices of rampant food insecurity, and then by working to ameliorate hunger, a painful bodily condition and arguably the most pressing material manifestation of poverty and deprivation. David Hilliard explained that food “serves a double purpose, providing sustenance but also functioning as an organizing tool.”v Revolutions might be waged to secure food, but strong bodies are necessary to make conceivable the very possibility of revolution itself. Even Eldridge Cleaver, who would ultimately break with the

Panthers over its emphasis on these survival programs, recognized the significance of small- scale, bread-and-butter politics, stating in 1969, “Breakfast for children pulls people out of the system and organizes them into an alternative. Black children who go to school hungry each

7 morning have been organized into their poverty, and the Panthers’ program liberates them, frees them from that aspect of their poverty. This is liberation in practice.”

Indeed, several members heralded the transformative potential of the survival programs, asserting that for true freedom to be possible, the essentials of life must themselves be free. The

Marxist politics of Newton and his followers, of course, lay at the root of this worldview, which declared that freedom and capitalism by definition could not coexist. “Capitalism is what put black people in slavery,” the Black Panther declared in March 1969. “Capitalism is why black people can’t get decent housing and capitalism is why there are so many hungry children in the black communities of America today.”vi But the survival programs went further, not merely showing what was wrong with capitalism, but highlighting what could be right about socialism in action. Party co-founder Bobby Seale made the connection plain: “Once the people see a socialistic program is valuable to them they won’t throw it away. By practicing socialism they learn it better” (43).

Beneath the particulars of the survival programs simmered deeper discontent surrounding hunger, food safety, consumer rights, and fair labor practices to which the survival programs spoke. In fact, I submit that the BPP food programs served to occasion important forums at and around which broader concerns about physical, social, communal, and spiritual health could be articulated and addressed. Moreover, as the postwar food system grew increasingly integrated, consolidated, and profit-driven, it embodied both the dangers and potential inherent in Huey P.

Newton’s understanding of the interconnectedness of the struggles of oppressed peoples. In this way, food politics both validated and mandated the political approach of intercommunalism, which acknowledged the diminishing utility of framing tyrannical power relations and struggles for liberation as contests between or with-in distinct nation-states. Instead, intercommunalism

8 conceptualized the oppressed masses, specifically the black urban poor, as colonized peoples.

Fusing a transnational understanding of politics with a Marxist view of historical class struggle, intercommunalism recognized that the oppressed of the world could be more united in their suffering than they were divided by differences of race, language, culture, and nationality. It quickly became apparent, for example, how the plight of migrant Mexican farmworkers spoke to the struggles of a black urban underclass to live in health and dignity. One Panther article advocating a boycott of lettuce picked by scabs during a United Farm Workers’ labor strike, made the case plain. “We, Black people, join with the Spanish-speaking people in common struggle, against a common oppression. We know, far too well, the plight of the landless and the dispossessed. Our own history of slavery and share-cropping will testify to this…For the oppressed, the politics of survival are similar though each particular struggle has its unique characteristics…” Highlighting a shared history of exploitation responsible for achieving the abundance characteristic of the American food system, particularly in the postwar years, this campaign underscored the historical and geographical parallels of the abuses endured by those forced to work the land without benefit from its nourishment.

In hindsight it becomes clear that the Panthers’ food politics were driven by the imperatives of “[f]ood justice,” a framework that “places the need for food security—access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food—in the contexts of institutional racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies.”vii Certainly, Panther food programs’ efforts to nourish the masses emphasized the need to go beyond the daily charities of feeding the hungry by demanding that communities, businesses, industries, and the federal government itself admit and be held accountable for complicity in the continued maladies of hunger and malnourishment.

While in some cases providing life-saving stop-gap measures, the food programs’ surrounding

9 rhetoric and organization worked to challenge the structures of inequality that undergirded the need for emergency food programs. As the Panthers recognized, and their foes feared, this itself was a revolutionary enterprise.

i Qtd. in Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 302. ii David Hilliard, “Introduction,” in The Huey P. Newton Reader, 15. iii Ryan Kirkby, “‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’: Community Activism and the Black Panther Party, 1966-1971,” Canadian Review of American Studies Vol. 41.1 (2011), pp. 25, 26, 30. iv Emphasis added v Qtd. Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnestoa Press, 2011), 58. vi “Capitalism Attacks Breakfast for Children,” The Black Panther (20 Mar 1969), 15. vii Alison Hope Alkon and Kari Marie Norgaard, “Breaking the Food Chains: An Investigation of Food Justice Activism,” Sociological Inquiry Vol. 79 No. 3 (August 2009), 289; Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman (eds.), Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2011), 5.

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