Emmy Award winning rapper Frzy joined the Bubba Show on 100.7 Star Pittsburgh to share an amazing Black History Month story on how the Black Panthers started the free breakfast program for children at pubic schools.
"I'm coming with the facts, I'm super excited, so this one's cool man, this one blew my mind, and it affected me personally," Frzy said.
"I don't know if people know this, right. But in 1968, the Black Panthers created the first free breakfast program... Craziness, right. So you know now nationally you get breakfast tickets for free if you go to public schools. But back then in 1968 there wasn't one, poor kids went hungry, or they had like a payment plan thing and they couldn't afford to get that.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, over 11.6 million children receive a free breakfast as part of the program today. Frzy went on to tell the story, detailing its creation by leaders of the Black Panther Party.
"Father Earl Neil of the Black Panthers and Bobby Seale, they planned this program to kind of help kids to be able to get free breakfasts. What was cool about it is, between 1969, they had fed more than 20,000 people in 23 cities, 20,000 kids. Which is crazy right.
Frzy continued to explain the program's creation, and how the FBI's involvement affected it's development by the Black Panthers.
"What's dope about it is, as it started to progress and get bigger, the FBI, who was already watching the Black Panthers, got upset about it. And tried to do whatever they could to slander that program and get rid of it. They would show up at the churches where it was and step on the food, and all these things to make sure that they couldn't do it. But they kept pushing it.
"Now as the Black Panthers continue, obviously they got shut down by the FBI and it didn't work. But because of that program and how big it was, the Congress ended up passing a law to make it national. So now we have, they inspired that and they created that program so we have free breakfast programs all over America. Started with the Black Panthers, which is nuts."
Frzy will be on the Bubba Show all month long, sharing interesting facts and fascinating stories in honor of Black History Month.
The 36-year-old from Pittsburgh started rapping in 2003 during his senior year at Career Connections Charter High School after winning a musical contest sponsored by the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
In October 2018, Frzy won a Regional Emmy Award for his collaboration with WQED Multimedia on a hip-hop remix of the song "Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” that was originally written by Pittsburgh's Fred Rogers for his TV show, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
The video segment was titled “The Sweater Sessions: Frzy” and won Best Program Feature/Segment in the Arts/Entertainment category at the 2018 Mid-Atlantic Chapter Regional Emmy Awards.
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