Did the Black Panthers develop a national program providing free meals for schoolchildren?
By Austin Tannenbaum
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YES
The U.S. government established a national school-lunch program to provide low-cost or free lunches at schools in 1946, and twenty years later added a pilot program offering breakfasts. The Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, began to supplement the federal efforts with its own free-breakfast program in Black communities, serving thousands of children in different cities. The breakfast program ran into harassment from the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover, who assailed the program as a propaganda tool as he sought to shut down what he saw as a subversive organization.
The federal government expanded its breakfast program in the early 1970s and permanently authorized it in 1975.
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