Printable Biography of Bobby Seale

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Within the last fifteen years, the demise of several sixties radical left icons, (including Huey P. Newton, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, Kwame Toure and Dave Dellinger), means that Bobby Seale has become one of the last surviving architects of one of the most important social change movements in American and African-American history.

Speaking together at some events, Bobby Seale and his wife Leslie take to the stage with their lively charismatic and activist eloquence. The Seales illuminate the birth and the youthful intelligentsia of the Black Panther Party. They spell out the pragmatic philosophical range of the sixties protest movement, which grew out of student activism, historical class analysis, scientific research, and programmatic community organizing.

The Seales transport the audience back to the near civil war turbulence of the late sixties and early seventies. This was a time when the civil rights protest and anti-Vietnam war activism of hundreds of thousands of protesters of many different ethnic groups included more than five thousand young black men and women selling thousands of copies of "The Black Panther" weekly newspapers.

Black Panther Party members were college students who created tangible grass roots community programs and registered many thousands to vote. They established free breakfast for children and free health clinics all across the USA. They also ran for political office for what was then profoundly progressive social change.

With law books in their hands and "legal" guns handy for self defense, in the early days, they patrolled and observed racist police, putting their lives on the line. They took a stand against vicious and overtly racist attacks on peaceful demonstrators and against brutality toward poor people of color. Defining themselves as revolutionary humanists, Seale and his wife Leslie bring the sixties protest movement era full circle showing how times have changed and how we must reach for the future:

Protest, organize people's programs, and evolve toward a profoundly progressive society with greater direct community control democracy, devoid of racist, bigoted or chauvinistic practices, devoid of war mongering and all the extremes of avaricious exploitation.