Bobby Seale interview

http://www.pittsburghpulp.com/content/2004/02_05/news_cover_story.shtml

Pittsburgh Pulp, February 5-12, 2004

>From Revolution to Evolution 
Former Black Panther Bobby Seale talks about the history and legacy of the 
liberation movement he co-founded 

Interview by GEOFF KELLY 


On Thursday evening, February 5, the University of Pittsburgh's Students of the 
Department of Africana Studies (SODAS) presents a lecture by Bobby Seale, the 
kickoff attraction in celebration of Black History Month. The former Black 
Panther will speak at Pitt's David Lawrence Hall at 7:30 p.m. 

Seale is 67 now and the former chairman of the Black Panther Party is a piece 
of history himself. Along with the fabled minister of defense Huey Newton, 
Seale founded the Black Panthers in October 1966. Angered by the violence met 
by Civil Rights activists, especially in the South, Newton and Seale adopted a 
more militant stance -- the Black Panthers were so named because a cornered cat 
will eventually lash out at its attacker. The Panthers armed themselves and 
dared police to come after them; in the meantime, the party established 
grassroots projects in poor black communities, providing free healthcare and 
food and registering voters. 

Political infighting, FBI harassment, poor political strategy and reckless 
behavior destroyed the Black Panther Party -- slowly at first and then all at 
once. Newton, the poster boy for what was most appealing and most destructive 
about the Panthers, was shot to death during a drug deal in 1989. Seale, the 
party's chief organizer and strategist, lives in Philadelphia now. He's written 
two books about the Black Panthers -- Seize the Time and A Lonely Anger -- as 
well as book of barbecue recipes. A PBS affiliate in Philadelphia is, in fact, 
producing a cooking show for Seale, which he says is part culinary revolution 
and part consciousness-raising. "Barbecuing is one of my old, old, old style 
social change fundraisers," he says. "I did barbecue fundraisers in the Black 
Panther Party. We used to put three or four thousand people in the park, and 
we'd charge two or three dollars a plate." 

Seale took some time to talk with Pulp this week about the history and legacy 
of the Black Panther Party. 


Pulp: In 2002, you joined other former Black Panthers in condemning the New 
Black Panther Party and trying to block them from using that name. Why?

Bobby Seale: They should have been calling themselves the New Nation of Islam. 
They're always saying "as salaam alaikum" and "walaikum salaam." Why hijack our 
name? Why propagate your cheap, xenophobic, revenge-style, black-racist 
nationalism and say you're the "New Black Panthers"? 

My Black Panther organization was about all power to all the people. It was 
about coalition politics. We crossed all racial and ethnic lines in our 
organizing in the 1960s. That was a mainstay characteristic of the real, 
power-to-the-people Black Panther Party organization that I titled, that I 
named, that I was the key national organizer of while Huey [Newton], my buddy, 
sat in jail. 

So here along comes some cheap, backward, myopic, close-minded idiots 
propagating and supporting the Taliban, supporting the Al Qaeda and those who 
would kill and murder anybody who's a so-called "infidel." I have no time for 
them. They're a bunch of cheap, scurvy, little racists who hijacked our name, 
and they need to be sued. They do not harbor a positive, progressive goal. 
That's the true win for humanity -- black folks at the helm, leading or trying 
to lead, and evolving something that makes sense for the future. Winning a 
future world of co-operational humanism on the face of this earth, and decent 
human relations between all ethnic groups, between all people, nation-states 
and religious groups. Evolving that is the true win for humanity. They can't 
see that.


P: How has racism changed in the last 50 years?

BS: In the 1960s, especially in the South, you know, the racists got up on the 
podiums and said, "Segregation forever!" I mean, Bull Connor, you saw him an 
television take an axe handle and beat people off the courthouse or the city 
hall steps, where black folks were standing trying to exercise their right to 
vote. That was glaring. 

And even though there are some dumb cops in New York that fired 41 shots and 
hit a guy 19 times and he was totally unarmed, the point of the matter is that 
they went to trial. I remember the times when nobody went to trial. I love 
those changes. It doesn't mean that racism is over, but when I look at what has 
changed, I want to praise people. 

In 1964, there were less than 200 duly elected black politicians throughout the 
whole of the United States of America. How many political seats can one be duly 
elected to? It's close to 500,000 nationwide. 

By the end of the 1970s, there were 7,000 duly elected black politicians in the 
United States of America. By the end of the 1980s, there were over 10,000, and 
by the end of the 1990s there were over 12,000 duly elected black politicians, 
doubly matched by the number of females in political office, also matched 
probably by now by Chicano and Mexican Americans in office, and Puerto Ricans, 
and Asians. 

That's not to say that all these politicians are great; I can hypothetically 
say that 40 percent of them aren't worth doodly squat. But I would rather have 
12,000 duly elected black politicians, half of them being worth doodly squat, 
than to have only 200. 

