Photo by Robert Altman, 1969

BOBBY SEALE * 17 March 1999 * unedited transcript

I interviewed Bobby Seale (official site) in person in Oakland for Vibe Magazine, on a commission by Peter Relic, who was editing the front section of Vibe that year. I think the transcript runs to 12,000 words. The published Q & A was about 700 words. There’s lots of great stuff in here about Black Panther Party history and philosophy, Bobby’s times in prison, barbecue and so on, after we get done with talking about what he’s up to at the moment…—Jay Babcock

Bobby Seale: I’m out here [in Oakland] for David Hilliard. David Hilliard is running for City Council, 3rd district, to mount a real student involvement and people’s involvement-type of campaign for him to win that particular political office. It’s all about the continuing progressive Old Left-radical politics today. We want to get these students involved in this campaign to teach them techniques and methods of the old Black Panther party campaign, Old Left radical politics, progressive politics. To teach students that they gotta take over, that they have to be part and parcel of this kind of stuff, they gotta take seats over all over this country and this is gonna set an example for that. That they’re the ones who have to begin to understand the need to control, run these political institutionalized functions whether they’re city council, county seats, state legislative seats, etc., and make laws, legislation and policy that reflect the real true human liberation of the people, the empowerment of the people, whether you’re black, white, blue, red, green, yellow, polkadot, we don’t care. We’re progressive. In the 1960s we were an ALL power to ALL the people. We didn’t care what you were.

People think we were just a strict so-called xenophobic-type Black power organization. Not true. If people look and know our history…as an African-American group of young people who were part of a young intelligentsia of the 1960s, what we evolved were some of the most profound progressive politics that emerged out of the Black community: to set up coalitions, working face-to-face coalitions with all our white left radical friends, with all the young Hispanics, young Puerto Ricans with the Young Lords organization or the young Mexican-Americans Chicano brothers and sisters with the Brown Berets and the Cesar Chavez farm labor movement. We had a working coalition with that organization. AIM—American Indian Movement—we worked directly with. All the young Asians, young Chinese and Japanese worked with us, like the Red Guard out of Chinatown. Young Chinese students and young Japanese. In fact, of all those ethnic groups, it was always a few of each one of those ethnic groups that actually literally joined our Black Panther Party. I’m just saying that, that’s the kind of progressive, “All power to the People” politics that we put into the ’60s. We crossed racial lines even though we were able to be an African-American community organization that ran our own organization without any intellectual or offbeat, abstract, academic dictates. We REFUSED to allow for that, because our concept and our method was putting theory into practice. Learning as we did.

And we want to show the youth—when I speak today—we want to show the youth that if you participate, I want you to sign up for this campaign because it is not about just a political seat, it’s about another kind of movement, moving into this Y2K period…it’s not necessarily about the continuing, old politics as usual of the Democratic and especially the right-wing conservative Republican politics… There’s the Green Party, there’s the Constitutional Party, etc. so on. For instance David is running his total non-partisan, there’s no political party per se mentioned here in terms of being listed on the ballot. So. We’re saying there are multi-thousands of these seats. You talk about 50,000? or are you talking 500,000? …duly-elected seats in the United States of America, especially on the local level. And this campaign is not the last of this era, it will be another one evolving.

For instance in Winston, North Carolina, used to have a chapter of the Black Panther Party there. The Party was over, what, in the late ’70s and early ’80s? What in effect happened was the former Party members ran for political office. Larry Little, the former Deputy Chairman down there, won a councilmanic seat that represented that poor low-income African-American community there. And since then, for 26 years, it’s always been a former Black Panther connected to that seat. The people will not allow anybody else. If you weren’t in the former Black Panther Party organization in Winston/Salem, North Carolina—they call it , the old other conservative council members call that particular seat “the Panther seat.”

In other words you have to remember those young Black Panther Party people, young students and others, they put together a free ambulance program for the people. They put together a free health clinic with a free pharmacy program which all chapters and branches did. They put together free breakfasts for children programs that served those people in that community. So those people never forgot that. They remembered that. These are tangible programs. This was not rhetoric, this was not talk. So this is what I’m saying.

So we have various examples of former Party members still in political office like Bobby Rush, who was an alderman there in Chicago for 12 years and then became a Congressman. We have Michael McGee in Milwaukee, he is still a councilman up there representing a heavy electoral group of the African-American community.

What a lot of people forget is this is really the politics of the Black Panther party. Even though we had a lot of shootouts and a lot of battles with the police attacked us, when the politicians would send their law enforcement agencies in on us, even though J. Edgar Hoover and all these guys were out to smash us, try to terrorize us out of existence, they killed 29 of my people in this country, particularly in the year 1969. 14 policemen wound up getting killed in those attacks. They attacked our offices, they attacked our homes and we vowed to defend ourselves. Cuz in our sense, all we were doing was defending our Constitutional, democratic, civil, human rights: one, to organize the people, political electoral community power…

People used to say “you’re outside the System.” You can’t be outside of something that’s oppressing you. You have to get right into the middle of it, change its structure, change its direction, change the laws, change the policy to serve the empowerment really and truly of the people. And THAT’s the kind of politically revolutionaries we were in the 1960s.

So this is the kind of stuff, and I’m going to be talking to these students about today… Not only that, but, Where are we going in the future? Getting another kind of paradigm that incorporates where we are today. In other words, there are Civil Rights issues, there are human rights issues, there are people-community empowerment-economic issues, etc.

BUT–we are not living in the ’60s. Even though we know the ’60s, there’s a lot of things we can PULL from the ’60s, a lot of positive organizing methodologies we can pull from the ’60s…BUT how do you place it in the present day context? So I’m trying to get these students to understand: you live in an overdeveloped, high-tech, fast-paced, computerized, scientific-technological social order. You are NOT living in the ’60s. This communications technology information base world globalizing on the level it’s in, you’re gonna have to learn how and get creative with this communications technology an integrate it into some of your methodology, your communicating and organizing and raising the consciousness of the
people, politically and programatically.

