The FBI feared the Panthers' free breakfasts more than their guns
She says calls to copy the breakfast program, including in poor white communities, worried Hoover.
Global News Podcast · President Macron vows to punish French riotersWhen Huey Newton, who helped start the Black Panther Party, asked fellow Panther Ericka Huggins to request the party's files from the government in the late 1960s, many cartons arrived. Huggins said one document stood out: "a letter from J. Edgar Hoover to his operatives in field offices and informants."
According to Huggins, Hoover wrote, "You know, I'm not worried about the Black Panther Party talking about self-defense in its communities. It's that breakfast program that concerned me."
What Huggins means, she says, is that the Panthers were winning support by doing practical work. Photographer Stephen Shames, who documented the party, said he was drawn to the Panthers because they did specific, concrete things while other campus groups only talked abstractly about revolution. The Panthers set up free medical help, ambulance support, and morning meals for schoolchildren who needed food.
Shames said he photographed happy children at the breakfasts, including two little white children, and said the Panthers welcomed everyone. Huggins said calls to copy the effort in other places, even in low income white neighborhoods, worried Hoover.
"He was a smart man," Huggins says of Hoover. "We were young Black people doing this and getting support for it, and that was a threat."
The Panthers, formed in 1966, were a revolutionary group for people impatient with the slow gains from peaceful protest tied to Martin Luther King and the broader struggle for civil rights. Leading figures faced grave criminal accusations, including homicide, and in 1969, 27 members died in gunfire involving officers. Huggins says when the Panthers responded to violence, they were treated as the makers of the violence. "If someone kicks your door down, comes in with guns, and wants to harm you and whoever lives there of whatever age, it is okay for you to try at least to defend yourself," she says. "When we respond to violence, we're considered the violence makers."
Questions people ask
What did the Panthers' breakfast program actually do?
The Free Breakfast for Children program began in Oakland in 1969 and spread to chapters across the country. Panthers and volunteers served full breakfasts before school, often in churches and community centers, and organizers said tens of thousands of children were fed. Federal officials later started a national free school breakfast program, though historians debate how directly the Panthers influenced it.
Did the FBI act against the Panthers beyond writing memos?
Yes. Hoover oversaw the FBI's counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO, which surveilled, infiltrated, and sought to disrupt the Panthers and other political groups. Tactics included informants, anonymous letters meant to create splits, and coordination with local police. Several congressional investigations in the 1970s later found many of those methods improper.
Who is Ericka Huggins?
Huggins joined the Los Angeles chapter of the party in 1968 while still in high school and later became a leader in Oakland. She spent two years in jail awaiting trial on charges that were eventually dismissed, and she later directed the party's Oakland Community School. She has since worked as an educator, writer, and speaker on community care and meditation.