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| Bobby Seale October 22, 1936 - |
| AAASM Black History Research Project |
AAASM.ORG
IMPROVING THE LIVES OF BLACK PEOPLE THROUGH
AWARENESS, KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATION
IMPROVING THE LIVES OF BLACK PEOPLE THROUGH
AWARENESS, KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATION
Personal Information
Born Robert George Seale, October 22, 1936, in Dallas, TX; son of George (a carpenter)
and Thelma Seale; married; wife's name, Artie; children: Malik Nkrumah Stagolee (son).
Education: Attended Merritt College, Oakland, CA, in the early 1960s.
Military/Wartime Service: Served three years in the U.S. Air Force.
Career
Worked as sheet-metal mechanic at various aircraft plants, late 1950s; cofounder (with
Huey Newton) and chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 1966-74;
founder of the Advocates Scene, 1974; author; lecturer. Community liaison for Temple
University's African-American Studies Department.
Born Robert George Seale, October 22, 1936, in Dallas, TX; son of George (a carpenter)
and Thelma Seale; married; wife's name, Artie; children: Malik Nkrumah Stagolee (son).
Education: Attended Merritt College, Oakland, CA, in the early 1960s.
Military/Wartime Service: Served three years in the U.S. Air Force.
Career
Worked as sheet-metal mechanic at various aircraft plants, late 1950s; cofounder (with
Huey Newton) and chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 1966-74;
founder of the Advocates Scene, 1974; author; lecturer. Community liaison for Temple
University's African-American Studies Department.
Life's Work
In Oakland, California, in 1966, passionate desire for a parity of power resulted in the formation of a revolutionary
group known as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Sol Stern, in an article originally printed in New York Times
Magazine in 1967 and later reprinted in Black Protest in the Sixties, articulated the sentiment of African-Americans who
found organization against oppression necessary. Members of the minority community felt pressured, Stern wrote, "to
call attention to their claim that black people in the ghetto must rely on armed self-defense and not the white man's
courts to protect themselves" from perceived societal abuse. Black Panther Party cofounder and chairman Bobby Seale
best symbolized the swelling dissatisfaction African-American individuals had with American society in the late sixties.
"[Seale's] story is not that of a man who reasoned his way into the black revolutionary movement of the late 60's,"
Howell Raines wrote in the New York Times Book Review. "He came to his eventual role as co-founder and chairman of
the Black Panther Party by the more painful and damaging route of anger and compulsion."
Seale was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1936. During his childhood his poverty-stricken family moved to Port Arthur, Texas,
and San Antonio, Texas, before finally settling in Oakland, California. Failing to graduate high school because of poor
grades in his senior year, Seale joined the U.S. Air Force and trained as an aircraft sheet-metal mechanic. After serving
three years, however, he was given a bad conduct discharge for disobeying a colonel at Ellsworth Air Force Base in
South Dakota. He returned home, finished high school at night, and found sporadic work as a sheet-metal mechanic at
various aircraft plants in the late 1950s.
In 1959 Seale pursued a career as an engineer draftsman, enrolling at Merritt College, a two-year institution located on
the fringe of West Oakland's ghetto, an area that was a "kind of incubator of Negro nationalism," Stern noted. Seale
was made aware of the African-American struggle for civil rights when he joined the Afro-American Association (AAA), a
campus organization that stressed black separatism and self-improvement. His cultural awareness was further
expanded through his friendship with Huey Newton, whom he met through the organization in September of 1962, and
with whom he often sat in coffeehouses discussing literary classics of black nationalism and revolution.
Seale and Newton soon became disenchanted with the AAA, however, believing the organization offered little more than
ineffectual cultural nationalism that would not help lessen the economic and political oppression felt in the
African-American community, especially in the ghetto. Seale began adopting the views of the Black Muslim leader
Malcolm X, who proposed armed resistance as a means for African-Americans to gain freedom and control from white
society. "We began to understand the unwritten law of force," Seale informed Stern. "They, the police, have guns, and
what the law actually says ain't worth a damn. We started to think of a program that defines and offsets this physical
fact of the ghetto."
