Black Panthers Connected Nutrition To Education Long Before Serving Breakfast in Schools Became Popular


Black Panthers Connected Nutrition To Education Long Before Serving Breakfast in Schools Became Popular

By: Katherine Newman

The second paragraph of a memo from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Counterintelligence Program, dated June 17, 1969, reads, “The Black Panther Party is a notorious black extremist group which advocates and practices violence. This group has

initiated a program to feed breakfast to ghetto children.”

The Black Panther Party of Chicago emerged on the city’s West Side in 1968, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Billy “Che” Brooks, deputy minister of education for the Black Panther Party of Chicago, remembers opening Chicago’s first free breakfast program for children in April of 1969 at the Better Boys Foundation, 1512 S.

Pulaski Rd.

The program was initiated because the Panthers saw that children in their neighborhoods were going to school hungry and knew that it would affect their ability to focus and learn.

“Research had been done and it was determined the young students would learn more proficiently if they had nutrition in them. A lot of our young kids at that particular time went to school hungry. There was absolutely no programs that would allow children

to eat once they got to school,” said Brooks.

Despite the Panthers’ consistent effort to improve the quality of life in their community, the FBI Counter Intelligence memo continued, “The announced purpose of [the free breakfast program] is ‘humanitarian.’ The real purpose is, among other things, to gain control of the ghetto community, poison the minds of ghetto children with anti-white propaganda and to cloak the illegal activities of the Black Panther Party with some segment of respectability.”

But there was no ulterior motive, Brooks said. The children were going to school hungry so the Panthers found a way to feed them.

“They came and ate and went to school. We did not have any other process at all

because it was so many of them. We were rushing them in, they would get their food,

and then they were off to school. There was very little time to do anything else,” said

Brooks.

Positioning the breakfast program as a brain-washing initiative was something the

FBI did to vilify the work that the Panthers were doing in their communities, according

to Brooks.

“As far as the city of Chicago was concerned the breakfast program was probably one of the most horrific programs that they had ever seen. That year, they arrested party members who were out collecting donations. They raided our office in May of 69, they came back again in June of 69 and raided the office again.

They destroyed all our donations,” said Brooks. The raids never prevented the

Panthers from providing breakfast because they had a community behind them that didn’t want the program to fail. If the offices got raided, people in the neighborhood would come together to make sure the kids got their breakfast because they knew it was a vital program, according to Brooks.

“They wanted to portray us as something other than what we were. We were able to pull it off basically by enlisting community support,” said Brooks.

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