In other words, the Black Panther Party, historically, we set up numerous programs. It united a lot of people in the community. But the programs were not just for the sake of setting up programs, it was to get the people INVOLVED on a practical level. So those very people who were being served with this programs became part and parcel…and the ones who became active and the ones who became involved, as they went out and organized more and more people, and they became the voters for these young political revolutionaries. Whether you were white or black, and if we could assess if you were a young white radical, if we could assess that your heart-mind-soul was dedicated to true human liberation for all peoples, BOOM—we would vote for you, set you up, you’d be part of this new wave that was the 1960s.

I’m saying the same thing can happen in this high-tech-fast-paced social order. More important, it HAS to happen, because too much corporate money-rich people control the politicians in this country, campaign financing, etc. For instance, this campaign we’re talking about, it’s not about money. “How much money you have to run the campaign?” We tell the students about your participation, and YOU get out here and get involved and YOU when you turn 25, 26, 30 years of age, YOU need to be running for these offices. YOU need to be taking over these seats, city council seats, county seats, state legislative seats, etc. and caucusing up and evolving a PROFOUND people’s human liberation ideology. And I like to say an “ideology in motion” cuz I can’t stand strict, doctrinaire ideological approaches, that’s theory without practice when it’s too doctrinaire. Once you get out there and get with the people, you see, you can come up with something that makes human sense…so you can EVOLVE a future world of cooperational humanism.

This is the kind of message I’m gonna give to the students today. But I do this for what, 40 colleges a year. This will be the 20th engagement of 1999. I’ll do six more during the spring.

I’ve been living in Philadelphia since 1983. When I first resigned from the Black Panther Party, I actually wound up in Denver, CO. The Party had dwindled down to less than 200 and some odd members, and there was some small ideological problems. You have to remember, the Party at one time had 5,000 active members in 45 cities throughout the United States of America. 45 chapters and branches of the Black Panther Party. The peak of that was January 1969. The Party was almost 2 and a half years old. Started in October 1966. We had international notoriety seven months later, May 2, 1967. Martin Luther King was killed April 6, 1968. Up to Martin Luther King I only had 400 members up and down the West Coast, San Diego to Seattle. When Martin Luther King was killed, in a matter of a couple of months,
particularly when the colleges let out, it blew my mind that so many young people started flooding into our organization. They were so angry that brother Martin Luther King was killed. They said, ‘I’m joining the Black Panther Party.’ So we had an influx, 60% of that membership being particularly college students, high school students headed to college who decided to postpone their college education.

In a matter of 5 or 6 months following the death of MLK, we had peaked at 5,000 active full-time members of the BPP. Plus our working coalitions had EXPANDED to a point that by 1969 we were able to create what we called the National Committees to Combat Fascism as an extension organizing effort BEYOND the Black Panther Party, we didn’t care whether you was white, black, blue, red, green, yellow, polkdaot, anyone could be a community worker with the NCCF. And that group was composed of almost 10,000 more people. This was why the power structure was really afraid of us, about that. Because to mobilize those kind of people, to mobilize those brothers and sisters, people who were angry, and to tell them we need to take over all of these political seats. These political seats, whether it’s a city council or making legislation, laws and policies, are not serving the basic desires and needs of the people. So we the young political revolutionary humanists, we can get in there. We’re saying the same thing as to exist now—in the context of the present, though.

By 1968 when the BPP was two years old, Huey P. Newton was on trial and in jail without bail. I ran for California State Assembly with my name on the ballot. We had a working coalition with the Peace & Freedom Party. Kathleen Cleaver ran for state Assemblyman out of San Francisco. Eldridge Cleaver was slated as the presidential candidate in 28 states and garnered two million votes. YES! Two million votes Eldridge Cleaver got! Huey Newton was in jail, defending himself for his life, and we put his name on the ballot of his ninth congressional district. Running for political office was always part of the Party[it wasn’t] just the programs, not just the philosophy, the argumentative left radical critiques and ideology. And we critiqued them, about the War, about racial discrimination…etc. We did all of this. But the BPP’s real true character was manifested in the programmatic organizing relating to political electoral community empowerment. To unify votes of people on another conscious level and opposition to the corruption, the avariciousness and the racism manifested in the political institutions of America.

Jay: Why did the Panthers decide to go that way instide of being separatists?

Well we never related to it. You have to remember, I come up in the high-tech world. Before I ever got involved with this stuff, I was working on the Gemini missile project in the engineering department at [inaud] aerospace and electronics. I was doing electromagnetic field, black light, non-destruct testing for all the engine frames for the Gemini missile program. For all three stages of exhaust housing for the Gemini missile program. I went to college originally as an engineering design major, and when I went to college, remember this is AFTER the four years in the United States Air Force, structural repair, hihg-performance aircraft for the USAF, so …raised a carpenter and a builder…architect by the time I’m 18. So I based everything in my life and my understanding, even by the time I got in college, based on it on good, proven, scientific evidentiary FACT.

So when the Nation of Islam, as religious Black nationalist-type of organization was propagating some very mythical misunderstanding, it’s not scientific fact for me. I have no time for it, you know what I mean? I did respect their call for financial self-sufficiency in the Black community, etc., but in terms of having an organization, we refused to have religious and/or myopic, xenophobic Black nationalists as the ideology or as any part of, we didn’t want that as the head, or the leading ideological notion. What happened was that in forming the Black Panther Party, Huey and I came up with what we called a functional definition of power. In those days, people were spouting in 1964 or ’65 or ’66, “Black power! Black power!”

There so much RHETORIC, you see what I mean. It was so much TALK, it was not really being put together. Huey and I set the word “black” to the side for a minute to come up with a functional definition of the term “power.” And we came up with “Power is the ability to define phenomena and then in turn, make it act in a desired manner.” What I’m getting at here, this is like three-dimensional to me. An engineering design major, an architect, I THINK three-dimensional. [That definition], oh my god, it’s metaphorical, it’s applicable to understanding what the situation is. If the city council are a bunch of low-life avaricious racists, BANG! We have defined them for what they ARE. Now we must unite all the people, vote they butts out of office and make them in turn act in a desired manner, giving greater people’s community political representation POWER. So this is where we came from.