Seale's burgeoning anger toward white authority was intensified and his desire to strike back was made resolute by the
assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. Raines noted that the black nationalist's death "became for Mr. Seale the symbol of
the oppression of a white world he believed to be irredeemably racist and destructive." Seale and Newton responded
the following year by forming the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. "Our objective was to create a grass-root based
political organization which would attract the less fortunate and teach them to use the electoral process as one avenue
of gaining control of the institutions that affect their lives, especially on the local level," Seale explained years later to
B.J. Mason in Ebony.
But the immediate, tangible function of the Panthers was to provide armed patrols on Oakland's ghetto streets,
protecting residents from what the Panthers deemed racist police abuse. Bolstered by the rhetoric of revolutionary
violence, they sought to ensure this protection through any means necessary. "To these young men," Stern observed,
"the execution of a police officer would be as natural and justifiable as the execution of a German soldier by a member
of the French Resistance [during World War II]. This is the grim reality upon which the Panthers built a movement."
Consequently, tensions heightened between the police and the African-American community, with the police
desperately trying to attenuate the appeal and effectiveness of the Panthers.
The authorities sought to weaken the Party by several means, including repealing the California law that allowed
firearms to be carried in public. Led by Seale, a group of 30 armed Panthers disrupted the California State Assembly
on May 2, 1967, protesting the proposed gun control legislation. After stating their case to the press, the Panthers
walked out, but were quickly arrested on a variety of charges, including the violation of some obscure fish-and-game
laws. Seale pleaded guilty to charges of disrupting the state legislature so that the majority of Panthers arrested could
be released; he served five months in prison. The incident gained the Party national exposure and helped increase its
membership.
By the mid-1960s, the black protest movement had become increasingly splintered, with groups ranging from Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which stressed nonviolent resistance and direct
action, to the Black Muslims, a militant group advocating violence, if necessary, as a way to achieve separatism from
whites. Although Seale was the official leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton had greater control over the group's
internal workings. Seale's intentions, more extensive than Newton's, lay in establishing contacts with other radical
groups, both in the black protest movement and in the mostly white peace movement. "You don't fight racism with
racism," Seale pointed out to Time 's Wallace Terry. "The best way to fight racism is with solidarity." In 1968, acting on
this belief, he led the Panthers to form the Peace and Freedom Party with several white radical groups.
Seale also participated with white antiwar leaders in the infamous demonstrations at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago in 1968. He and seven others, including Youth International Party founders Jerry Rubin and
Abbie Hoffman and the founders of Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, were indicted
under the new antiriot provision of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal to cross state lines to incite a riot or
instruct in the use of riot weapons. The group, dubbed the "Chicago Eight," went on trial on September 24, 1969.
Seale's attorney, Charles Garry, was recovering from surgery at the time and therefore could not represent him in the
trial. Two weeks before the proceedings, Seale asked the presiding judge, U.S. district judge Julius Hoffman, for a delay
so his lawyer would have adequate time to convalesce. Judge Hoffman refused. Seale then retained William Kunstler,
who was representing the other seven defendants, but upon Garry's advice, Seale fired Kunstler and requested that he
be allowed to represent himself, thus having the option to cross-examine witnesses and present evidence during the
trial. Again, Hoffman refused his request, citing that Kunstler and his colleagues were sufficient representation for Seale.
Feeling his constitutional rights were denied because he had neither proper representation nor was allowed to
represent himself, Seale consistently disregarded courtroom procedure and decorum with repeated outbursts against
Judge Hoffman. In his autobiography, A Lonely Rage, published in the late 1970s, Seale recounted one of his many
tirades against Hoffman for the judge's continuing denial of Seale's requests for representation: "I have a constitutional
right to speak, and if you suppress my constitutional right to speak out in behalf of my constitutional rights, then I can
only see you as a bigot, a racist, and a fascist." During the trial Seale also called the judge a pig.
