![]() ![]() “My grandmother was a numbers runner, and she paid off the cops,” Jennings recounted. ![]() “I couldn’t articulate it, but that’s how I felt.”Īs is often the case for Panther members, the regularity of police violence and corruption also played a role. “At that time, we were ‘the Negro people,’ and ‘Negro’ always felt nasty, dirty, inferior, and sub to me,” said Jennings, now a professor of literature. A significant piece of the puzzle was her hatred of being called a “Negro.” She couldn’t stand Negro History Week, in part because of how white classmates mocked the idea of it. ‘I didn’t know what those brothers were saying, but I knew it was tough’Ĭoming up in a Point Breeze rowhouse off 19th and Annin streets, there were a range of events that would come to figure into Jennings’ political outlook. “We cannot wait for this country to tell the real truth, they won’t do it.” “Black people have to tell their own story,” she said. Jennings looks forward to sharing first-hand accounts of this and other scenes she said often seem relegated to history books - books that don’t get the impact of those actions right. Under the aegis of Hoover, local police began destroying some of the food gathered to feed people, “or they would threaten the neighborhood grocery stores,” she told Billy Penn. Edgar Hoover to dub the group “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The program’s popularity - and its role in earning the Panthers the respect of many moderate Black folks and even some white liberals -is considered the final straw that moved then-FBI Director J. One of just a few mandatory actions for each chapter, in its first few years the program fed thousands of poor children (and others) on a weekly basis. There’s lots to discuss about the Panthers’ free breakfast initiative, which had a wide-ranging impact. That’s the mission of the library’s Culinary Literacy Center, according to Abigail Weil, an instruction librarian with the CLC who received a civic engagement grant from the Thomas Harrison Skelton Foundation to put the program together. ![]()
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