School Lunch Politics (28 page)

For radicals like the Black Panther Party, free lunches represented not only a useful rhetorical demand but a concrete social service as well. The Black Panther free breakfast program in Oakland, California, formed the party's central organizing strategy and stood as its most enduring legacy. When Senator George McGovern asked school lunch program administrator Rodney Leonard whether the Panthers fed more poor children than did the state of California, Leonard admitted that it was “probably true.”
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Even more moderate civil rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson saw the Black Panther free breakfast program as one of the most “creative and revolutionary” food programs in the country. Unlike the National School Lunch Program in which, as the CSLP discovered, poor children were regularly embarrassed or humiliated, Jackson observed that “the only prerequisite to eat a Black Panther breakfast is to be hungry.”
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Jackson adopted the free lunch demand as part of his own Operation Breadbasket agenda. Leading demonstrators to the Illinois state capitol in 1968, he charged that legislators who sent “sons and fathers” to fight in Vietnam neglected the children in their own country. Unlike the Black Panther strategy of building independent community institutions, however, Jackson's Poor People's Campaign focused its energies toward wresting resources out of federal and state governments.
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In response to mounting grass-roots pressure, Agriculture Secretary Freeman promised quick action to bring free lunches to poor children. Freeman clearly preferred to work with the women's groups than to deal with more militant anti-hunger activists. He praised
Their Daily Bread
as “by all odds the most accurate and constructive” report.
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Other critics, he charged, including the CBS program
Hunger USA,
promoted “misinformation” and “misunderstanding” and distorted the department's achievements. Freeman demanded that the network air corrections to its “oversimplified, and misleading picture.” The secretary similarly accused reporter Nick Kotz of “making a major muck-raking enterprise out of picking at our programs.” Kotz's reports, Freeman said, were “pathetic word pictures of the people we are not yet reaching.” He declared that he and his department were “doing everything we can” to reach those children but admitted that there was room for change in the program. He conspicuously invited CSLP representatives, rather than PPC leaders, to serve on a liaison committee to help draft new school lunch guidelines.
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Over the course of the next twelve months, debate both inside and outside Congress focused on transforming the scope and operation of the National School Lunch Program. The CSLP's Jean Fairfax, along with NCJW representative Florence Robins, regularly appeared at congressional hearings and public forums to promote their report and to lobby for increased funding for free lunches. The women were given a warm welcome by legislators. Even liberal stalwart George McGovern opined that the women's report was reasoned and that critics such as those who produced “Hunger USA” were “a little long in the criticism of the adequacy of the human welfare job Agriculture has done and short on praise of the agriculture sector for doing all it has done.”
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The Department of Agriculture, McGovern said, “is not a welfare agency in the sense of immediate and direct aid to the poor.” This, of course, was the heart of the matter.

Ultimately, grass-roots pressure resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of poor children receiving free or reduced price meals. Although Congress kept level the federal overall school lunch appropriation (i.e., operating costs, meal subsidies, and food donations), in the spring of 1968 it approved $32 million to be used to expand the school lunch program in impoverished areas and those with “a high concentration of working mothers or mothers enrolled in job training programs.”
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A month later the Senate approved funds for pre-school lunch programs in poverty areas as well. Finally, in January 1969, the annual school lunch appropriation for regular lunches was increased to $50 million and an additional $5 million was authorized for “needy” children.
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From a funding level of $146 million in 1965, the National School Lunch Program appropriation grew to $226 million in 1973, and the School Breakfast Program grew from $3.5 million in 1969 to $18 million in 1973.
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Congress declared that all children below the federal poverty level should receive free lunches. The states now had to provide free meals for children whose family incomes were up to 25 percent above the poverty line, and reduced price meals for those families with incomes up to 50 percent above poverty level.
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T
ABLE
7.1
Children Participating in the National School Lunch Program, 1947–85 (in millions)

Source:
“Child Nutrition Programs: Issues for the 101st Congress,”
School Food Service Research Review
13, no. 1 (Spring 1989): Table 11, p. 38. United States Census Bureau, The 2007 Statistical Abstract, The National Data Book, School Enrollment, No. HS-20, Education Summary, Enrollment, 1900–2001 and Projections, 2001.

 

 

 