Seale gained national notoriety through this spectacle, becoming a symbol of black anger and protest. He also incurred
the wrath of Judge Hoffman, who finally ordered Seale bound and gagged a month into the trial. A reporter for Time
described the scene: "The black defendant sat chained to his chair by leg irons and handcuffs, emitting muffled
obscenities toward the bench through a gag of muslin and tape." Because Seale continued to disrupt the court,
managing "to convert the proceedings into a tragicomic harlequinade," a Newsweek reporter noted, Judge Hoffman
eventually declared a mistrial for Seale, severing his portion of the trial from the other seven and finding him guilty on
16 counts of contempt of court, each count having a sentence of three months in prison--a total of four years. He was
to have been retried on the riot charges, but in 1972, after he had served two years, the federal government rescinded
all charges against him.
In March of 1971, during his prison term, Seale again stood trial, this time in New Haven, Connecticut, for charges of
conspiracy to kidnap and murder in the death of Alex Rackley, a New York-based Black Panther suspected by the Party
of being a police informant. The Federal Bureau of Investigation believed Seale gave the order for Rackley's torture
and execution. However, a mistrial was declared on May 24, 1971, after the jury deadlocked on a verdict. The judge in
the case then dismissed the charges against Seale, believing there had been too much publicity for a fair new trial.
At the beginning of the 1970s, Seale began steering the Black Panther Party away from its revolutionary, invective
actions to ones that procured the development of such community action programs as free health clinics in the ghetto
and a national breakfast program for inner-city children. He also swept the ranks of the Party, expelling any individuals
with criminal intentions--"provocateur agents, kooks, and avaricious fools," Seale was quoted as having said by Joan
Martin Burke in her book Civil Rights.
These actions helped present a softer, more mainstream image of the Party and coincided with a book Seale published
in 1970 called Seize the Time, in which he attempted to discredit the belief that the Panthers had ever been racists or
cop killers. Reviewing the book for Newsweek, Raymond A. Sokolov believed that "the great revelation of his unique
book is, in fact, how open and contemplative and evolving this supposed thug's mind is." But others remained skeptical,
both of the Party's shift in strategic emphasis and its recent history.
Still, Seale remained adamant about his changing convictions. "In the past," he told Mason, "I've hated situations, but
I've developed beyond that. It's almost like, 'Forgive them, they know not what they do.'" In 1973, discarding the Party's
trademark black leather jacket, Seale put on a suit and tie and ran a Democratic campaign for mayor of Oakland. Out
of a field of nine candidates, he finished second with a surprising 43,710 votes, an indication that the shifting Party had
widened its constituency.
But Seale believed the focus was still too small. In 1974 he walked away from the Black Panther Party. "I did not feel or
believe our Black Panther Party would ever reach that point where we were there, out front, as the righteous
spokesmen for black folks and united with other organizations," he wrote in his autobiography. In contrast, a reporter
for Newsweek noted that "the de-Pantherization of Bobby Seale was, by common judgment and his own, a simpler
matter of combat weariness--a one-way ticket out of a party that had in his estimate 'declined into a quasi-radical
respectable notoriety.'" Upon his withdrawal from the Party, Seale formed Advocates Scene, an organization aimed at
helping the underprivileged form grass-roots political coalitions, a goal not unlike the originally stated objective of the
Black Panther Party. Around the same time, Seale also began writing A Lonely Rage. Whereas his previous book,
Seize the Time, covered the ideology of the Black Panther Party, this autobiography mainly explored his psychological
state during his childhood and activist years.
In the early 1980s, deviating from the stance he held when he marched upon the California State Assembly fifteen
years earlier, Seale became an outspoken proponent of handgun control. He explained to a Newsweek reporter that
rising unemployment in the African-American community due to governmental economic policies could have disastrous
effects: "We won't so much have political opposition as we will have more random crime." Seale maintained this
viewpoint when he declined an offer in 1983 from Eldridge Cleaver, former minister of information for the Black Panther
Party, to help lead a new Party composed of unemployed black and white Vietnam veterans who would train young men
and women in the use of firearms. "I don't live in the sixties," he was quoted as having said in Jet.
