Bobby Seale

Founder and National Organizer of the Black Panther Party

Former Chairman, Surviving-Founder and National Organizer of the Black Panther Party, USA, Bobby Seale was born in Dallas, Texas in 1936. He grew up in the Oakland/Berkeley, California communities where he worked as a carpenter, stand-up comedian, jazz drummer, draftsman, and mechanic. He later joined the United States Air Force to become a structural repairman on high performance aircraft.

At Merritt College in 1962, Bobby Seale, an engineering-design major, was first introduced to his African and African-American people's history of struggle. While Native American people's cultural history was already a part of Mr. Seale's forte of knowledge, Malcolm X's philosophical perspective on Black people's liberation struggle and "international human rights" profoundly influenced Mr. Seale. In 1963, Seale began a career as a community organizer through the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). Among his accomplishments were the formations of youth job and tutorial programs. With Malcolm X's death, Bobby Seale dedicated his life to a revolutionary humanist cause: "To help turn this backward racist world around, to make some human sense."

In 1966, in the face of massively brutal government repression toward peaceful protesters, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton formed what was to be the vanguard of the political-revolutionary organizations of the 1960's: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. They advocated the right to self defense and moved to organize real "power to the people" revolution, putting their lives on the line against institutionalized racist discrimination, vicious police brutality and murder of Black people.

During his eight years as Co-founder and Chairman of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale served as the key national coordinator for coalition-organizing and a number of nationwide community based service programs. The programs included: Free Breakfast for School Children; Senior Citizens Free Busing; Preventative Medical Health Care; Cooperative Housing; National Committees to Combat Fascism; People's Free Food and Clothing Programs, mass voter registration drives, and more. In that period while Huey Newton was a political prisoner, Bobby Seale organized over five thousand (full time) members in over forty chapters and branches of the Black Panther Party in cities across America.

In 1969, Bobby Seale gained international recognition as a defendant in the 1969 Great Chicago Eight Conspiracy Trial, where he was chained, shackled, gagged and tied to a chair for three days during the trail. While in jail (Mr. Seale was incarcerated without bail for two years while entangled in courtroom battles), he wrote the book Seize the Time. Eventually, all political charges were dismissed or thrown out of court. During the Attica prison riots, he became the key negotiator to resolve the crisis.