The impact of the new lunch budget was dramatic. To continue receiving federal subsidies, local school districts, particularly those in low-income communities, had to vastly increase their free meal service. In Pennsylvania, for example, the number of free meals jumped from 25,000 per month to almost 2.8 million.
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Philadelphia provided 10,000 meals in fifty schools. The city of Dallas increased the number of free lunches from a mere 2,000 to over 14,000 within a year.
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In St. Louis, the percentage of free lunches increased from four to over 60 within a year.
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Providence added 1,000 free meals a day; Wilmington, Delaware, 600; and Portland, Oregon, 2,400. Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, and Oklahoma City began to serve free lunches to poor children. Chicago opened a central kitchen to provide lunches for thirty-eight inner-city schools without cafeteria facilities (see
Table 7.1
).
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But increased federal funding for free lunches did not immediately alter the way school lunchrooms operated. For one thing, the federal mandate did not contain sufficient new funds for general lunchroom operation. This meant that local districts and states had to come up with their own funding sources in order to be able to feed all children identified as poor in their districts. Because most school lunch programs relied on children's fees to cover costs, many administrators simply tried to raise meal prices for paying children. Under the new federal rules, however, the maximum that any school could charge for lunch was 20 cents.
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The second problem was that while the federal government mandated that free lunches be available to all poor children, the Department of Agriculture was slow to articulate eligibility standards and even slower to issue operating guidelines about how poor children were to be treated.
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Grass-roots activists, taking up the CSLP findings, demanded that the states assume a more prominent role in providing free lunches to poor children. States for too long had relied on surplus food and children's fees. “The real secret to expanding the ability of schools to serve lunch to all those who need it but cannot afford it, and ultimately perhaps to make school food service universal,” John Kramer, executive director of the National Council on Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States, noted, “is to prompt State governments to put up their fair share of the cost.” This would happen, he believed, only if state and local governments “are either confronted by an outraged, politically potent citizenry or are subject to federally imposed stringent matching rules.”
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Most states, however, dragged their feet when it came to appropriating funds for school lunches. As a result, anti-poverty groups across the country mounted demands for new state funding. In Illinois, Jesse Jackson led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Operation Breadbasket in a demonstration to the state legislature in Springfield. The Committee for the Hungry Child in Detroit, the Mingo County, West Virginia, Hot Lunch Strike Committee, and the Tucson, Arizona, Free Lunch Committee challenged local officials to feed poor children. In Houston, high school students organized themselves and threatened to boycott the schools. Coalitions in Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa launched coordinated campaigns during the summer of 1969 to demand state funding for free lunch programs.
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ELIGIBILITY STANDARDS AND THE RIGHT TO LUNCH

Frustrated by the slow pace of change in school lunchrooms, the Poor People's Campaign, along with the Citizen's Crusade, threatened a national mobilization for the “right to lunch” and promised “an endless string of litigation directed at securing a meal for every needy pupil in every community in the Country.”
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Across the country grass-roots groups began to agitate for free lunch programs. By the end of 1969, the National Council on Hunger and Malnutrition documented lawsuits throughout the country. These suits focused national attention on two issues: the reluctance of local officials to put resources into school lunches and the continued paternalism and discrimination that characterized rules regarding which children were eligible for free lunches. Even moderate anti-hunger groups were frustrated with local and state officials who refused to supplement federal dollars with local funds in order to provide services for poor children. At the same time, anti-hunger activists, influenced by a newly emerging welfare rights movement, focused increasingly on issues of dignity and fair treatment by public officials.
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The call for a right to lunch mirrored a growing welfare rights movement during the late 1960s. Demanding not only access to government benefits but respect and dignity as well, this movement directly challenged federal bureaucratic offices and regulations. Women on welfare organized the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) to mobilize welfare recipients and to educate women regarding eligibility standards and application procedures for food stamps, Aid to Dependent Children, and other federal benefits. In 1969 the group put out a pamphlet entitled “The New School Lunch Program Bill of Rights,” which listed the following “rights”:

1. The right to have every school operate a school lunch program.

2. The right that all poor school children receive their lunches for free or at a reduced price.

3. The right to make sure that children receiving free or reduced price lunches and breakfasts will not be discriminated against in any way.

4. The right to be told by school district officials about the rules and administration of the school lunch program.

5. The right to prevent school administrators from prying into your personal life, or asking irrelevant questions when your children apply for free lunches.

6. The right to get your free lunches immediately, without being investigated or forced to prove eligibility.

7. The right to appeal a denial of free lunch benefits or any other administrative decision that adversely affects a student.

8. The right to have the appeal decided fairly and by an impartial referee.

9. The right to a good and nutritious school lunch.

10. The right to fair and equal treatment, free from discrimination based on race, poverty, color or religion.

11. The right to assure that children and families of children receiving free school lunches have the same constitutional rights as everyone else.

The pamphlet offered specific information on free lunch eligibility including income and family size, provided guidelines for filling out the federal application forms, and gave phone numbers to call if federal or state officials did not comply or if applicants were not treated with dignity and respect. It also suggested things to do “in case your rights are violated,” including organizing hearings and pressuring local politicians and state agencies. If all else failed, the Bill of Rights advised, “bring law suits.”
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The results of the widespread mobilization for free lunches were mixed. In Illinois, Jesse Jackson's coalition forced the state legislature to appropriate $5.4 million for free lunches. The Baltimore, Maryland, FOOD (Feeding Our Own Deprived) Committee, made up of “clergy, junior leaguers, and just plain folks,” pressured the governor to contribute $1.5 million in state funds for free lunch programs. In Memphis, where the school board had never contributed local funds to children's lunches, a broad-based citizens' coalition ranging from welfare rights activists to Junior Leaguers forced the school board to appropriate $150,000 of its Title I funds to provide lunches for poor children.
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Gary, Indiana, and Wichita, Kansas, began entirely new free lunch programs, and Detroit promised to provide food service in seventy schools where no lunch programs had existed before.
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John Perryman, lauding the grass-roots efforts, said, “For the first time in history we have had the courage to say that matching funds for the federal dollars shall not come alone from the nickels and dimes of the children, but also from state matching funds.”
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