So our point was, I think it was a pivot point when we came up with that definition, we looked at and began to see a CLASS analysis, in the sense that it was not only black people that were being oppressed, we had poor whites who were oppressed, poor Mexican-Americans who were oppressed, Native Americans, etc. Crossing the racial lines. And THAT’S why we moved not for some Black nationalist, xenophobic-type separatist ideology. Two, I didn’t think that way. Ohmigawd, gimme a break, you know. I looked at the world as being interconnected and interrelated. Thinking three-dimensional.

See, we were part of a young Black intelligentsia. We were researchers. We were avid readers. We took time to know. You couldn’t just come up with some platitude, some emotional speech, hahaha, to get us all hooked up. Cuz we would QUESTION it. “Where you going with it? What do you mean by…?” So much theory. “Well how you gonna put that theory into practice?” In other words: I’m an architect. When I draw and lay out the plans for building a structure, those plans are only theory for the idea, right? [But] When I build the building, it’s real. You have to put it in practice.

So you have to put all that together and you can see where we came from. The separatist ideology was ABSURD. And I used to tell people, “No, we’re not outside the system.” “Oh yes you are.” I says, “Agnew said that!” Agnew, the vice president of the United States, part of a corrupt political structure, telling people we were outside the political system. Which was BULLCRAP, when we’d already ran for political office. How can you be outside of something that’s oppressing you, I would tell people. “Oh that’s right, how can you be outside of something…” Then I’d ask the white left radical buddies one time, after Bobby Kennedy was killed, [they were saying] “Oh no Bobby, man, we’re tired of the System, man. We’ve dropped out, man.” I says, “You CAN’T drop out. You cannot drop out of the total system. We have to get rid of the avaricious corporate monopoly capitalism. We have to get rid of the institutionalized framework of racism in America. Those two aspects we must fight against.” “No we’ve dropped out!” I sez, “You think you can drop out of the TOTAL System? cuz everything IS interconnected and interrelated, then you take all your buddies, go down to Cape Canaveral, I want you to hijack one of those rockets, take your butt to the moon. When you get to the moon, the president of the United States, Tricky Dick Nixon, is gonna send some troops up there, bring you back. There is no such thing as dropping out of the total system!” So my point becomes you must struggle to CHANGE the frameworks, the institutions and make those institutions make human sense.

So this is the argument and this is where we came from in the 1960s. I mean, yeah we were political revolutionaries, yeah we identified a racist for what he was, and if we said “Black power” as fast as we said “Black power” we said “Red power” and as fast as we said “Red power” we said “Brown power”, “white power” and then we summed it up with “All power to all the people.” See what I’m getting at? So this is where we came from. Our concept was that working closely with other people, particularly students and young people, cuz it was student movement, people forget that, it was student movement. Students did that 1960s protest era. They were the key, they were the young intellectuals, they were the ones who became and learned how to critique, we were the ones, we must have had over 200 very heavily circulated underground weekly tabloid newspapers throughout the United States of America and including the BPP being one of em. We were circulating up to 250,000 copies of this newspaper every week on time, every saturday by mid-1969.

So if you understand that, then we understand where we were coming from. We just didn’t have a time… if you look at the original Ten Point Panther program, I don’t think we used the phrase “Black Power” as such. We make no reference to religion. We make no reference to state control command economy-style socialism. People think the BPP evolved out of Marxist-Leninism. It didn’t. Later on, we picked up on, checked out and critiqued Marxist-Leninism. But what we thought may be valuable out of it …But ours was more of a democratic socialism, if anything was going to develop out of it. …or cooperative community control form of socialism, even allowing for democratizing capital for some concepts, possibilities, depending on what we got creative with, of market economy socialism. And then of course we dropped all of the social phrases and came up with community-controlled economics. How do we evolve greater community control of economic frameworks and reach out and produce services and goods in a high-tech fast-paced social order of the USA?

The Soviet Union’s Politburo state control command economy socialism was out. I pushed it out of the BPP because it started seeping in, a few concepts of it. I pushed it out. But we had to grow through this process–these arguments, these debates, implementing programs, seeing what was happening, etc. And we come up with community controlled politics. Well that’s more related to the concept of direct democracy, or greater participatory democracy. Participatory democracy is people’s grassroots community decision-making democracy, NOT the decision of a handful of bought-out politicians, politicians bought out by the corporate money-rich.

So that was the difference.

Q: What are your thoughts on New York City cops right now?

The recent shooting of a Guinean immigrant, 41 shots, heard they hit him 19 times, he was unarmed. I think there’s three major incidents that happened there in the last year and a half or so…

[In weary voice:] I’ll say it this way: We have still too many cases of police brutality. That’s really overwhelming, it’s a key issue that a lot of students have to understand that you have to have new policies and new legislatures and new directors, new training programs, and all these city governments, state and legislative frameworks in the one hand. But the primary difference between the ’60s when we were out there is that it was ten times as much police brutality and murders and stuff going on as it is now. Two, nobody went to court in the ’60s. Police were not charged, were not put on trial, were not suspended, you see what I mean? Undue and unneccesary force with glaring evidence, witnesses–they didn’t happen. Today at least we get a lot of these people to trial, to court, etc., win or lose the case. So that’s one somewhat change, even with the overwhelming amount of police brutality we still have going on now today.

