We the People Breakfast Program in Austin
mining the archives
From 1969 to 1977, the Austin Law Commune graced Austin with its unique brand of lawyering. This singular law firm offered FREE services to anti-war protestors and civil rights activists. It’s the FREE part that was unique and singular. Not pro-bono, just free.
The Austin Law Commune offered free services because they believed that activists needed to be back on the streets. They believed that activists needed to be agitating instead of worrying about how to pay for a lawyer.
The Austin Law Commune handled cases throughout Texas and were also called in to help on historically significant national cases such as the Gainesville 8 and Wounded Knee.
PHIT interviewed five of the Austin Law Commune members for a documentary called Defending Dissidents. Jim Simon, Cam Cunningham, Brady Coleman, Bobby Nelson, and Julie Howell tell their story in their own words. You can find in on the YouTube Peoples History in Texas channel.
Documentaries unfortunately leave a lot of interesting historical material on the cutting room. In this substack, we are mining our own archives to pass on some of those interesting historical tidbits. Here a few narrative details left on the cutting room floor from the interview with Brady Coleman.
Brady Coleman went to law school at the University of Texas in the 60s and then went off to work in Longview on the Texas border with Louisiana. When asked about why he would do such a thing, he laughed and mentioned that he got a lot of trial experience, but volunteered that he didn’t particularly like the atmosphere, “if you know what I mean.” Wink, wink.
Brady wanted to get back to “civilization”.
He saw an advertisement in the Texas Observer for a partner in this new fangled Law Commune Office concept in Austin. He applied and got the job. No one has ever suggested that any one else applied for the basically minimum wage job.
In his career at the Law Commune, he and the other lawyers once packed up the car and drove off to Washington DC to help with the protests in 1971. Brady mentioned that he had some fun protesting, but Washington, DC judges didn’t respect his Texas law credentials in the District of Columbia. Another time, he and Cam Cunningham trotted off to Florida to defend the historically famous Gainesville 8.
But a lot of the legal work was in Austin.
“One of the cases that the law office tried, Cam and I tried, was here in Austin. There was a group of African Americans, and their group was called We the People, and they had a recreation center and a breakfast program and a pool table over in East Austin.”
We the People was the Black Panther chapter in Austin. They called themselves We the People because Black Panthers were being systematically targeted by the police.
The Breakfast Program was created by the Black Panthers in Oakland. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale launched the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1967, and quickly dropped the Self Defense part and began community organizing. One of the most enduring programs was the Breakfast Program.
Huey Newton is generally given credit for the program. Black children were heading out to school every day without any breakfast. Hungry kids don’t make good students. The Black Panthers fed thousands of kids for a couple of years.
45 of the programs in the United States. One of them was in Austin.
J. Edgar Hoover was infuriated. He hated the Black Panthers and thought the breakfast program was going to make serious inroads in building community support for the Panthers. He was right.
Hoover called on his minions to break up the Panthers.
Whether the Austin cops were told by the FBI that We the People and the Black Panthers were the same organization, or whether the local police just didn’t like Breakfast programs feeding Black kindergarteners, We the People were targeted.
“Like all of these cases, they're all politically motivated. I mean,
It's really not enforcing criminal law so much as trying to eradicate what is really happening with the progressive movements. And especially what they were doing in East Austin with the breakfast program.
Well, the cops decided to raid the brothers, and a fight broke out with pool balls and pool sticks. And the end of it was that three of the members got indicted for assault with intent to murder a police officer, and it was a very heated trial. The prosecutor just went crazy. The jury deadlocked and it was never retried. We put that in the win column.”
The breakfast campaign continued for a couple of years. The University of Texas tried to prevent fund raising for the program on its campus, but that was challenged and defeated as well.
In 1969, the head of the US National Lunch Program admitted that the Black Panthers were feeding a greater number of low-income children than the State of California. By 1975, the School Breakfast Program was officially authorized by the US government and now feeds over 14.6 million children
PHIT is trying to recapture those stories of the Austin Breakfast Program. Please contact us if you would like your oral history preserved.
Such an interesting story - thanks for writing this.