You have to have great respect for the democracy project, and a lot of people 
don't. I don't think we're that far from the threshold of being able to really, 
truly change the world, in terms of influencing the world to a higher level of 
consciousness, in terms of progressively evolving some kind of new economic 
practice that makes human sense -- economic practices and policies that 
ultimately negates the existence of direct poverty, even among the six billion 
people that live on the face of the earth. 


P: You're talking broad-scale action now, but the Panthers were effective 
community activists, too. Do you think that today's young leftists should more 
actively engage grassroots projects in the vein of the Black Panther Party's 
free breakfast for children program? 

BS: People have to remember, and I have to explain this to students many times, 
free breakfast for children was not only about an issue. It was political 
organizing methodology that I designed. The free breakfast for children program 
-- put up in [Oakland, California's] St. Augustus Church, one block from a 
grammar school in a low-income black community -- attracted attention. It 
attracted the media. That program criticized our existing government and its 
policies. It said that the average military personnel paid two and half cents 
at the time for a pint of milk, and it cost a kid in school at the time 10 
cents. 

After that program got real popular, a few months, the police walked in one 
morning at St. Augustus Church with their shotguns resting on their shoulders. 
They walked through, looked around and left. The next morning we had no kids, 
because they went home and said, "The police came to the Black Panthers 
breakfast program this morning!" That left mothers fearing for their kids -- we 
were known to defend ourselves in shootouts, although there were no guns at the 
free breakfast program. That was a tactic on the police and politicians part to 
goof up our program. 

But we were able to counter that. We were up to 250,000 kids being fed five 
days a week in all the chapters and branches -- and in some other city 
locations where there were no chapters or branches, but the Black Panther Party 
helped people start a program. The program got so popular that the California 
state legislature moved to provide $5 million for all California schools for 
free breakfast and free lunch programs. It was sent to Ronald Reagan, then 
governor of California. He vetoed $4.5 million of it. The California state 
legislature overrode his veto and put the whole goddamn $5 million back in. 

Now what did we do with that? The free breakfast program involved people in the 
community who were not necessarily members of the Black Panther Party. We had 
all the kids' addresses, and when it came to voter registration we would hit 
those addresses -- not only to register people to vote but for people out of 
those households to donate three or four hours and become voter registrars 
themselves. 

The free health clinics and the free sickle cell anemia testing program -- all 
the addresses of the people who had visited those clinics or got free testing, 
we would go back. It was a reciprocal kind of thing: organizing something 
concrete, real and practical on the one hand, on the other hand telling people 
that we have to run for political office so that we can create legislation that 
makes human sense. 

The programs were organizing tactics. They were more than just programs. So J. 
Edgar Hoover jumps up on national television: "The Black Panther breakfast for 
children program is a threat to the internal security of America. It is 
Communist-inspired..." Blah, blah, blah, blah... 


P: Do you think Hoover thought the Panthers were Communists because you all 
carried Mao's little red book everywhere? 

BS: That wasn't until 1968. When we first picked the book up, we only got it to 
sell it for a dollar apiece. We got the book at a store in San Francisco that 
sold Chinese Communist materials. We had heard that they had this book -- the 
little red book, The Thoughts of Chairman Mao Tse Tung. We had heard about it 
through the news -- the news had shown millions of people over in China holding 
up the little red book. 

The Black Panther Party was only five months old. That was in February or March 
[of 1967] and we started the Black Panther Party October 22, 1966. Huey said, 
"I know where we can raise some rent money. We can get some money for some more 
shotguns." And he said, "How much money have you got?" I worked for the City of 
Oakland at the time. I said, "I don't know, I got a couple hundred dollars. 
What about it?" 

So we went to the address for this store. Individual person going in there, you 
buy it for 35 cents or something like that. If you bought 10, it was 25 cents. 
We got the guy to give us 200 at 20 cents apiece. We went to the entrance to 
the University of California [at Berkeley], where thousands of students walk 
through. "Get your red book here, the thoughts of Chairman Mao Tse Tung" -- and 
they sold like hotcakes. We ran back and got 400 more, sold those books, bought 
two shotguns, paid the rent and bought a bunch more books. 

Then we heard there was going to be a big antiwar rally. We left our guns at 
home, but we kept our little black berets and our leather jackets and our black 
slacks and our shined shoes to identify us, and we walked up and down the 
aisles of Kesar Football Stadium in San Francisco. They had 30,000 people in 
the goddamned place. I think we sold almost 2,000 books. 

