Bobby Seale

Activist

• Born: October 22, 1936
• Birthplace: Dallas, Texas

Cofounder of the Black Panther Party

Best known for cofounding the Black Panther Party, Seale was a central figure in the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He continued to advocate for civil and human rights into the twenty-first century.

Area of achievement: Social issues

Early Life

Robert George Seale was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 22, 1936, to George and Thelma Seale. He was the oldest of three children. Seale’s father was a master carpenter and was employed throughout the Depression. Although his father was abusive, Seale showed an early aptitude for carpentry and began to work with him. Seale also learned to hunt and fish.

When Seale was eight years old, the family moved to Berkeley, California. As a young man, he identified with Native Americans and dreamed of visiting the Lakota Sioux nation in South Dakota. He attended Berkeley High School, but dropped out late in his senior year after being informed that he would not graduate because of an altercation in gym class.

In 1955, Seale enlisted in the United States Air Force. He served for just under four years as a sheet metal mechanic. In 1959, after fights with his fellow recruits and a run-in with a lieutenant colonel, he was discharged for bad conduct. Seale returned to Oakland, got his high school diploma, and found work as a draftsman, comedian, and at Kaiser Aerospace and Electronics as an inspector for parts on the Gemini missile. He married his first wife, Artie (now Artie Seale McMillan), in 1964.

Life’s Work

Seale enrolled at Merritt College in 1962, studying engineering design. He quickly became active in African American issues, joining the campus Afro-American Association, where he met Huey P. Newton. He went on to join the Revolutionary Action Movement, cocreate the Afro-American Study Group, and create the Black History Fact Group (which in turn spawned the school’s Department of Black Studies) in 1965. In 1966, he started the Soul Students Advisory Council.

That spring, Seale and Newton were arrested in Berkeley after Seale read Ronald Stone’s antiwar poem, “Uncle Sammy Called Me Fulla Lucifer,” outside a café. Seale began working for the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Program that year. In the fall, Seale and Newton wrote the Ten Point Program that became the foundation for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). On October 15, 1966, Seale and Newton became, respectively, the chairman and the minister of self-defense of the BPP.

Seale and Newton agreed to organize the group locally but with a progressively national vision. Their first objective was to protect African Americans in their community from police brutality, and they created their own armed patrols for that purpose. At the group’s weekly meetings, Seale taught history and community organizing to recruits. In February, 1967, Seale and Newton made their first media appearance after providing security for Betty Shabazz, who was interviewed by Eldridge Cleaver. In May, Seale and other armed BPP members entered the California State Assembly to protest the Mulford Act, which banned public display of loaded weapons. They were arrested afterward on a variety of charges. This incident was reported internationally and brought widespread attention to the Black Panthers. Seale served four months in jail for disturbing the peace.

Seale was involved in violent antiwar protests surrounding the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago. He and seven other leaders of the protests—who became known as the Chicago Eight and later, the Chicago Seven—were charged with inciting a riot and conspiracy and brought to trial amid major publicity. Seale challenged Judge Julius Hoffman’s appointment of defense attorneys William Kunstler andLeonard Weinglass, seeking instead to be represented by his own attorney, Charles Garry, who was undergoing surgery. Hoffman refused Seale’s demands and, after a tirade by Seale, ordered the defendant bound and gagged in the courtroom. Ultimately, in November, 1969, Seale’s case was severed from that of the other defendants. He was sentenced to four years in prison for contempt of court.

While Seale was in prison, he was indicted on charges that he had ordered the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a suspected informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). On May 25, 1971, however, the case ended in a mistrial when the jury deadlocked. In 1972, the government suspended Seale’s contempt charge and he was subsequently freed.

Seale continued his political activity with the Black Panther Party after his release. He ran for mayor of Oakland, California, in 1973 and finished second, losing a runoff with the incumbent Republican mayor, John Reading. In 1974, Seale left the Black Panther Party (although there are conflicting accounts that he was expelled by Huey P. Newton) after renouncing violence.

In subsequent years, Seale continued his activism, taught African American studies at Temple University, and lectured frequently at colleges and universities. He also published his autobiography, A Lonely Rage (1978), and even wrote a cookbook, Barbeque’n with Bobby (1988). He considers himself a revolutionary humanist.

Significance

Seale remains best known as a cofounder of the Black Panther Party, an important and influential organization during the 1960s and 1970s. Decades after its founding, Seale remained dedicated to fostering understanding and knowledge of the Black Power movement. His message of armed resistance to racism and white authority resonated during an era fraught with racial conflict, and Seale was a provocative, polarizing figure. In the 2010s, as the Black Lives Matter movement took shape in response to police brutality against African Americans, observers drew parallels between the movement and the Black Power movement of the 1960s and BPP. In 2015 Seale himself said, in an joint interview with D’Angelo for the New York Times, “On the Black Lives Matter [front], I’m pushing for the youth in these groups to get more political and more electoral; you’ve got to take over some of these seats. And you’ve got to get more [Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn] Mosbys elected to some of these political offices. And you got to put some measures on the ballot. I didn’t start the Black Panther Party until 1966. This was the year that Stokely Carmichael came out with black power. They understood that we need political seats. You could change the whole spectrum. You could change the city laws. This is what you do.”

Bibliography

Bass, Paul, and Douglas Rae. Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Digital file.

Freed, Donald. Agony in New Haven: The Trial of Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, and the Black Panther Party. 1973. Los Angeles: Figeroa, 2008. Print.

Hyman, Dan. “D’Angelo and Bobby Seale on the Past and Future of Political Protest.” New York Times. New York Times, 19 June 2015. Web. 25 Mar. 2016.

Joseph, Peniel. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. 2006. New York: Holt, 2013. Digital file.

Seale, Bobby. “Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers: ‘You Cannot Fight Racism with Racism. You Have to Fight It with Solidarity.’” Interview by KK Ottesen. The Washington Post, 28 July 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/bobby-seale-of-the-black-panthers-you-cannot-fight-racism-with-racism-you-have-to-fight-it-with-solidarity/2020/07/27/c4042aec-bfa6-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8‗story.html. Accessed 19 July 2021.

Seale, Bobby. A Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale. New York: New York Times Books, 1978. Print.

Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. 1970. Reprint. Baltimore: Black Classic, 1991. Print.