“Feeding the Revolution”: the Black Panther Party, Hunger, and Community Survival

Abstract

This article situates concerns of hunger and food access at the center of Black Panther Party efforts to organize poor black communities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning with free breakfast programs for schoolchildren, Panther community food initiatives, the most celebrated of the Party’s “survival programs,” worked to neutralize the power of hunger to inhibit the physical development, educational advancement, and political engagement of the urban poor. In conceptualizing and executing these projects, the Panthers forged unlikely alliances while sparking persistent police and FBI repression. Programs and campaigns such as these acknowledged and resisted the function of hunger in maintaining structures of white privilege and black oppression, politicizing hunger and malnutrition by framing them as intended outcomes of institutional racism.