Ten Points and Free Breakfast: What the Black Panther Party Actually Did

Eleven children sat down to breakfast at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in West Oakland one morning in late January 1969. By the end of that week, 135 children were eating there every day. By the end of the year the Black Panther Party counted 20,000 children fed before school in cities around the country, and J. Edgar Hoover had put the breakfast program in an FBI memo as the most dangerous thing the party was doing.

The party was founded in Oakland on October 15, 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The photographs everyone has seen are the armed patrols, the berets, the leather. The daily work, for most of the party’s sixteen years, was food, medicine, and school.

The panther came from Alabama

Organizers founded the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama in 1965, and state election law required every party on the ballot to carry an emblem. The Alabama Democratic Party’s emblem was a white rooster over the slogan White Supremacy. The Lowndes County group picked a black panther, chosen, Stokely Carmichael said, for the strength and dignity of the animal. Newton and Seale took the same cat to Oakland under the founding name Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. There was never a formal organizational tie between the two.

What the Ten-Point Program said

Newton and Seale wrote the platform in October 1966 and set it in two columns, one headed What We Want and one headed What We Believe. Ten numbered demands: freedom and the power to determine the destiny of the Black community; full employment; an end to the economic robbery of that community; decent housing; an education that tells the truth about American society; exemption from military service; an end to police brutality; freedom for Black people held in prisons and jails; juries drawn from the defendant’s own community; and point ten.

We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

The document ran in every issue of the party newspaper, The Black Panther, which published from April 25, 1967 to September 16, 1980. Point 7 is the one that got photographed.

We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

The method behind point 7 was a law book. Party members carried loaded guns, which California’s open-carry law then allowed, watched police behavior in their own neighborhoods, and when officers confronted them, cited the statutes back and promised to sue any officer who violated their rights. California closed that door fast. Assemblyman Don Mulford of Oakland introduced a ban on carrying loaded firearms in public on April 5, 1967, a delegation of armed Panthers walked into the state capitol in Sacramento on May 2 to protest it, and Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act on July 28, 1967. The law was drafted to disarm men who had read the penal code carefully.

Eleven children, then 135, then 20,000

Ruth Beckford-Smith, a parishioner at St. Augustine’s, ran the first breakfast program. Working with Father Earl A. Neil, she built a menu and a kitchen that would pass a health inspection. Children got some combination of eggs, grits, bacon, toast, pancakes, sausage, and milk or juice, before school, free, with no form to fill out.

Eleven came the first morning. By the end of the week, 135 were coming every day. The party’s own count for 1969, repeated since by National Geographic among others, was 20,000 children fed in 19 cities through 23 local affiliates, and by 1971 at least 36 breakfast programs were running.

The federal government had been piloting school breakfasts since 1966 and moving slowly. Congress permanently authorized the School Breakfast Program in 1975, by which point most of the Panther kitchens had been shut down. Whether the Panthers pushed Washington into it is an open question. The sequence is on the calendar either way: six years of church basements first, then a permanent federal program.

The clinics, the ambulance, the school

Newton called them survival programs. By the sociologist Alondra Nelson’s count in Body and Soul, the party ran free health clinics in 13 cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, testing for lead poisoning and high blood pressure and treating people who had no doctor.

In the early 1970s the party began screening for sickle cell anemia, a disease that mostly affects people of African descent and that American medicine had largely ignored. At the party’s Boston clinic, a Harvard student named Mary Bassett set up a screening program around a test that was not yet in wide use. On May 16, 1972, Richard Nixon signed the National Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act.

The rest of the list is long and mostly unglamorous: clothing distribution, classes in politics and economics, self-defense and first aid instruction, rides to upstate prisons for the families of people locked up, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, an emergency-response ambulance service. The Winston-Salem chapter in North Carolina ran the ambulance, and no other chapter had one.

In 1973 the party opened the Oakland Community School at 6118 East 14th Street, directed by Ericka Huggins. It enrolled more than 150 children at its height and kept a waiting list that included children not yet born.

The food traveled, too. In April 1977, disabled activists occupied the federal building at 50 UN Plaza in San Francisco to force the government to enact Section 504, and the local Black Panther Party fed them for the duration: one hot meal delivered every day, plus supplies for two more. The 504 sit-in held for 26 days on Panther cooking.

Why the FBI cared about breakfast

Of the 295 counterintelligence actions the FBI has documented against Black political organizations, 233 were aimed at the Black Panther Party. The clearest sentence in that paperwork is about eggs. On May 15, 1969, Hoover sent a memo to field offices about the Breakfast for Children Program, saying it

represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.

Field offices went to work on a meal. In Richmond, Virginia, agents told parents the Panthers would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, parents heard the food carried venereal disease. In Chicago, police broke into a church that hosted a breakfast, destroyed the food, and urinated on it.

Publicly, Hoover called the party the greatest threat to the internal security of the country, a line PBS dates to June 15, 1969. The public statement named the security of the United States. The internal memo, a month earlier, named a breakfast line.

December 4, 1969

At 4:45 in the morning on December 4, 1969, Chicago police raided an apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street and killed Fred Hampton, who was 21, chairman of the party’s Illinois chapter and a deputy chairman of the national party. William O’Neal, the FBI’s informant inside that chapter, had drawn the Bureau a floor plan of the apartment. A coroner’s jury ruled the deaths of that morning justifiable homicide on January 21, 1970. Thirteen years later the federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago settled the survivors’ civil suit for $1.85 million, each paying a third to nine plaintiffs.

Who was actually in the party

The picture in most people’s heads is a man in a beret. A survey Bobby Seale ran in 1969 put membership at more than 60 percent women, a figure carried in the scholarship on women in the party; a Smithsonian account of the rank and file puts the share closer to half, with an average member age of 19. Both estimates describe the same organization, and both point at the people who cooked the breakfasts, staffed the clinics, taught the school, and did the administration. Malika Adams, a former Panther, said it directly:

Women ran the BPP pretty much. I don’t know how it got to be a male’s party or thought of being a male’s party. Because those things, when you really look at it in terms of society, those things are looked on as being woman things, you know, feeding children, taking care of the sick.

Elaine Brown chaired the party from 1974 to 1977, the only woman to lead it. Seale ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, finished second in a field of nine with 20 percent to the incumbent John Reading’s 50, and lost the runoff. Brown ran for Oakland City Council that year and took 30 percent, then ran again in 1975 and took 44.

Angela Davis worked with the party’s Los Angeles branch, directing political education, while keeping her Communist Party membership. She was arrested in October 1970, held for 16 months, and acquitted of all charges on June 4, 1972.

How it ended

By the late 1970s the party had contracted to Oakland, with members in prison, in exile, or dead. The Oakland Community School closed in 1982 and the party dissolved the same year, sixteen years after two men in Oakland wrote down ten demands ending in the words land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. Some accounts date the school’s final year to 1981.

Both sides wrote it down. The party printed its ten demands in every issue of its own newspaper for thirteen years. The Bureau typed up its assessment of eggs and grits on May 15, 1969 and filed it. The argument about what the Black Panther Party did has two paper trails, and they agree about the breakfast.