Although President Lyndon Johnson initiated new child nutrition programs during his administration, including a new School Breakfast Program, a 1968 study published by the Committee on School Lunch Participation — an organization formed by several of the nation’s largest women’s organizations — revealed that fewer than two million of the 60 million children eligible for free lunch at school were receiving those lunches. Their report, titled Their Daily Bread, evidenced endemic racial disparities and discrimination in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and argued that the program contributed to the mistreatment of poor children of color.

In the wake of the report’s publication, advocates and activists across the country organized to demand reforms to the NSLP: the National Welfare Rights Organization, for example, issued a “New School Lunch Program Bill of Rights,” asserting that every child had “the right to a good and nutritious lunch.” Parents in Detroit, New York, Tucson, and Baltimore formed organizations at the local level to fight for expanded access as well. By reframing access to school lunch as an urgent matter of racial equity and justice, they encouraged Congress to take action. In 1969, after a series of congressional hearings affirmed Their Daily Bread’s findings, Congress allocated an additional $50 million to the NSLP with $5 million specifically to support low-income school districts. As a result of relentless community activism and several lawsuits, funding for the NSLP increased from $146 million in 1965 to $226 million in 1973.