Black Panther Party

Building an Organization

Bobby Seale was born on October 22, 1936, in Dallas, Texas, the oldest of three children. His father was a master carpenter who taught him the carpentry trade. Seale was a naturally gifted individual and mastered the concert piano. He worked several jobs as a journeyman sheet metal mechanic and mechanical draftsman before joining the air force, where he was dismissed on a bad conduct discharge. Unable to find stable work, Seale attended Merritt College in Oakland, where he met Huey Newton in September 1962.

Newton was born on February 17, 1942, in Monroe, Louisiana, the last of seven children. His father was an itinerant minister who moved the family to Oakland in 1944. Newton struggled in school until his older brother tutored him through high school. After graduation, he enrolled in Merritt College. Newton became an ardent reader of African American history and literature and participated in several radical organizations. He met Bobby Seale while both were members of the Afro-American Association, a student organization that debated African American topics. The men were immediately drawn together by their radical ideology and their commitment to the poor. They volunteered in the Oakland Poverty Center, where they got a firsthand view of the effects of urban poverty.

At Oakland Community College, they laid the foundation for the introduction of Black History courses and successfully campaigned for hiring additional Black faculty. After becoming disillusioned with the plight of the poor and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, they formed the Black Panther Party. They were concerned about the ghetto conditions African Americans [Page 175]faced in urban areas of the West. They believed that the Civil Rights Movement had not promoted the structural changes necessary to ensure Blacks meaningful economic opportunities or to attain African American equality. Therefore, they broke from the mainstream nonviolent civil rights struggle and advocated a program of self-defense and self-determination, which was anchored in their Black Nationalist philosophy.

Shifting emphasis away from Dr. King's integrationist stance, they instead advocated a nationalist and socialist ideology more closely associated with his critics. After reading the writings of Malcolm X and Franz Fanon, they adopted their ideas advocating the internationalization of the African American cause. They called for armed resistance to American oppression and destruction of the machinery of the oppressor. They were especially concerned with the treatment African Americans received from what they called racist police forces.

Later, they read works from Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. They adopted Mao Zedong's teachings, including his words “Power emanates from the barrel of a gun.” They emphasized the progress made by violent Black revolutionaries like Denmark Vesey, Toussaint L'Overture, Gabriel Prosser, and Nat Turner, arguing that violence in self-defense does work. The organization's name and emblem were borrowed from Stokely Carmichael's Lowndes County, Alabama, Freedom Organization, which had been founded a few years earlier.

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