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Happy birthday to Black Panther Party (BPP) co-founder and chairman Bobby Seale!
When Seale began attending Merritt College in Oakland, California, he was exposed to Black radical politics and first met Huey Newton. Inspired by Malcolm X, revolutionary independence movements in Africa, and anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Seale, and Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. While working at a War on Poverty program, he and Newton wrote the revolutionary ten-point program that laid the groundwork for the BPP's radical legacy as a movement fighting to achieve Black liberation through revolutionary socialism.
In 1968, Seale was arrested, along with seven other activists, during protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, becoming one of the infamous Chicago Eight defendants. During the trial, Seale was repeatedly denied the right to represent himself, and the presiding judge, Julius Hoffmann, ordered him bound and gagged. He was ultimately sentenced to four years in prison for contempt of court. In an interview with the Guardian, Seale recalled: "All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf, and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a Black man to get a jury of his peers."
After his release from jail, Seale found the BPP significantly weakened due to arrests, killings, and internal conflicts caused by the FBI's efforts to neutralize the organization. In an attempt to enter electoral politics, Seale ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, finishing second and prompting a runoff election, which he ultimately lost.
In 1974, Seale resigned as chairman of the BPP. However, to this day, he remains politically active, advocating for groups that support social justice, and is an influential figure in the fight for equality and justice.
#BobbySeale #BlackPantherParty #BlackRevolutionary