Throughout the rest of the 1980s, Seale continued developing and helping organizations committed to addressing
political and social injustice. He became a community liaison for Temple University's African-American Studies
Department. He also lectured around the country on his past activism and the continued need for involvement. And to
this he added another of his passions--barbecuing. In 1987 he published his outdoor cooking philosophy and recipes in
Barbeque'n with Bobby, the proceeds from which were to go to various non-profit social organizations.
Awards
Received Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, 1971, for Seize the Time.
In Oakland, California, in 1966, passionate desire for a parity of power resulted in the formation of a revolutionary
group known as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Sol Stern, in an article originally printed in New York Times
Magazine in 1967 and later reprinted in Black Protest in the Sixties, articulated the sentiment of African-Americans who
found organization against oppression necessary. Members of the minority community felt pressured, Stern wrote, "to
call attention to their claim that black people in the ghetto must rely on armed self-defense and not the white man's
courts to protect themselves" from perceived societal abuse. Black Panther Party cofounder and chairman Bobby Seale
best symbolized the swelling dissatisfaction African-American individuals had with American society in the late sixties.
"[Seale's] story is not that of a man who reasoned his way into the black revolutionary movement of the late 60's,"
Howell Raines wrote in the New York Times Book Review. "He came to his eventual role as co-founder and chairman of
the Black Panther Party by the more painful and damaging route of anger and compulsion."
Seale was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1936. During his childhood his poverty-stricken family moved to Port Arthur, Texas,
and San Antonio, Texas, before finally settling in Oakland, California. Failing to graduate high school because of poor
grades in his senior year, Seale joined the U.S. Air Force and trained as an aircraft sheet-metal mechanic. After serving
three years, however, he was given a bad conduct discharge for disobeying a colonel at Ellsworth Air Force Base in
South Dakota. He returned home, finished high school at night, and found sporadic work as a sheet-metal mechanic at
various aircraft plants in the late 1950s.
In 1959 Seale pursued a career as an engineer draftsman, enrolling at Merritt College, a two-year institution located on
the fringe of West Oakland's ghetto, an area that was a "kind of incubator of Negro nationalism," Stern noted. Seale
was made aware of the African-American struggle for civil rights when he joined the Afro-American Association (AAA), a
campus organization that stressed black separatism and self-improvement. His cultural awareness was further
expanded through his friendship with Huey Newton, whom he met through the organization in September of 1962, and
with whom he often sat in coffeehouses discussing literary classics of black nationalism and revolution.
Seale and Newton soon became disenchanted with the AAA, however, believing the organization offered little more than
ineffectual cultural nationalism that would not help lessen the economic and political oppression felt in the
African-American community, especially in the ghetto. Seale began adopting the views of the Black Muslim leader
Malcolm X, who proposed armed resistance as a means for African-Americans to gain freedom and control from white
society. "We began to understand the unwritten law of force," Seale informed Stern. "They, the police, have guns, and
what the law actually says ain't worth a damn. We started to think of a program that defines and offsets this physical
fact of the ghetto."
Seale's burgeoning anger toward white authority was intensified and his desire to strike back was made resolute by the
assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. Raines noted that the black nationalist's death "became for Mr. Seale the symbol of
the oppression of a white world he believed to be irredeemably racist and destructive." Seale and Newton responded
the following year by forming the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. "Our objective was to create a grass-root based
political organization which would attract the less fortunate and teach them to use the electoral process as one avenue
of gaining control of the institutions that affect their lives, especially on the local level," Seale explained years later to
B.J. Mason in Ebony.
But the immediate, tangible function of the Panthers was to provide armed patrols on Oakland's ghetto streets,
protecting residents from what the Panthers deemed racist police abuse. Bolstered by the rhetoric of revolutionary
violence, they sought to ensure this protection through any means necessary. "To these young men," Stern observed,
"the execution of a police officer would be as natural and justifiable as the execution of a German soldier by a member
of the French Resistance [during World War II]. This is the grim reality upon which the Panthers built a movement."
