![]() "Right now," Bobby Seale, chairman and co-founder of the party said last week, "we are feeding over 1,000 kids every day right here in the Bay Area." Seale added that the program, which was also operating in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles, Kansas City and other major cities, feeds 10,000 children daily. The project involves at least six cities in the state. In the Bay Area, every chapter of the Black Panther Party is involved in providing free breakfasts for children. The New York Times reported in June 1969: The breakfast program provided the opportunity to show a kinder, gentler side of the party, albeit still fraught with revolutionary politics. Edgar Hoover called BPP "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country"), press coverage of the Panthers was overwhelmingly negative, focusing exclusively on their militant rhetoric and violent confrontations with police. From its inception as an armed, revolutionary organization in 1966 (J. The roll-out of the Free Breakfast for Children program marked a turning point, however short-lived, in the Black Panthers' public image. One also finds the claim repeated on web sites such as Counter Current News and Urban Intellectuals, who cite as evidence a list of 65 community programs allegedly created by the Black Panthers during their heyday, including a "WIC (Women Infants, and Children) Program."īut though it's easily corroborated that the Panthers launched a community food program in 1968 called Free Breakfast for Children, an effort some believe provided inspiration for the federal government's school breakfast program (if not for WIC itself), we could find no evidence that the Panthers ever operated a program called WIC, or which bore any close resemblance to the USDA program. ![]() Here it is in meme form, as posted in February 2017 recognition of Black History Month: According to this narrative, the program grew out of (or was at least inspired by) organized efforts by the Black Panther Party (BPP) to help feed single mothers and their children in predominantly African-American communities in the late 1960s. There is an alternative account of how WIC came about, however. After some pilot programs launched by the Nixon administration failed to produce the desired results, a bill containing the WIC amendment and improvements to existing school nutrition programs was passed by Congress in 1972. A 1969 report by the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health concluded that hunger and poverty existed on a "disgraceful scale" across the United States, and urged the federal government to take immediate action to close the "hunger gap" among poorer Americans. Impetus for the legislation is usually credited to an accumulating body of research in the 1960s identifying hunger and malnutrition as a major national problem. Initially funded as a two-year pilot program, WIC was permanently reauthorized by Congress in 1975 and today offers federal grants to states for "supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk." The program is administrated by the U.S. The Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (known as WIC for short), a federal program that provides nutritional assistance to malnourished mothers and children, was enacted in 1972 as an amendment to the Child Nutrition Act of 1966.
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