I say we need to network with hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods, whole blocks, network with camcorders, of if you can get people to pool together and set up some town or block watch, some camera systems to watch these police. Take this stuff and put it on the Internet. Edit the stuff down and get some of these young, youthful students, these computer whizzes and political organizational groups and make video leaflets. Not even for that community but for the whole congressional or councilmanic district, etc. That kind of stuff. Integrate all this communications technology into our ability to raise the consciousness of the people to unify them in opposition to government frameworks that perpetuate this crap. There’s profiling going on in Jersey, that’s a big issue. I’m sure there’s profiling going on all over the country. In jersey state troopers are trained by policy to stop Blacks and hispanics if they’re driving nice cars as “suspects” or possibly running or carrying drugs. Now. The training procedure that’s set up, the racial profiling… Young college students were shot, cops coming to the window with guns drawn based just on the racial profiling. Verbal altercation occurred, the police stepped back and started shooting. State trooper. When in fact under the law the cops are not supposed to be stopping unless they have reasonable cause to do so. To train police to SUSPECT people because of their racial ethnicity who may be driving nice cars as drug pushers is not reasonable cause, it’s beyond the law. So that’s another aspect of what we call institutionalized racism. The institutional function of the police department, setting up policies…

This is only one issue. The real problems and issues I think are primarily rooted economically. We talk about a boom economy—I’m saying every poor and low-income person and others need to be able to root themselves economically in such a way and evolve to a point in a 10-year period to where they put themselves in some decent standard of living way above the poverty line. This is the uppermost over-developed, high-tech, richest country in the world. It’s absurd for this not to happen. So these are the real issues. The other issues are higher education for the masses of the people. Part of our mass protest movement…you have a handful or organizations running around saying, ‘That’s the white man’s education.’ I say, ‘You’re full of shit. 1 + 1=2 if you got it in your head whether you’re white, black red blue green yellow polkadot, that’s your education, that’s your knowledge. If you master the quadratic formula in college math, that’s your knowledge. You can apply to probably every field of research, even when if I think something’s being taught incorrectly in some way, it’s skewed such as anthropology that use the word “negroid” when I thinkt hey should use the word “Africanoid”..this kind of stuff.. it becomes my education, your education as a human being.

To me, education is about whether or not your ideas, your beliefs, your notions, your understandings, your new realizations, whether or not they correspond correctly to reality or not. That is the definition of what education is. Whether you get it out of institutional framework or whether you do a lot of self-education.

Q: What do you mean when you say it’s an ‘overdeveloped’ society?

We have a corporate money rich, not only in America but expanded to the worldwide framework, where too much 1) money and political power is being concentrated in the hands of one percent. Overdeveloped to the extend that 90% of the wealth is ultimately owned and controlled by that 1% corporate money rich. Too many of those corporate money rich are too avaricious. They overproduce goods to a point of pure waste. To the point that we have excessive environmental problems. Wastefulness. I say Hey we can provide environmental renovation jobs projects, if I can raise this first $10 million with my barbecue book-CD-ROM-DVD cookbook guide. I’m gonna raise $10 million to set an example of an environmental renovation youth jobs project, which would be a community controlled economic development project. Putting youth ages 16-27 or 28 renovating old houses, old cars, and step by step evolving alternative energy. We could create two or three million jobs this way across the country. These are just two examples.

I came from a line of carpenters, of builders, hunters and fishermen. I was an architect by the time I was 18. [Air Force, Gemini…] This was all part of my make-up on the one hand, then when I began to learn about the social ills, and began to realize that I had to make a contribution to deal with trying to end institutionalized racism in America, BANG. I shifted to the political, social and behavioral sciences in college, and next thing you know, I’m out here organizing. But I brought all those skills and abilities, insights, concepts, my 3-D view of things with me and applied it to that grassroots community development.

Q: What does ‘polyectic’ mean?

In the old days we talked a lot and used ‘dialectics.’ It’s applicable. But I thought we wouldn’t hit six billion in world population til 2003, 4 or 5, but we’ve already hit it. We gotta one, slow down this exponential growth of population but at the rate we’re going it’s estimated by the year 2040 we’re gonna have 10 billion human beings on the face of this earth, living human beings consuming resources. Now, how do you begin to deal with this when you’re trying to teach or get people active? Develop another paradigm, raise it to another level, so it’s applicable to a broader, interconnected, interrelated, interdependent situation that goes on. So dialectics I rememeber tended to be a line-linear analysis, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, but generally it was applied to one or two factors in a general sense. You
could find multiple factors related to that, but what I’m saying here, if we move to the higher level paradigm we could find the dialectics of 20 different of a hundred different categorical things… We have to see how they intersect, how all these dialectical points of view intersect, interrelate. One of my next books is called “Polyectic Reality: The Non-Linear Analytic View.”

When you go back and you hear Malcolm X say the ballot or the bullet, if you read further, you’ll find out the man preferred the ballot. And he defined it in terms of black folks unifying their vote. And even he said when we get some black unity then we can some black and white unity, but they killed Malcolm. What we did with the BPP, we could move this up now. We moved it up a notch. We coalitioned with all the progressive young whites, etc. and any ethnic group that’s progressive enough to understand and relate.

If a former Panther runs for office, he always gets a group, they will get a group of us to come into the city, come on in there and support them, because that was always part of the characteristic aspect of the BPP–we run for political office, we put four people’s names on the ballot right here in the state of California including Eldridge Cleaver with the Peace and Freedom Party coalition, in 1968.

Most of these politicians perpetually amend bills and everything else to empower the corporate rich and concentrate too much political power and too much money in the small one percent who control things.

What we’re saying is, Here we are in another era, there’s no Cold War, a boom economy and people are gettin’ ready to get sucked. People are looking for something different. We want to raise the consciousness of people to get something different. Jesse The Body Ventura getting elected is an indication that people are ready to step outside the old politics, the corporate money rich–controlled politics of usual of the Democratic and Republican party.

Q: What are some other misconceptions that people hold about the Panthers?

Sure. When people see the movie “Panther,” 90% that you see portrayed on the screen is absolute fiction. Crap. It has nothing to do with the real true history and the involvement of what the BPP was truly about. It totally missed the true character of the party, it missed the coalition politics of the BPP. That was essential, that was a profound characteristic of ours that the power structure hated. They hated us crossing these racial lines! If you got people racially divided, politicians up there easily use one group against another. When you get people crossing those lines, going to the real issue and critiquing them as the enemy, as the avaricious racist enemy of the masses of the people, ah, they don’t like that! Politicians think they own these seats. You don’t own this goddamned seat, the people own this seat.