So we had sold more than 2,000 copies of this book, but none of us had read it. 
Then we get some brother who comes out of Los Angeles, he joins the party -- 
Ray Masai Hewitt. He's abreast on Chairman Mao. I wasn't so much interested in 
the material, but if he was going to talk about some positive aspects, fine. 
Looking through the Red Book, I found there were some little rules about how 
you organize with the people. One: Do not steal a needle nor a piece of thread 
from the people. Always serve the people. I saw we could use these rules in the 
Black Panther Party. That's how in 1968 the red book became required reading 
material in the Black Panther Party. 


P: Huey Newton is often remembered as the face of the Black Panthers, but the 
way you tell the story, he did more harm than good in the end. 

BS: Huey was not the organizer of the party, that's what people can't get 
through their heads. When Huey went to jail there hadn't been more than 50 
people who went through the Black Panther Party. That was in the first year. 
Huey went to jail in October 1967. So through 1968 and 1969, I organized 5,000 
people in 48 chapters around the United States. Huey didn't have that 
face-to-face relationship with all that leadership. Huey never met all these 
party members. People knew me. I went to all these chapters and branches; I 
spoke at all these colleges. 

Really the party was my baby -- I'm not trying to be conceited or anything, I'm 
just trying to put the history straight. My thing was organizing multiple 
leadership, multiple spokespersons, because my belief was that we couldn't have 
the power structure run where they could kill one person or put one person in 
jail. We had to have multiple spokespersons. And this multiple leadership and 
these local chapter leaderships all had to have a central democratic committee. 

That was what held the Black Panther Party together even after they forced 
Eldridge Cleaver's exile, had Huey in jail and then put me in jail. The party 
survived. 


P: Some say the Black Panther Party was done in by its own culture of violence. 
What do you believe caused the party's demise? 

BS: The FBI's counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, working with racist 
police departments and racist politicians, particularly in the year 1969, 
directed by J. Edgar Hoover, attacked every Black Panther office in this 
country. And many times they came in shooting, as a means or a tactic to 
terrorize us. And they knew -- they knew from the very inception of the Black 
Panther Party, especially those first two years, 1967 and 1968 -- they knew we 
had a policy that we would take the arrests if you tried to come and get us. So 
what they decided to do in 1969 was come in shooting as a tactic to terrorize 
us out of existence. 

Our right to self-defense was about how the pig power structure, as we used to 
call them, would come down on us to murder us and terrorize us. That's 
important to why the Black Panther Party evolved in the 1960s -- how we viewed 
institutional racism, based on the activities of certain racists in this 
country who had already been attacking peaceful protesters, brutalizing and 
killing them. And so we said we would be ready to defend ourselves when they 
came. They killed 28 of us; we killed 14 of them. They wounded 69 of us; we 
might have wounded 37 or 38 of them. It was a mini civil war, particularly in 
the year 1969. 

It got to a point that, after [the police slaying of Black Panthers] Fred 
Hampton and Mark Clark, and then, two days later, the attack on the Los Angeles 
Black Panther Party office -- which resulted in a four-and-a-half-hour shootout 
-- people in this country, including the Congress of the United States, 
including Senator [Frank] Church and Senator [Edward] Kennedy, and including 
many others on the Senate investigating committee, called the FBI to the carpet 
and said, "Why are you running around here attacking these Black Panthers? 
These guys register people to vote." 

The mayor of Seattle, just before the Senate investigating committee hearings, 
got on public television and told the FBI to get out of town, you're not going 
to get our police department to attack these Black Panthers, who have a free 
health clinic and this free people's hospice down here and the free breakfast 
program. The guy got on television and told the FBI to get out of Dodge. 

After the Senate hearings, there were never any more attacks on the Black 
Panther Party. Therefore there were never any more shootouts between the Black 
Panthers and police. None whatsoever. 


P: So what about the infighting?

BS: The first split was between Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. Huey had just 
come out of jail after three years. I was in jail. Eldridge was in exile in 
Algiers at the time. It was years later that we were able to read the Freedom 
on Information Act documents on COINTELPRO and learned that split between 
Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton was generated with false letters being sent to 
each person, falsely accusing Huey of doing something negative against 
Eldridge, then letters sent to Huey falsely accusing Eldridge of doing 
something negative against Huey. That's what generated that split, an FBI 
counterintelligence operation. Years later I read that these letters and 
messages must not to be sent to Bobby Seale because Bobby Seale would be able 
to see through them. 


P: A lot of old leftists believe COINTELPRO is what did the Panthers in.

BS: I have been speaking and lecturing on this point for, my God, 25 years. 
Ever since I left the Black Panther Party. People say, "The FBI destroyed you 
guys." Bullshit. We weathered them. We weathered everything they threw at us. 
Even after the split, I still had 3,000 party members by the time I come out of 
jail, and 28 chapters and branches. When I ran for mayor of Oakland -- a 
strategic organizing mistake on the part of our own organization, generated by 
Huey Newton -- that was what caused the next major membership drop and the 
demise of the Black Panther Party. 


