Charles Bursey hands a plate of food to a child seated at a Free Breakfast Program. Photograph courtesy of Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch. National Geographic.
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The Free Breakfast Program, launched by the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, aimed to reduce hunger and improve student learning in majority Black communities. The Panthers partnered with local churches and organizations to provide free and healthy breakfasts to children. As part of a bigger effort to provide Black communities with free health services, the Program also helped spread Black Power beliefs in self-reliant Black communities and fulfilled needs in urban areas that government services had failed to address. Feeding hundreds of thousands of children in dozens of American cities, the Free Breakfast Program outpaced school breakfast programs and won the Panthers more community support. Although it ended in the late 1970s after years of interference by the FBI and other agencies, the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program helped pressure the government to expand free and reduced price school lunches and later begin offering free school breakfasts as well.
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