Bobby Seale: Black Panthers gave power to movement
/Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, long ago traded his beret and black leather jacket for a coat and tie.
But, he said, that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten his roots.
The Panthers, he said, put action behind the words of its motto, “Power to the People,” developing as many 22 programs to help residents in inner-city neighborhoods in Oakland, Calif.
“We made it real,” Seale said. “It was a people’s democracy.”
Seale, 76, delivered that message Friday night to about 130 people who attended the second annual meeting of the National Alumni Association of the Black Panther Party.
During his 10-minute speech at the Carter G. Woodson School, Seale praised the leaders of the local Panthers’ chapter, who were honored recently with a marker at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Fifth Street, near the group's former headquarters.
The Winston-Salem chapter, organized in 1969, was the first to be formed in the Southeast. Among the founders were Larry Little, Nelson Malloy and Hazel Mack-Hilliard.
Little is now a political-science professor at Winston-Salem State University, Nelson Malloy is a former member of the Winston-Salem City Council, while Mack-Hilliard is an attorney with Legal Aid of North Carolina.
“They organized in a dedicated spirit and put some programs together,” Seale said. He pointed out the free ambulance service that the city chapter operated in eastern Winston-Salem.
Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Panthers in 1966 in Oakland, advocating the right of self-defense for blacks and calling for decent housing for blacks, fair treatment in court and an end to police brutality.
The organization advocated carrying weapons in “militant self-defense” to counter such institutional racism as police brutality against blacks. The Black Panthers also organized free-lunch programs, health clinics and sickle-cell anemia screening.
Seale led the Black Panthers during the height of the civil-rights movement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Panthers as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.”
Several Panthers engaged in deadly shootouts with Oakland police in the mid-1960s. The violence resulted in the deaths of 26 Panthers and 16 police officers, the Associated Press reported in a 1982 story about Seale.
In 1974, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Oakland. After his defeat, he resigned as chairman of the Black Panthers Party and left Oakland. But he remained in the public eye, writing books and lecturing at various colleges.
In his speech at Woodson, Seale talked about how the Oakland Panthers distributed 10,000 bags of groceries and registered 4,700 people to vote in one event.
He said that was an example of effective grassroots organizing by the Black Panther Party, whose ranks swelled after the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“I poured everything I had in creating these programs,” he said.
Before the Seale spoke, former members of the Winston-Salem chapter presented Malloy with a Black Panther Party lifetime achievement award.
Malloy said he was humbled and that other Black Panthers contributed more than he did to “end discrimination and oppression of black and poor people.”
