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[...] the free breakfast programs highlighted the fact that hunger impeded a child’s ability to learn. Politically, the breakfasts shed light on the government’s failure to address childhood poverty and hunger—pointing to the limits of the nation’s War on Poverty. The U.S. government spent only $60…

Polly Graham knew about hardship and struggle. In the 1940s, she had been part of a failed attempt to organize low-wage black workers in the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Factory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. But virulent anti-unionism, magnified by racism and anti-Communist hysteria, had beaten that …

But by 1968, even in “Bloody Lowndes,” the political dynamic had changed.26 As the Civil Rights Movement dismantled Jim Crow through the mid-1960s, it ironically undercut its own viability as an insurgent movement. Whereas activists could sit in at lunch counters or sit black and white together on …

When the Man walks up and says we are anti-white, I scratch my head, I say, “. . . what does he mean by that?” He says, “Well, I mean, you hate white people.” I say, “Me? Hate a white person?” I say, “Wait a minute, man, let’s back up a little bit. That’s your game. That’s the Ku Klux Klan’s game.”…

Building on the political strategy they had developed in facing legal challenges after the Sacramento action, Newton and the Panthers insisted on a political approach to the trial. They would follow the law to the letter and strive to exonerate Huey through legal channels, to “exhaust all legal mea…