The Bay Area is known to be the birthplace of numerous vital social justice movements that have spread across the country. One of the most influential movements to come out of the Bay Area was the childrens free breakfast program that was founded by the Black Panther Party (BPP) right here in Oakland in 1969. The program was created after BPP members saw firsthand the disproportionate, and often overlooked, effects of food insecurity among Black children in the Bay Area. They understood that children could not excel in school if they were hungry, and intended to send a message to the government that they were not properly assisting impoverished communities and children. The program was advertised as “self-defense against hunger,” and educated Black youth about the ways that Black students had been historically discouraged and disempowered to engage in their academics.
One of the most influential leaders of the BPP’s free breakfast movement in Oakland was city native Ruth Beckford. Ruth Beckford was a parishioner at the Saint Augustine Episcopial Church in Oakland, and was the person who initially asked the priest if the BPP could serve breakfast there daily to neighborhood children. She took charge of the effort to ensure that the kitchen was up to code, and created a nutritionally balanced menu for the kids to enjoy. Some of the children who were first served by the program had never had a breakfast meal in their life. Starting the free breakfast program was only one of the many incredible things that Ruth Beckford accomplished in her lifetime. She was an integral part of the Bay Area community throughout her life, and was one of the first people to teach Afro-Haitian dance classes in the Bay. She remains a local legend among the dance community and is one of the earliest champions to bring African dance into mainstream Bay Area culture.
As the free breakfast program grew in success, other chapters were started throughout the country. By November of 1969, around 20,000 children were being served by the program across the United States. Supporters of the Panther Party began helping to manage the efforts to serve more children. The FBI dubbed the program one of the BPP’s “most dangerous” because of its monumental success in serving the Black communities who were in need of help that the state did not provide. The FBI continuously tried to denounce the program as criminal, up until it was successfully derailed in the early 1970s.
The federal adoption of a nationwide effort to serve free breakfast for all children in schools started almost immediately after the disbanding of the BPP’s program. The School Breakfast Program was officially authorized in 1975, and today serves over 14.5 million children before school every day. The federal government does not acknowledge the BPP as being the inspiration and catalyst for a nationwide breakfast program.
So the next time you enjoy a free meal here at school, or remember snacking on a bowl of cereal from the gray breakfast bins in middle school, I ask you to remember the struggles that have been fought in the past to ensure that our communities are fed, and our are children are empowered to achieve in school each day.