Consequently, tensions heightened between the police and the African-American community, with the police
desperately trying to attenuate the appeal and effectiveness of the Panthers.
The authorities sought to weaken the Party by several means, including repealing the California law that allowed
firearms to be carried in public. Led by Seale, a group of 30 armed Panthers disrupted the California State Assembly
on May 2, 1967, protesting the proposed gun control legislation. After stating their case to the press, the Panthers
walked out, but were quickly arrested on a variety of charges, including the violation of some obscure fish-and-game
laws. Seale pleaded guilty to charges of disrupting the state legislature so that the majority of Panthers arrested could
be released; he served five months in prison. The incident gained the Party national exposure and helped increase its
membership.
By the mid-1960s, the black protest movement had become increasingly splintered, with groups ranging from Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which stressed nonviolent resistance and direct
action, to the Black Muslims, a militant group advocating violence, if necessary, as a way to achieve separatism from
whites. Although Seale was the official leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton had greater control over the group's
internal workings. Seale's intentions, more extensive than Newton's, lay in establishing contacts with other radical
groups, both in the black protest movement and in the mostly white peace movement. "You don't fight racism with
racism," Seale pointed out to Time 's Wallace Terry. "The best way to fight racism is with solidarity." In 1968, acting on
this belief, he led the Panthers to form the Peace and Freedom Party with several white radical groups.
Seale also participated with white antiwar leaders in the infamous demonstrations at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago in 1968. He and seven others, including Youth International Party founders Jerry Rubin and
Abbie Hoffman and the founders of Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, were indicted
under the new antiriot provision of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal to cross state lines to incite a riot or
instruct in the use of riot weapons. The group, dubbed the "Chicago Eight," went on trial on September 24, 1969.
Seale's attorney, Charles Garry, was recovering from surgery at the time and therefore could not represent him in the
trial. Two weeks before the proceedings, Seale asked the presiding judge, U.S. district judge Julius Hoffman, for a delay
so his lawyer would have adequate time to convalesce. Judge Hoffman refused. Seale then retained William Kunstler,
who was representing the other seven defendants, but upon Garry's advice, Seale fired Kunstler and requested that he
be allowed to represent himself, thus having the option to cross-examine witnesses and present evidence during the
trial. Again, Hoffman refused his request, citing that Kunstler and his colleagues were sufficient representation for Seale.
Feeling his constitutional rights were denied because he had neither proper representation nor was allowed to
represent himself, Seale consistently disregarded courtroom procedure and decorum with repeated outbursts against
Judge Hoffman. In his autobiography, A Lonely Rage, published in the late 1970s, Seale recounted one of his many
tirades against Hoffman for the judge's continuing denial of Seale's requests for representation: "I have a constitutional
right to speak, and if you suppress my constitutional right to speak out in behalf of my constitutional rights, then I can
only see you as a bigot, a racist, and a fascist." During the trial Seale also called the judge a pig.
Seale gained national notoriety through this spectacle, becoming a symbol of black anger and protest. He also incurred
the wrath of Judge Hoffman, who finally ordered Seale bound and gagged a month into the trial. A reporter for Time
described the scene: "The black defendant sat chained to his chair by leg irons and handcuffs, emitting muffled
obscenities toward the bench through a gag of muslin and tape." Because Seale continued to disrupt the court,
managing "to convert the proceedings into a tragicomic harlequinade," a Newsweek reporter noted, Judge Hoffman
eventually declared a mistrial for Seale, severing his portion of the trial from the other seven and finding him guilty on
16 counts of contempt of court, each count having a sentence of three months in prison--a total of four years. He was
to have been retried on the riot charges, but in 1972, after he had served two years, the federal government rescinded
all charges against him.