Other misconceptions is that we were all locked up and put in jail. We won 95% of all our coutroom cases, people don’t know this. We had one of the best legal teams in this country, we won those. They had me in jail without bail for 22 months, and I won both cases. Angela Davis won her case, ultimately Huey Newton won his case. Geronimo Pratt. We still got Party members in there, maybe we can get amnesty for them in the next few years.

“You picked up guns cuz you hated white people!” What do you mean? We ran up and down the streets with millions of our white buddies. We almost got killed together, in fact they shot and killed some of my white left radical friends, buddies, right here in Berkeley at People’s Park protesting. We were working directly with Stu and Judy Gumbo Albert. And they shot and killed and brutalized 10, 20 people up there. We weren’t the ones getting shot and killed, although we were a focal point in terms of the racist mentality of the FBI and police departments led by the politicians. ‘They’ ain’t just a cop. Somebody has to be giving orders and directives–policy–of how to treat the Black Panthers, how to treat the left radical movement. People don’t understand that.

That doesn’t mean that everybody in the BPP was perfect. Not true. I mean, I could probably cite 15 or 20 people out of 5,000 Party members who did some fuck-ups. We had to kick em out of the Party. A couple people got hurt… But let’s talk too about the provocateur agents that in the BPP. They screwed up shit out there and then the FBI tried to blame us, but it was the FBI. We got the COINTELPRO documents that we can read at the library to show all the dirty tricks they pulled on us.

So these are the things that were in the Establishment newspapers that never got really corrected, movies don’t know, most of these jive plays that people write on the Panthers, they don’t even know the history of the Party. Half of the academics or most of em who are writing books STILL do not know their history. I networked with over a thousand party members. We can tell our own history–real-life, real active involvement, human experience history, which is what we’re doing. We’re not sitting on our butts. We’re about getting that feature film out, Seize the Time, named after the book, which would really be my life story, but 80% of this feature film will be the rise and decline of the BPP. The real history.

Our producers got John Singleton, by 1992 he was contracted and had an option payment already in his pocket, I had an option payment in my pocket before Melvin Van Peebles ever started Panther. Now when he put the movie out, Warner Brothers, who made a mistake with Wyatt Earp and Kevin Costner…[TAPE ENDS]

We had the cooperation of 20 former Panthers, we’d been in development. So Melvin jumps up and does some cheap $7 million production, scraping money, rushes some junk out there that 90% of which has nothing to do with our real true history.

Q: Well, not many people saw it. It was kind of a bomb…

Wellll…I’m saying it this way. It was a bomb.

Q: So that hurts your chances for making a film.

No it doesn’t hurt it. It hurt THAT chance. They did it in 1995 and we’re almost into 2000. So if I can geta film done by 2002, major feature film that really reflects us….I’ve written the screenplay, me and my wife expanded the screenplay, we’re including all these other former Party members’ contributions to get a continuity-type story, okay? So it’s done. We’re gonna do this. I’ve taught myself how to produce movies. I went and talked to Danny Glover, who tentatively said he’s definitely interested in helping me raise the money and possibly being one of the producers in this thing. That’s just a possibility. If I can get Will Smith to do this, playing Bobby Seale, my $42.5 million budget’s gonna jump to $62.5 million cuz Will Smith needs $20 million a film. But that’s what we’ll DO. Will Smith playing Bobby Seale based on Bobby Seale’s script, NOT some other cheap script or cheap research that has nothing to do with the real history is. People got notions in their head…but they don’t know, unless you talk to real Black Panther Party members, you don’t know what the real history is.

Q: Wasn’t there something in ‘Forest Gump’ that was really derogatory towards the Panthers?

Yeah. It was a satire. They used BPP to play with a satirical notion. That’s all it was. I’m not even upset about that. I’m more upset about a major feature film, publicized, and he and his son, gets on television and pretends that this is the real history of the BPP: “Oh yeah it’s really fiction but it’s real history.” I sued! I took all the production companies and Melvin Van Peebles to court. I lost the suit because I’m a public figure. But my point is, my real reason for suing them is, win or lose, is that I want to y’all to know that I totally disagree with that film, I totally disagree with the crap you put out. So for the record, for the historical record, you know. You know.

Q: Where did the money come from to fund the Panthers’ community projects?

First, our BPP newspaper. Individual chapters made 15 cents per paper they sold which helped pay rent, phone bills, etc. The other level where money came form is really a lot of people–black and white–I’m talking about Ossie Davis, Jane Fonda, Paula Weinstein, people don’t even KNOW Sammy Davis Jr. donated over $60,000 to the BPP, $10,000 here, $15,000 there. Paule Weinstein’s mom, Hann Weinstein the movie producer set the thing up with the conductor Leonard Bernstein. You see what I’m getting at? Sarah Pillsbury from the Pillsbury Cake and Flourpeople just donated money. The Stern fund our of New York used to, they handed me $100,000 a year. These are foundations that did this stuff. Then we had individual people who just came around. We had one lady who wanted to help out, a little old white
lady, I got her to give us $250,000 to buy this one square block school and church, to take the whole thing over under a nonprofit entity.

Q: What about selling the Little Red Books?

We did sell the red books, but what I want people to understand is that the BPP did not evolve out of Marxist-Leninism, it evolved out of a profound research and understanding of our African-American history. Red Book didn’t come along until a little bit later. Huey calls me up one day, I think we were five or six months old, “I know how we can make some money!” Since this news over and over and over had talked about China, Mao Tse Tung and the little Red Book, they would show millions of people on the television news holding up the little red book, Huey stumbled on a place where we could buy them in bulk for 20 cents a piece, we bought 200 books, went up to Sather’s Gate at University of California, 40,000 student population, half of them walk through that gate, “Get your Red Book! One dollar, right here!” They sold like hotcakes. We went and bought some more Red Books, bought some shotguns, paid the phone bill at the office, got some more books and reading materials, etc. Then a couple of weeks later we heard there was gonna be a big giant antiwar rally at Kesar football stadium in San Francisco. Naturally we left our guns at home, so we took our little contingent of 25 or 30 Party members, that’s all we had handy to go out and do the work and sold 2,000 Red Books all day long for a buck a piece.

