In July 1969, the founder and director of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declared that the Black Panther Party (BPP) ‘without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country’. Hoover used the idea of the threat that the group supposedly posed as a means to stage what Black Panther Party Chairman Huey P. Newton would characterise as a ‘war against the panthers’. During this period, hundreds of members of the Black Panther Party were systematically harassed, incarcerated and even killed by local and state police, the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Surprisingly, J. Edgar Hoover would argue in an infamous memo and later during a news conference that it was not a military threat that the Black Panthers presented, but rather a public relations threat. Hoover's original 15 May 1969 memo in which he labelled the Black Panther Party ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country’ was actually addressed towards the party's Breakfast for Children Program (BCP). In this programme school-aged children were provided breakfast for free before school, prepared by party members from locally donated food. Hoover would criticise the attempt to ‘provide a stable breakfast to ghetto children’. He noted: ‘The program has met with considerable success and has resulted in considerable favorable publicity for the BPP.’ Hoover would then write that:

According to Hoover, the public relations success of the Breakfast for Children Program, and by extension the BPP's other public relations successes, proved so great that the FBI was left with only one viable alternative and that was ‘to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for’.