As people watch, or rewatch on the occasion of the Oscars, Judas and the Black Messiah, it is important to reject the assimilation of Fred Hampton into the liberal imagination of what revolutionary change looks like. Even before the film was released the stripping of Hampton’s revolutionary vision was being criticized. Akin Olla’s article “Fred Hampton Was a Radical Revolutionary. Judas and the Black Messiah Ignores That” in The Guardian circulated widely and is worth a read.

Throughout the film, Hampton is shown advocating for expanding the Black Panther Party Survival Programs, but the conception of these programs is never explained. Without understanding the ideological underpinnings of these programs, there is nothing to distinguish them from reformist social-uplift strategies. Without understanding what the Free Breakfast Program and what the Black Panther Party worked to achieve, it is impossible to see them as a threat to American and global capitalism. To see the assassination of Fred Hampton as an overreaction of the state is to misrecognize what happened. Fred Hampton was a threat to the state because he wanted to end the racism and capitalism that maintain American society. To deny this directs us toward individual rather than structural and institutional change.

After Hampton was murdered the Panthers invited the community to see for themselves the horror of what had happened. One of those who went in “a rickety sedan to join the Chicago chapter in their remembrance of their murdered leader” was Mumia Abu-Jamal, a young Black Panther from Philadelphia. He reported what he saw upon his return to Philly and later in his history of the Black Panther Party We Want Freedom. (Listen to Mumia speak about that experience.)

In We Want Freedom, Mumia Abu-Jamal provides what Judas and the Black Messiah fails to deliver, the revolutionary context of the Free Breakfast and other Survival Programs of the Black Panther Party:  

“The Police-alert Patrols were a hit with Black Oaklanders and undoubtedly led to increased membership in the Party. Yet this was just one program out of many that the organization established.

By 1968 the Seattle chapter had instituted its Free Breakfast for Children Program, where Panthers gathered food (often from supportive neighborhood merchants), assembled the necessary personnel, and cooked breakfasts for neighborhood kids. The average breakfast, though nothing fancy, filled the belly and was far more than most could find at home. It consisted of fried eggs, toast, a few slips of bacon, and grits. Oftentimes, community members would volunteer to help with these efforts. Due to its popularity in the community and strong support by the Party, demonstrated by an order issued by Chairman Seale, every chapter or branch had a breakfast program by 1969.

The Free Breakfast for Children Program was, by far, the most popular of all the Party programs. It also served as a unique opportunity for the secular BPP and the Black church to establish a working relationship since most breakfast programs were situated within neighborhood churches and staffed by Panther men and women. Father Earl Neil, a Black priest assigned to Oakland’s St. Augustine Episcopal Church, was an early and vocal supporter of the Black Panther Party and made some interesting comparisons between the Party and the traditional church:

Black preachers have got to stop preaching about a kingdom in the hereafter which is a “land flowing with milk and honey” … we must deal with concrete conditions and survival in this life! The Black Panther Party … has merely put into operation the survival program that the Church should have been doing anyway. The efforts of the Black Panther Party are consistent with what God wants …(8)

The Breakfast Programs had other less obvious yet equally beneficial effects. Getting up early to serve neighborhood kids and spending some time with them before they were bundled up for school gave many Panthers a real example of what we were working for—our people’s future. Most Panthers, fresh out of high school, didn’t have children and thought of them, if at all, abstractly. The program, filled five days a week with smiling, sniffling young boys and girls, lifted our hearts at the beginning of the day, steeling us to hit the streets to sell The Black Panther or enabling us to go to other community programs with a bounce in our steps. One may not spend time around children and not be lightened by the experience.

As the Breakfast program succeeded so did the Party, and its popularity fueled our growth across the country. Along with the growth of the Party came an increase in the number of community programs undertaken by the Party. By 1971, the Party had embarked on ten distinctive community programs, described by Newton as survival programs. What did he mean by this term?

We called them survival programs pending revolution. They were designed to help the people survive until their consciousness is raised, which is only the first step in the revolution to produce a new America.… During a flood the raft is a life-saving device, but it is only a means of getting to higher ground. So, too, with survival programs, which are emergency services. In themselves they do not change social conditions, but they are life-saving vehicles until conditions change.(9)

Among these programs were the Intercommunal News Service (1967); the Petition Drive for Community Control of Cops (1968); Liberation Schools, later called Intercommunal Youth Institutes, (1969); People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinic (1969); Free Clothing Program (1970); Free Busing to Prisons Program (1970); Seniors Against Fearful Environment (SAFE) Program (1971); Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation (1971); and Free Housing Cooperative Program (1971).

In later years, the Party would initiate other programs including Free Shoe Programs, Free Ambulance Services, Free Food Programs, and Home Maintenance Programs.

While clearly every branch of the Party didn’t offer all of these programs, most did operate the basics: a free breakfast program, a clinic, and a free clothing program. The bigger chapters, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, tended to provide the widest range of community services, while smaller branches tended to concentrate on the most popular programs.

While these programs were definitely political, they were conceived of as instruments to promote the political development and radicalization of the people, Newton understood that they had practical applications as well: serving human needs. As one who grew up in the ghetto, Newton understood the very real poverty and subsistence issues affecting many in the community:

The masses of Black people have always been deeply entrenched and involved in the basic necessities of life. They have not had time to abstract their situation. Abstractions come only with leisure. The people have not had the luxury of leisure. Therefore, the people have been very aware of the true definition of politics: politics are merely the desire of individuals and groups to satisfy first, their basic needs—food, shelter and clothing, and security for themselves and their loved ones.(10)

In Kansas City, Missouri, the Black Panther Party opened its Free Community Clinic and named it for the slain Bobby Hutton, the Party’s first martyr, killed by Oakland cops as he surrendered with Eldridge Cleaver on April 6, 1968. BPP affiliates in Brooklyn, Harlem, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago, and Rockford, Illinois, followed suit. Members of the Health Ministries received rudimentary health care and first aid training in order to staff the clinics, but professional help was necessary also. In many cities, community-minded physicians were found who opened up their offices in our clinics, donating time and services to the most depressed communities. Dr. Tolbert Small, for example, contributed his time and efforts to the Oakland clinic.(11) In Philadelphia, a kind, thoughtful, and gentle man named Dr. Vaslavek staffed the clinic.

For most Panthers, our lives in the Party were dedicated to community service. That meant long, sustained work to keep our community programs running, but it also meant battling the State when it came at us with paramilitary attacks, unjust arrests, and, perhaps most often, legal battles in which the State attempted to utilize its judiciary machinery to destroy or disrupt Party organizing efforts.

Sometimes, however, community service meant trying to push the revolutionary struggle further, to create beachheads of focused communal resistance, to create a climate conducive to change.”

To read more, get We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party, by Mumia Abu-Jamal with an Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver.

8. Neal, “Church and Survival Programs,” 11.
9. Newton, To Die For the People, 89. 
10. Newton, To Die For the People, 89. 
11. Abron, “Serving the People,” 184.