Now check this out: we sold that book for a solid month and hadn’t even opened it to read it. [laughs] We were busy making money to be financially self-sufficient, to pay our rent, to buy more shotguns, to buy more political education African-American history books, etc. THIS was what was important. So that’s how the Red Book got in there.

But that little portrayal that they did in the movie PANTHER about the Red Book, it was totally off. Bobby Hudd never said, ‘This one I’m putting my money out for.’ That’s bull shit! Lil Bobby Hudd, ‘Wow man we making money!” He was the first one to help sell Red Books. See what I’m getting at?

Q: To go along with the self-funding thing. Is that what your barbecue book is about? You did that first in the ’80s, right?

First cookbook I ever wrote, I wrote that in 1985 and ’86, and I …I had the idea, but I really buckled down to do it when 15 former Party members in Philadelphia met with me in my office at Temple University. ‘Chairman, we need to raise some money. We need to get something to do with renovating these housing, creating jobs for these youth.’ And they were giving me the information, they were former Philadelphia Panther member, they knew more about Philadelphia than I did. I said ‘Well dang the only thing I can think is we ain’t got the Stern Fund no more, we ain’t got these other groups no more. Jane Fonda did an aerobics tape and I heard she donated her money to things. I’ll tell you what; What about me writing a cookbook?’ ‘Right on, Chairman!” So it was us ex-Party members.. ‘Come on chairman, man, right that book.’ We”ll raise some money with that and with that we’ll try to buy a couple of these houses up. So later on I went to work for the Environment YES program, environment youth program, I did have some youth…. But that’s the real reason I wrote the barbecue cookbook.

Now–the book went out of print, I wrested control of the book from the original publisher, that was in my original contract. Now I got the book. I’m expanding this hundred and some odd recipe book to a 450-page recipe book. This cookbook, I’m intending to have a CD-ROM with DVD demonstrations…three-dimensional graphics of how to light a pitfire on 20 different styles of barbecue pits. Plus the recipes.

I’ve been barbecuing since I was 12 years old. We used to have rallies at the park right here in Oakland, 5,000 people, we would sell to two and three thousand barbecue plate dinners. Another source of our funds for the free breakfast program, the preventative medical health clinics, etc. My uncle taught me how to barbecue in Liberty, Texas when I was 12 years old. Now if I roll out this new edition with CD-ROM and DVD… there’s a TV show that goes with this, a 16-part series, 13 for the summer and three for the winter/holiday season pit smoking. Cuz in my recipes you can pit-smoke a whole 22-pound turkey with a cranberry baste marinade. Whole roasts, whole rib roasts, beef roasts… Hmm mmm. These are recipes that people could use. My point is if I pull $20 million, $10 million of it goes into this idea of environmental renovation youth jobs nonprofit entity structured to evolve examples of a community-controlled economic development project, youth jobs.

I’m just the type of guy who love to organize the real program. I’m a grassroots guy. I don’t have no money, so I have to make money, and then pour money and funds in…In other words, in the final analysis, even though I think in terms of ‘How do we evolve a new economic practice where we truly democratize the capitalist system, democratize capital, this is all I’m talking about’, at the same time, you have to set examples for people to say ‘Oh okay this makes sense.’ It is not about politburo state control command economy socialism which is the model of the Soviet Union, which I rejected in 1968. It is NOT about the continued avaricious, racists behind the major corporations who are part and parcel of why all the money and political power is being concentrated in one percent of the population.

Q: What sets your barbecue style apart from the way that people do it right now?

Well a lot of people are still barbecuing with bottle-back recipes. A lot of people who say Well I just want some barbecue.’ So they pick up some sauce, they see a bottle-back recipe, and 9 times out of 10 it tells them to rub the sauce on some raw meat and put it over hot coals. All barbecue sauces have some kind of sugar content, especially store-bought barbecue sauces. Honey, molasses, brown sugar. If you put sauce on raw meat over hot coals the sugar tends to BURN before the meat is even seasoned or done.

So in my book we have numerous recipes with various flavors, what we call a baste marinade–totally different from sauce. This is the way I learned to barbecue form down south, from my uncle and most people down south barbecue this way. Even old white folks KNOW that you baste meat, good old down-home white folks down south know that you baste marinade the meat before you put all the sauce on. Now you can put the sauce on at a certain point, halfway done or three-quarters done, start braising the sauce in. But that’s what sets mine apart. So all these various blends of baste-marinade recipes, I got ‘barbecue quick!’ recipes, I got heavy blend recipes with boiled vegetables, Worcestershire sauce, hickory liquid smoke which is extracted from hickory wood. In the old days, people barbecued with hickory wood, that was the most popular wood to barbecue with. You can also barbecue with various kinds of ruti woods, sweet woods, etc. You can even barbecue with oak wood, as far as that goes. But it’s the outdoor wood flavor that goes with the taste. Now. What has happened over many many years, since I come out of the military, some company started extracting the pure hickory liquid smoke, juice, out of green hickory wood. THAT’S where it comes from. And it’s pure, so it’s strong. You can buy it at a supermarket. It comes in mesquite now, too. If you want to buy large quantities you go to restaurant supply places, you can buy up to a gallon. A gallon, if you just barbecuing for the house and the home, might last you a whole year. A cup of this, and a cup of worchester, a cup of red wine vinegar, or you might want some….raspberry wine vinegar! Or you may want…onion wine vinegar!

