"WIC", which stands for Women, Infant & Children, is a federal nutrition program to help families of all races across the country with low-cost food products, but did you know that WIC was created by the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s? Some of the foods that are a part of the WIC program are milk, eggs, yogurt, wheat bread, cheese, and more.
According to Gabriel Scott, a respected lecturer and historian, other programs that the Black Panther Party created were The Free Breakfast Program for hungry children, Free Health Clinic, Free Employment Program, Free Ambulance Program, GED classes, Visiting Nurses Program, and much more. Their most popular one was The Free Breakfast Program that started in 1969, by the leadership of founders, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.The initial purpose of the Black Panther Party's establishment was to fight police brutality and exercise their right to self-defense. What began as a revolutionary organization, quickly turned into a social organization as well. They fed free breakfast to thousands of children every day before school.
It gained so much attention, that the politics and revolutionary tactics of the Black Panthers were less threatening and intimidating to the government than the free meals they were giving out. However, it did not stop FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, from organizing a counterintelligence program (CointelPro), to sabotage and destroy the Black Panther Party and everything they had established.
People tend to have the wrong perception of who the Black Panthers were and represented. They were a revolutionary group, not a supremacy group that operated in hate. They did a lot more "good" for the public than anything else.
