The Black Panther Party’s (BPP) free breakfast program for children began in Seattle first and next in Oakland in 1968. Panther founder Huey P. Newton asked cofounder Bobby Seale to announce the free breakfast program is a national initiative in 1969. The BPP’s Chicago chapter organized a grocery giveaway event in remembrance of the police murder of Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark December 1969 in Chicago. The event had been successful in educating and and mobilizing citizens about the BPP. The BPP Central committee in Oakland learned about it and repurposed it as another party wide food related survival program. And that is how it went, local BPP chapters created programs that worked and thereafter the national headquarters in Oakland made them national programs.
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