See, it’s blending. That’s why I say cooking is creative. None of my recipes is secret, never have I tried to say they were secret. Some guy told me one time, ‘I can out-barbecue you. My recipe is better than yours.’ I say, “Okay fine. Whachu wanna do, you come up here, you act like you want a contest..’ ‘All my friends say no way you gonna get, Bobby Seale can barbecue circles around you. We gonna hold a a contest.’ I say “Waitaminute.’ So when I first wrote that book, I had my draft with me, so I got out and said run down to the corner and copy me a copy. I copied my recipe and said Here, here’s my recipe. ‘Huh?’ I say, Oh yours is secret, right? Mine isn’t.’ ‘Oh I see you got apple juice here.’ So when the contest came down, I didn’t use apple juice! This time I shifted to pineapple juice in one recipe and then shifted over, he says ‘ Whachu doin over there’ I says ‘It’s a turkey.’ “Turkey?!?’ “yeah, a 14-pound turkey.’ And I put a little bit of hickory, a little bit of worchester, and a whole quart of cranberry juice. The accent is on it! And I take that turkey sitting in a plastic bag in a high-rim pan and I twist-tie it so that the marinade will come all up around the turkey and sit it in the refrigerator over night, marinating. Then you come out and you save that base marinade and you put that turkey on the pit in a small shaving pan and baste it with that same marinade. You take that marinade out of there, you could even put a little butter or margarine in when you warm it up again. MMMm uhh!

So I did television shows on this stuff, showing people boom boom boom boom, they loved it. When we first published this book I did one particular show, one of those early cable TV shows and I think I got 1,300 orders. I was only on there, demonstrating for approximately 16 minutes, in between commercials. They put my address up on the screen, boom boom boom, you can get this book, you can write Bobby Seale and he’ll autograph for you….

I’m just saying: This works. Cuz it’s family-type buying. If you ever studied the market, systems of how this market has survived, one of the things that’s caused this market to survive is family-type buying of the whole computer technology. When you develop technology that’s usable by people, they will buy it. Specially if it’s a functional for them. This is something that’s functional, lifetime function. You’re gonna get this big spiral-bounded 450-recipe book with a CD-ROM maybe …and a separate DVD….DVDs are now being made for six hours, imagine I can practically alll of those video demonstrations of various recipes…That’s a marketable item, it’s a household item, it’s something people like to do. And I teach you not only to barbecue in pits, I teach you oven-baked barbecue, I teach you microwave, convective oven barbecuing,etc. the whole gauntlet. I teach you how to actually take and cook some of your meat, broil some of your meat right quick and I teach you how to blend all of these items, put them over and cover this thing in a microwave, and i just want you to quick-broil it, and kick that in the microwave but seal it down, so to speak, all those juices and sauce stuff just comes together! [laughs] This book is gonna be fantastic.

Q: And you did a lot of barbecuing through the years with the Panthers?

Sure man, that business was one of the key things I integrated! See, that’s why you have to do a lot of things, it’s not just a “rally.” I never liked “just a rally.” Specially when you gonna do it at a grassroots community. When we had a rally, we not only had barbeque for sale, we had the bandstand, the rock bands and the rhythm and blues bands and the blues band, we had the speakers there, we let other organizations’ representative groups cuz we was in coalitions speak too, then we would have tables, every 50 feet some tables and a big giant sign: ‘sign up to work on the breakfast for children program.’ another sign: ‘sign up to work on the people’s free medical health care clinics. sign up to work on the six-cylinder engine testing program. sign up to work on the free shoe program. sign up to work on the BPP’s free clothing program. Sign up to be a voting registrar and do some community work.’ You don’t have to join the BPP. See you’re doing more than just speaking, you’re organizing the people, they become part and parcel of something.

And me, I was always a troop feeder. I learned that in the military service. All the troops have to eat! We were always able to leave and go to the chow hall three times a day and eat to our hearts’ content. How do you think I got B-52 bombers out of them docks? I’m a crew chief leader, and I got 6-8 people and a B-52 bomber with 450 gigs on it, sheet metal structure repair gigs, and BOOM. We got four weeks to clean this plane. I cleaned that plane up in two weeks, two and a half weeks. We were able to go eat! You feed the troops [punches hand rhythmically].

So in the BPP, I had cookin’ crews. And I was one of the head cooks. Lotta the times when they wanted to have a central committee meeting, I’m the Chairman, the head of the Party, guess where they held it? In the kitchen. I might be smothering down a hundred pork chops, big giant frying pan and a half-pan, and I got this big giant pot here with the onions and the celery and everything already chopped up in there, and you’re gonna dump a couple of cans of blended stew, tomatoes in there. As fast as I brown them pork chops, I’m dumpin them in there, this is gonna gravy up itself, right? I cook a couple of pots of long-grain rice, I had these big ol pans where we could bake 24 cornbread muffins at one time. We have two or three pans of that. Party members come in from the evening working, selling papers, to this day, and I’m not tryign to be conceited, Party members say ‘We love the Chairman!’ Why? ‘He used to feed us, he used to…’ That’s what you do. ‘What the Chairman cook today?!” Big 6 or 8-gallon pot of that hickory sirloin chili. I had 65, 75 Party members working at the headquarters. Each head office had to have cooking crews! For party members. You eat breakfast there…boom boom boom… If you tellin’ your troops to serve the People, there’s something got to be in your structural framework where if you got arrested in jail, we had a bail fund. Your feet be hittin’ ground. You’re not gonna sit up in a jail, [laughs], unless you got in there with murder and they ain’t give you no bail. But party members, boom. You know, out selling papers and some cop starts harassing them and somthing happens and words are exchanged and he comes in an arrests them all, ‘they was disturbing the peace’.’ Man, two or three hours your feet are on the ground. And then we’d go to court. We loved to go to court. Fast as the court is open, we got the press–and the underground press–and we always could get 20 people, from the Guardian to the Barb to whoever, to come to the press conference, telling the people about what this case is about. This case is about harassment, the police said this and he said this and witnesses… Most people don’t even remember, 90% of all the arrests, charges amounting to 2,000 charges, sometimes people arrested with two, three counts of charges….were dropped, right after the arrests. 10% of all those charges ever went to court and then we turn around and won 95% of those cases.

