🤯 Julio Lafuente was a Spanish architect who worked mainly in Italy. This is a summer cabin he built with structural engineer Gaetano Rebecchini on Capocotta beach near Rome in 1965. We have never seen anything like it. What a playful to stack bunkers!
In 1969, a group of children sat down to a free breakfast
before school. On the menu: chocolate milk, eggs, meat, cereal and fresh
oranges. The scene wouldn’t be out of place in a school cafeteria these
days—but the federal government wasn’t providing the food. Instead,
breakfast was served thanks to the Black Panther Party.
At the time, the militant black nationalist party was
vilified in the news media and feared by those intimidated by its
message of black power and its commitment to ending police brutality and
the subjugation of black Americans. But for students eating breakfast,
the Black Panthers’ politics were less interesting than the meals they
were providing.
“The children, many of whom had never eaten breakfast before the Panthers started their program,” the Sun Reporterwrote, “think the Panthers are ‘groovy’ and ‘very nice’ for doing this for them.”
The program may have been groovy, but its purpose was to
fuel revolution by encouraging black people’s survival. From 1969
through the early 1970s, the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for School
Children Program fed tens of thousands of hungry kids. It was just one
facet of a wealth of social programs created by the party—and it helped
contribute to the existence of federal free breakfast programs today.
When Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby
Seale founded the party in 1966, their goal was to end police brutality
in Oakland. But a faction of the Civil Rights Movement led by SNCC
member Stokeley Carmichael began calling for the uplift and
self-determination of African-Americans, and soon black power was part
of their platform.
At first, the Black Panther Party primarily organized
neighborhood police patrols that took advantage of open-carry laws, but
over time its mandate expanded to include social programs, too.
Free Breakfast For School Children was one of the most
effective. It began in January 1969 at an Episcopal church in Oakland,
and within weeks it went from feeding a handful of kids to hundreds. The
program was simple: party members and volunteers went to local grocery
stores to solicit donations, consulted with nutritionists on healthful
breakfast options for children, and prepared and served the food free of
charge.
School officials immediately reported results in kids who
had free breakfast before school. “The school principal came down and
told us how different the children were,” Ruth Beckford, a parishioner
who helped with the program, said later. “They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps.”
Soon, the program had been embraced by party outposts
nationwide. At its peak, the Black Panther Party fed thousands of
children per day in at least 45 programs. (Food wasn’t the only part of
the BPP’s social programs; they expanded to cover everything from free medical clinics to community ambulance services and legal clinics.)
For the party, it was an opportunity to counter its
increasingly negative image in the public consciousness—an image of
intimidating Afroed black men holding guns—while addressing a critical
community need. “I mean, nobody can argue with free grits,” said
filmmaker Roger Guenveur Smith in A Huey P. Newton Story, a 2001 film in which he portrays Newton.
Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head
J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war
against them in 1969. He called
the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities
to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte
blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.
The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went
door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP
members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes
historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected
with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by
officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and
participating children were photographed by Chicago police.
“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”
Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black
Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility
of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders
to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American
children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member
Norma Amour Mtume toldEater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.
Though the USDA had piloted free breakfast efforts
since the mid 1960s, the program only took off in the early 1970s—right
around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975,
the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it
helps feed over 14.57 million children before school—and without the radical actions of the Black Panthers, it may never have happened.
On this day, 16 May 1967, the All Circles Struggle Committee (ACSC) was established in Hong Kong in the wake of violent police repression of a strike of plastic flower factory workers.
On May 6, British colonial police violently beat picketing workers and bystanders, causing mass outrage. Protests and clashes with police began breaking out across the city. After the ACSC was set up to coordinate a movement against colonialism, 126 struggle committees had been formed within the next two days to share experiences and plan action. A week later, wildcat strikes began to break out, with widespread rioting. In June, a general strike was called, which eventually faltered although strikes in some industries continued until late July.
As the strike collapsed, many protesters began resorting to bomb attacks – both real and fake – targeting British authorities to cause chaos and disrupt business as usual. The “Hong Kong riots,” as they became known, lasted until December before they were called off after secret talks between British authorities and the Communist Party of China. The CPC were nominally opposed to British colonialism, but in reality the Chinese economy benefited from having access to international markets through British Hong Kong and so they eventually decided not to push for British withdrawal.
While the protests ended, in their wake British authorities implemented numerous reforms which significantly improved the lives of working class Hong Kongers. These included UK-style social benefits for the unemployed, the disabled and the elderly, construction of new hospitals and homes, abolition of some sexist laws, and rampant police corruption was largely eradicated.
Learn more in our podcast about the Hong Kong riots: https://workingclasshistory.com/2019/07/15/e26-27-the-hong-kong-riots-1967/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1427475690770910/?type=3
On this day, 14 May 1940, Emma Goldman, legendary anarchist and advocate of women’s rights and sexual freedom, died in Toronto, Canada aged 70.
Born to a Jewish family in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, she emigrated to the US, where she became known as “Red Emma.” She was an electrifying public speaker and an extremely competent propagandist, who was arrested countless times for her activism and was described by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as the “most dangerous woman in America.”
In the 1890s she helped run an ice cream shop with her companion Alexander Berkman, who then tried to assassinate an industrialist who had had striking workers killed. When Berkman was imprisoned, Goldman helped organise an audacious jailbreak attempt, digging a tunnel into the prison from a nearby house, although it was unsuccessful.
She was eventually deported from the US because of her activities to Russia, where she joined the revolution, although she became critical of the Bolshevik state when they began repressing workers’ strikes and protests. Later she travelled to Spain to aid in the fight against fascism during the Spanish civil war, and remained active until the end.
We have some of her work, as well as posters and more, available in our online store: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/feminism/emma-goldman
Pictured: a young Emma Goldman https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1425633067621839/?type=3
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
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