Care as a Community Practice

Before care became a policy, it was a promise.

A promise that no one should be hungry in a classroom.
A promise that no one should be sick without somewhere to go.
A promise that health belongs to the people, not just to systems.

The Black Panther Party understood something ancient and simple:
A body cannot learn if it is hungry.
A community cannot rise if it is unwell.

So they built what was needed.

Free breakfast programs that fed children before the school day began. Not as charity, but as infrastructure. Clinics that offered basic health care, screenings, and education in neighborhoods that had long been overlooked. Spaces where people could ask questions about their bodies without being rushed, judged, or turned away.

This was medicine practiced in the open.

Not behind a desk.
Not behind a fee.
But across a table, in a line, in a shared room where care moved from hand to hand.

They treated nourishment as a form of prevention.
Access as a form of dignity.
Education as a form of healing.

Much of what now feels standard (school meals, community clinics, neighborhood health outreach) once lived as a radical idea… that health should be close, local, and human.

The legacy didn’t end when the programs did.

It lives in food banks and mutual aid.
In mobile clinics and neighborhood health fairs.
In the instinct to organize when systems move too slowly and bodies can’t wait.

This is not just a chapter in political history.
It is a chapter in the history of care becoming communal.

And every time we feed, tend, or show up for one another,
we carry that lineage forward.

Body to body, table to table, life to life.