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The Child Nutrition Act (CNA) is a United States federal law signed on October 11, 1966 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Act was created as a result of the "years of cumulative successful experience under the National School Lunch Program" to help meet the nutritional needs of children. The Special Milk Program, functioning since 1954, was extended to June 30, 1970 and incorporated into the act. The act also provided Federal funding assistance towards non-food purchases for school equipment.
The act established the School Breakfast Program, a federally assisted meal program that provides low-cost or free breakfasts to children in public and non-profit schools as well as child care institutions. During the signing of the act, the president remarked that "good nutrition is essential to good learning."
It is believed by many former Black Panther Party members and by many on the Radical Left that the huge success of their Free Breakfast for Children program in the early 1960s "shamed" the Johnson administration into providing free breakfasts in public schools. The Panthers would cook and serve food to the poor inner city youth of the area out of a San Francisco church, and eventually countrywide, which would wind up feeding tens of thousands of children throughout the party's history. Within a couple of years they were feeding over 10,000 school children in the morning before they went to school.
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