U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation
Hoover Memo on Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children Program
SAC, May 15, 1969

PERSONAL ATTENTION TO ALL OFFICES

Director, FBI

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM
BLACK NATIONALIST - HATE GROUPS

The Breakfast for Children Program (BCP) has been instituted by the BPP in several cities to provide a stable breakfast for ghetto children. ... The program has met with some success and has resulted in considerable favorable publicity for the BPP. ... The resulting publicity tends to portray the BPP in a favorable light and clouds the violent nature of the group and its ultimate aim of insurrection. The BCP promotes at least tacit support for the BPP among naive individuals ... and, what is more distressing, provides the BPP with a ready audience composed of highly impressionable youths. ... Consequently, the BCP represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities ... to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.