Power Hungry
Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Two unsung women whose power using food as a political weapon during the civil rights movement was so great it brought the ire of government agents working against them
In early 1969 Cleo Silvers and a few Black Panther Party members met at a community center laden with boxes of donated food to cook for the neighborhood children. By the end of the year, the Black Panthers would be feeding more children daily in all of their breakfast programs than the state of California was at that time.
More than a thousand miles away, Aylene Quin had spent the decade using her restaurant in McComb, Mississippi, to host secret planning meetings of civil rights leaders and organizations, feed the hungry, and cement herself as a community leader who could bring people together—physically and philosophically—over a meal.
These two women's tales, separated by a handful of years, tell the same story: how food was used by women as a potent and necessary ideological tool in both the rural south and urban north to create lasting social and political change. The leadership of these women cooking and serving food in a safe space for their communities was so powerful, the FBI resorted to coordinated extensive and often illegal means to stop the efforts of these two women, and those using similar tactics, under COINTELPRO--turning a blind eye to the firebombing of the children of a restaurant owner, destroying food intended for poor kids, and declaring a community breakfast program a major threat to public safety.
But of course, it was never just about the food.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
NYU writing professor Cope rescues two female activists from obscurity in this intriguing look at the role that food played in the civil rights and Black Power movements. Contending that preparing and serving food provided a crucial means of fostering a sense of community necessary to fight for change, Cope spotlights Cleo Silvers, who cooked for the Black Panthers' Free Breakfast for Children program in New York City, and Aylene Quin, who served meals to Freedom Riders and held secret voter registration meetings at her restaurant in McComb, Miss. Cope draws on the work of historian François Hamlin to explain how both women performed "activist mothering," finding their power "in roles socially modeled and considered acceptable for them to embrace within society at large," and weaves in harrowing details of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's crackdown on Black activism (FBI agents destroyed food intended for the Black Panthers' breakfast program, alleging that there were "drugs or guns hidden among the eggs and grits") and the reign of terror white supremacists directed against the civil rights movement in the South. Incisive sketches of other female activists, including Fannie Lou Hamer and Afeni Shakur, add depth to Cope's contention that sexism limited the recognition of women's contributions to the cause. The result is a worthy tribute to the unsung heroines of the fight for racial equality.
