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
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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
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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,
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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
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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 socioeconomic 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
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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.
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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 smallscale, 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
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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
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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
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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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