In the late 1960s, at the peak of the Puerto Rican- and Black-led community control movement, United Bronx Parents, an organization of mostly immigrant mothers, launched the city’s first sustained grassroots campaign to improve school lunch. This chapter explores the tenets of community control and the related movement of welfare rights to show how both informed the approach of parent organizers who staged the campaign and challenged New York City’s Board of Education to improve services to school-aged children. The chapter also shows how food became a tool of empowerment: the campaign helped parents move from blaming themselves to having a systemic understanding of their children’s disenfranchisement within a racist public school system. The campaign gave parent organizers the knowledge that they could solve problems more effectively than could school administrators.