We were a helluva fine organization, because we dealt in multiple leadership. We didn’t limit it to one mono thing like Farrakhan is some mono-type leader of the Nation of Islam. He’s probably got a committee, I’m not criticizing him there per se on that. My point is that we dealt with committee leadership. Each chapter and branch had a committee. And each chapter and branch had leadership spokespersons, two, three or four of them. Multiple leadership! So when they put me in jail, forced Eldridge into exile and Huey was already in jail–we the top known leaders, early organizers–the party continued to function. David Hilliard was Chief of Staff, he kept it together. When I came out of jail, they put David in jail. [laughs]

Q: How did you survive, mentally, in jail, being such a natural organizer of people?

They put me in isolation cell. I had no problem. I’d been in stockade before in the service. I did six months in the stockade for some racism. They kicked me out of the military services after three years, eleven months and eleven days. I only enlisted for four years! I was kicked out with undesirable discharge, I couldn’t deal with the racism. I didn’t have any political consciousness then–I just couldn’t take it. I didn’t give a damn if you were a colonel, you’re doing wrong. I never allowed a bully to run over me, even when I was a kid. Even if I get my ass kicked, I’m gonna confront this bully. And I guess it was something having to do with my character, I don’t know. Cuz I truly believed in fair-shares equality, fair relationships between people, I don’t care what color you was. I learned through the party, and before the party…My biology, your biology–white or black, that’s bullshit to me. I took biology, I took anthropology, I says, wait a minute, we’re all human beings. I believe that. And I know that. And I proved it to myself with good human scientific evidentiary fact. I’m no better than you and you no better than me. You’re just another human being. Those are the kinds of relationships we had with all our white left radical buddies. Cuz it was this free-flow attitude. We weren’t running around, ‘Oh you white!’ WE had no time for that. We kicked people out of the Party for messing around with our white radical friends.

We had a female who was the head of the whole Massachusetts state chapter. 8 or 9 young black males called me–“oh chairman Bobby, they called me from Boston, their headquarters–“uh uh, we Black men and we can’t be taking no orders from a woman, we need a brother, a man in charge of this chapter out here, and we allg o together.’ So I said, ‘gimme all your names’ and I told somebody to pick up the other line, take these names down, these brothers are protesting sister Audrey Jones out there. We finally got all the names and then I says, Lemme tell you something. You read the rules of the Party, you’re supposed to write up your charges and your disagreements and send em in in the mail to me. And you can still do that, you can appeal, cuz I’m getting ready to tell you something: If you cannot take directives from deputy chairman sister Audrey Jones, get the FUCK out of my organization, Cuz I don’t have no time for no punk-ass sonovabitches running around here with they penis in front of their ego like they’re supposed to be better than in front of another human being which is a female and she is THE sister, she is THE organizer. Get out of my goddamned organization! Roll, cuz I can see it all stickin’ out now. The police come up there to attack the offices, sister Audrey Jones give you a directive to go downstairs and get the guns, ‘we ain’t taking no orders’ but i says the racist power structure is getting ready to kill us, I said, get the fuck, hurry up. Let the door slam you in the ass and knock you down to the next block and don’t come around.’CLICK. They never forgave me for that. [laughter]

Maybe they did, some of them. But my point I, I have no time for the little dumb…

Q: It’s hard for me to imagine you handled being in the thick of it on a day-to-day basis and then being put in solitary in jail…

Well I’d been in jail before. I was in the stockade, that was the first time I went to jail. The second time I went to jail was when the BPP six months, when I led the 24 males and 6 females armed, led that delegation to the California state legislature, May 2, 1967. That’s when the BPP received its notoriety. All of that was about leaving a message cuz they were trying to make a law to stop us from patrolling the police, that’s how legal we were. We were legally patrolling the police. They couldn’t arrest us just for observing the police; they were legal guns, as long as they were not concealed. But we were very disciplined, and they knew this. So I lead that delegation…and ultimately I had to serve six months in jail because we were not—it was not about carrying illegal guns that we got arrested, we got arrested for disturbing the peace of the California state assembly, cuz some of the party members got ahead of me and happened to walk on the real floor, just walking, and upset the legislators. And Ronald Reagan wanted us arrested on anything… But we were not arrested on illegal weapons [charges]—they had to give us our guns back! We filed a brief in court. You give us our private property back, and they had to give them back.

Q: So you were in jail for six months there.

Six months there, and then they put me in jail a second time around…by the time I was in jail a second time, I had a helluva reputation. “Oooo, don’t let him around the other prisoners.” So they put me in an isolation cell. Then later they threw me in “the Hole.” The Hole is a punishment location, isolation cells you get fed with the prisoners but you just in a different location then the rest of em. Why? Cuz Bobby Seale will organize these prisoners if they let him in the big room…so they always put me in isolation cells. Then when I got Connecticut for that case– I’m in jail without bail, remember–I took the State Jails Commissioner to federal court while I got another case, a conspiracy to commit murder case in Connecticut, and I won, they were violating the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. So mine’s was a fight and a struggle. When I walked into a jail–cool! Now if you’re gonna act the fool with me, prisoner-wise…? Most prisoners say hey man that’s Bobby Seale, hey brother man, good to meet cha, white and black, cuz they knew, they see it on the news, this guy leads the BPP. So, boom.

They beat me up in Oakland, over here in San Francisco County Jail in the testicles and choked me to unconsciousness and threw me in the Hole for three days. They really threw me in there for 15 days but I got out in three. Because I knew before I went there that the Hole in San Francisco had been declared illegal. You cannot put prisoners in there. So the third day they let me out to clean out the junk, it had defecation in it. Some kind of liberal guard opened the big thick door, it’s a thick door, the Hole is seven feet this way, six feet wide, a grate in the center, no bed, no nothing, 12-14-foot ceiling with one little light beaming down on you. Well the grate was where you defecated or urinated, the grate is the floor. The cheap racist guards flushed it from the outside, they would flush that thing cuz they knew it was stopped up. I’d be laying [tape ends]