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The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Food

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The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Food 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.
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