AAPRP Free Breakfasts

About three years ago Mike Crenshaw was feeling a little worn out and discouraged by gentrification, foreclosures, and racist economic systems that exploit and punish people of color in the USA. Today as he met his friends Ahjamu and Nyanga at the Columbia International Cup coffee house, he was in a more hopeful frame of mind. It was the first day of a new breakfast program sponsored by the All African People’s Revolutionary Party, Portland Chapter. A gathering of lovely young people was serving free food to school children as a way to build community and educate young people to the political and racial realities of life in Portland as a person of color. 

There’s an article about the program and its ideals here. I’m going to add three pictures as extras: one of Mike and Ahjamu, one of Nicole and Jamilah dancing for delight behind the food counter, and one of some of the children who showed up. The program is similar to that of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Columbia International Cup, the coffee shop where the breakfasts are being served, proudly sports a larger-than-life-size poster of Kent Ford, the Panther in this picture from the breakfast program of 1971, who is still a mainstay of black activism in Portland. I told Ahjamu I would do my best to take pictures like the ones made of the Panthers breakfasts. The program will be ongoing on Mondays and Fridays from now on, including the summer months when schools are closed.

P.S. You get to hear a few seconds of Ahjamu being interviewed here.