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The FBI field office suggested sending the letter to Fort rather than Hampton because Fort was more likely to respond with violence: “It is believed the above may intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups and occasion Fort to take retaliatory action which could disrupt the [Black Pan…

Field offices quickly responded to Hoover with plans for escalating the conflict, and the Los Angeles office reported back to Hoover, “The Los Angeles Office is currently preparing an anonymous letter for Bureau approval which will be sent to the Los Angeles Black Panther Party supposedly from a me…

[...] 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 …