Power To The People - Bobby Seale Speaks at OSU

Bobby Seale was the guest speaker for The Ohio State University's United Black World Month on Thursday February 1st. Seale is primarily known for being one of the two founders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and its chairman. Delivering a passionate yet playful oral history of the BPP at Hitchcock Hall Auditorium, Bobby Seale painted a profound picture of what it was like to be an African-American in the 1960's during the height of the civil rights movement in a time before the term African-American was used to describe Black people. Seale described how he learned about African-American history through student associations while attending Merrill College in Oakland, CA. He joked that while working at Kaiser AeroSpace & Electronics, as a Gemini Missile non-destruct parts inspector, he took lots to breaks to read African literature.

Inspired by seeing the great orator Martin Luther King, and the life imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, it was not until the death of Malcolm X which caused Seale and Huey P. Newton to found the BPP. Approaching his longtime friend Newton with a copy of Franz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth", Seale described how he was inspired to organize with the Black community. Newton was not convinced until he heard and felt Seale deliver an impassioned poem during a large gathering Seale had organized. During his lecture at OSU, Seale recited the poem for the audience, it was about the need for Blacks to resist being drafted into Vietnam and It was the same poem which would have Newton and Seale arrested when he perfomed it at an outside restaurant. He described the incident and how he was tackled by an undercover police officer for indecent language. The evening following their court case, on Seale's 28th Birthday in 1966, they officially formed the Black Panthers, using the name of a panther, who when trapped in a corner, with no where to run, finds a way out by confronting their captor. Seale made the remark to Newton, that now we are a political organization we need a chairman, and interestingly enough it was decided upon with the flip of coin, with Seale winning the toss to become the Chairman, and Newton the Minister of Defense.

Their first action as an organization was a type of cop watch program, observing the arrest of a Black man in Oakland, they bared arms as means of defense, and with Newton's wits from Law school, he cited court cases to the cops explaining his legal rights to observe the police and carry heat. Passing out copies the BPP 10 point program that evening to encourage more members of the community to get involved, the flame was ignited in Oakland and would soon spread internationally when the BPP stormed the California State Legislature meeting to protest a bill that was passed months later into law banning individuals from carrying arms within city limits. This new measure was used to suppress the Black Panthers.

With the assassination of MLK in 1968 the BPP wings of resistance began flapping across the country, with new chapters flying up in all over the nation, and even in other countries such as Algeria. Creating this mass movement of self-determination caused a great uproar in the Capital, and the BPP were soon attacked by the FBI and the unethical actions of the counter intelligence program headed by J. Edgar Hoover. As Fred Hampton said, "you can kill a revolutionary, but you can't kill a revolution". Which is where we are left at today standing in the footsteps of such great grassroots organizers, the communities we all live in still need to uproot the weeds of apathy and engage our generation to act up in the face of injustice, speak truth to power, and create alternative cooperative economic models to truly give Power to the People.