In March of 1971, during his prison term, Seale again stood trial, this time in New Haven, Connecticut, for charges of
conspiracy to kidnap and murder in the death of Alex Rackley, a New York-based Black Panther suspected by the Party
of being a police informant. The Federal Bureau of Investigation believed Seale gave the order for Rackley's torture
and execution. However, a mistrial was declared on May 24, 1971, after the jury deadlocked on a verdict. The judge in
the case then dismissed the charges against Seale, believing there had been too much publicity for a fair new trial.
At the beginning of the 1970s, Seale began steering the Black Panther Party away from its revolutionary, invective
actions to ones that procured the development of such community action programs as free health clinics in the ghetto
and a national breakfast program for inner-city children. He also swept the ranks of the Party, expelling any individuals
with criminal intentions--"provocateur agents, kooks, and avaricious fools," Seale was quoted as having said by Joan
Martin Burke in her book Civil Rights.
These actions helped present a softer, more mainstream image of the Party and coincided with a book Seale published
in 1970 called Seize the Time, in which he attempted to discredit the belief that the Panthers had ever been racists or
cop killers. Reviewing the book for Newsweek, Raymond A. Sokolov believed that "the great revelation of his unique
book is, in fact, how open and contemplative and evolving this supposed thug's mind is." But others remained skeptical,
both of the Party's shift in strategic emphasis and its recent history.
Still, Seale remained adamant about his changing convictions. "In the past," he told Mason, "I've hated situations, but
I've developed beyond that. It's almost like, 'Forgive them, they know not what they do.'" In 1973, discarding the Party's
trademark black leather jacket, Seale put on a suit and tie and ran a Democratic campaign for mayor of Oakland. Out
of a field of nine candidates, he finished second with a surprising 43,710 votes, an indication that the shifting Party had
widened its constituency.
But Seale believed the focus was still too small. In 1974 he walked away from the Black Panther Party. "I did not feel or
believe our Black Panther Party would ever reach that point where we were there, out front, as the righteous
spokesmen for black folks and united with other organizations," he wrote in his autobiography. In contrast, a reporter
for Newsweek noted that "the de-Pantherization of Bobby Seale was, by common judgment and his own, a simpler
matter of combat weariness--a one-way ticket out of a party that had in his estimate 'declined into a quasi-radical
respectable notoriety.'" Upon his withdrawal from the Party, Seale formed Advocates Scene, an organization aimed at
helping the underprivileged form grass-roots political coalitions, a goal not unlike the originally stated objective of the
Black Panther Party. Around the same time, Seale also began writing A Lonely Rage. Whereas his previous book,
Seize the Time, covered the ideology of the Black Panther Party, this autobiography mainly explored his psychological
state during his childhood and activist years.
In the early 1980s, deviating from the stance he held when he marched upon the California State Assembly fifteen
years earlier, Seale became an outspoken proponent of handgun control. He explained to a Newsweek reporter that
rising unemployment in the African-American community due to governmental economic policies could have disastrous
effects: "We won't so much have political opposition as we will have more random crime." Seale maintained this
viewpoint when he declined an offer in 1983 from Eldridge Cleaver, former minister of information for the Black Panther
Party, to help lead a new Party composed of unemployed black and white Vietnam veterans who would train young men
and women in the use of firearms. "I don't live in the sixties," he was quoted as having said in Jet.
Throughout the rest of the 1980s, Seale continued developing and helping organizations committed to addressing
political and social injustice. He became a community liaison for Temple University's African-American Studies
Department. He also lectured around the country on his past activism and the continued need for involvement. And to
this he added another of his passions--barbecuing. In 1987 he published his outdoor cooking philosophy and recipes in
Barbeque'n with Bobby, the proceeds from which were to go to various non-profit social organizations.
Awards
Received Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, 1971, for Seize the Time.
| See Him Hear Him Play Now "The Black Panther Party's Ten Point Program" |
| See Him Hear Him Play Now "Bobby on the Early Days of the Panthers" |
| See Him Hear Him Play Now "Bobby on the Growth of the Black Panthers " |
| See Him Hear Him Play Now "Bobby on The Murder of Bobby Hutton " |