P: Why was that a mistake? 

BS: That mistake was all centered around the idea that I would run for mayor of 
Oakland. Elaine Brown would run with me for a city councilwoman's seat at 
large. Huey suggested that we needed people from all the other chapters and 
branches. I said, "No, we don't. We've got 255 people here and we can match 
that with community workers who come around regularly. So we've got 500 people 
in the San Francisco Bay area that operate with the Black Panther Party. 

But Huey insisted. The argument was that in the year before the election, every 
month or so we needed to break down a chapter and branch of the Black Panther 
Party. So the democratic central committee outvoted me -- and then turned 
around and directed me to call each chapter and branch. The reason that they 
did that was they knew that I organized them. I was the one who had a 
face-to-face relationship with all these members and all these chapters and 
their leadership. 

So every month I would call up a couple of chapters and say, "You guys are 
hereby directed by headquarters to break down your chapter, all your resources. 
If you have a clinic, break it down. Any resources you can transfer to here. 
Bring all of that stuff to Oakland, California." 

Do you know that I lost as much as three quarters of the membership in those 
places? I went back to a meeting and said, "We're losing the people." I said 
people were pissed off at headquarters for telling them to break down their 
free breakfast programs in their cities, in their locations. 

In eight months, all those chapters and branches were broken down. And we lost 
three quarters of that 3,000 membership. Remember, 50 to 60 percent of the 
people who came into the party were headed for college or already were in 
college and had postponed their education to work in the Black Panther Party 
for two or three years. So they went back to college. 


P: What happened next?

BS: Then I lost the mayoral campaign. Of the 500 or 600 who did come across 
country for the campaign, when I lost, 90 percent left. So within a month or so 
after the mayoral campaign was over -- I only got 42 percent of the vote -- I 
had about 300 party members concentrated in Oakland, California. 

Then in January 1974, Huey Newton jumps on and beats up a party member, a 
female. A hundred party members walked away. Then he jumped on a popular disc 
jockey and beat him up. And some party members said, "Man, I'm leaving this 
crap, Huey Newton's out of his fucking mind." 

In the last week of May 1974, I learned that Huey was attempting to take over 
the drug-pushing operation in Oakland, California. He was doing this secretly. 
Within a month or so, I privately resigned. My brother John Seale told me that 
within three weeks of my leaving, nearly 150 of the 200 party members left when 
they found out I was gone. 

So by August 1974 you have 50 or 60 people left in the whole of the Black 
Panther Party. Now remember, by December 1968 I had 5,000 members in 48 
chapters and branches throughout the United States of America. So that dynamic, 
broad-based membership and all the programs -- the breakfast program, the 
preventative medical health clinic, the sickle cell anemia testing program, the 
free food voter registration drive, the cooperative housing program that never 
really got off the ground but it was great theoretical designs -- all of these 
things died. 


P: Why did Huey Newton do such stupid things?

BS: Because he was stupid. We made the biggest mistake in the world calling him 
a genius. Plus he was using the junk. I got the central committee to vote with 
me to direct Huey to a hospital to dry himself out three times -- two times in 
1973 and one time in early 1974. He'd go to these nightclubs were the Raiders 
hung out and next thing you knew he was beating up somebody. It was a fiasco. 
It was a pity. He was snorting the cocaine at 90 miles an hour. 

Huey was never an inspirational speaker. Huey did not know how to integrate the 
intellectual with the emotional. He knew the intellectual. He was quite 
theoretical. He had a tendency to want to be precise: "Brothers and sisters, if 
we could first agree upon the dialectical principle that quantitative increase 
or quantitative decrease causes a qualitative leap or change, I think then we 
can move forward..." 

Well, he lost the whole audience -- and half the audience was college students. 
Now, I walk into a room and I say, "Today we're getting ready to get down to 
the nitty gritty, and we ain't gonna miss no nits or no grits." I got people 
laughing already, you see -- I used to be a standup comedian. By the time I'm 
done breaking it down, the average guy on the street could understand what I 
was talking about. 


P: Can you explain it to me?

BS: You need to be able to use dialectical principles to know how to think as 
opposed to what to think. Racist groups demand what to think. I dealt in how to 
think. That's what pisses me off about the New Black Panthers, with their 
close-minded, myopic views. Their existence is almost like an FBI 
counterintelligence program itself, to discredit the positive, progressive 
history of what the real Black Panther Party was always about. 

Huey Newton was on trial for his life and we put his name on the ballot for 
U.S. Congress. Eldridge Cleaver, we got him nominated as a presidential 
candidate with the Peace and Freedom Party. The man got two million votes 
across the country in 28 states. 

This is American history, you see what I'm getting at? Good old, juicy, 
down-home, take-no-crap American history. I love it when I think about it. 



- - - - -
John Lacny

People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!


"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and 
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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