Seale: Black Panthers wrongly tagged as “hoodlums, thugs”

Scott Sonner

Saturday, Feb. 24, 2001 | 10:13 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - Thirty-five years after he helped found the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale says he's still trying to shake the organization's bad rap as a radical, violent, hate group.

"We were not hoodlums and thugs," Seale said in a speech Friday night at the University of Nevada, Reno.

"We were students. We were avid readers. We were researchers. We were serious," he said. "Our philosophy was about empowering the people."

Seale, 61, started the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966 with Huey Newton while they were students at Oakland's Merritt Junior College and working at a city anti-poverty center.

"It is a profound piece of American history," he said in a nearly two-hour keynote address before a crowd of about 300 at UNR's Black Student Organization's 14th annual ball.

Paul Mitchell, a UNR journalism professor who is an advisor to the student group, said Seale was invited to speak to help clear the air.

"The Black Panther Party has been very misunderstood," he said.

Then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan was the first to call the group's members "hoodlums and thugs," Seale said.

"The FBI would consistently say we were a black, militant, hate group. They were intent on trying to stereotype us a certain way," he said.

"But our slogan was all power to all people," he said. "And they didn't tell you when they called me a hoodlum I was working for the city."

The national civil rights movement was already kicking into high gear by the time the Black Panthers were established, he said.

"We were like a social evolutionary accident," said Seale, now working in community relations for African-American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.

"We weren't that much different from any other civil rights organization. We just were going to draw a line in the sand when you get shot at, killed, brutalized or attacked by some racists. We weren't going to take it any more."

The group decided to take action in the form of arming its members and shadowing Oakland police officers to help ensure citizens' civil rights.

"It was another time, another era," said Seale, a former Air Force mechanic and engineer who worked on the Gemini missile.

"We didn't have personalized cam corders and computers. We patrolled the police with law books, tape recorders and shot guns."

By 1969, Black Panther chapters were serving free breakfast to 250,000 children across the country, he said.

But the guns continued to draw the most attention.

Newton, a law student, had found a California Supreme Court ruling that ensured citizen rights to observe police officers on duty. He also researched gun laws that ensured a right to carry a gun in California as long as it was not concealed.

"We studied all those laws before we went into the streets," Seale said.

"We even parked legally because we had this thing about the law," he said.

In response, the California Assembly passed a law to end the legal observation of police officers.

"That's how legal we were," Seale said, who was arrested for carrying a gun to a protest at the legislature and served six months in jail.

The Black Panthers' first shootout with police was in October 1967, a full year after the group had started, he said.

By 1969, Seale said the FBI had attacked every Black Panther chapter in the country.

"I used to tell people, if we are attacked, we defend ourselves," he said.

"At the end of that year, 28 Black Panthers were dead. Fourteen police died too. ... They wounded 69 of us. We wounded 39 of them," he said.

"It's a pitty and a shame when you have to get to that level. This was like a mini-Civil War."

Over the period, some 2,500 felony charges were filed against members of the Black Panther Party, Seale said.

"A little over 10 percent went to trial and we won 95 percent of the cases. That's good human-struggle history, I think."

Black Panther membership peaked in 1969 with 5,000 members in 45 chapters across the country, but the party folded in 1974.