> [Original, emphasis added]: the only reason we have school lunch programs in the US at all is because the Black Panthers started a free breakfast program for black children in the 70s

> [Response, emphasis added]: The first school lunch programs started with private initiatives in the 1890s. The first major federal program for student lunches was the National School Lunch Program enacted in 1946

Are you saying that the government started trying to one-up the Black Panther school lunches 30 years before the Black Panthers started offering them?

Is it possible that the people in charge of school lunches in the 1970s viewed the Black Panther program as some kind of competition? Sure. Was the 1970s Black Panther program "the only reason" the US started a national school lunch program in the 1940s? I don't see how that would be possible.