Bobby Seale

Bobby Seale (born 22 October 1936, in Liberty, Texas) is an American civil rights activist, who along with Huey Newton, co-founded the Black Panther Party For Self Defense in 1966.

Bobby Seale in 2006

Quotes

• The only solution to pollution is a people's humane revolution.
  • Speech at the "Free John Sinclair" concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan (December 1971)

• I still want my right to defend myself. A railroad operation, and you know it, from Nixon on down. they got you running around violating my constitutional rights.
  • Transcript from Seale's conspiracy case as part of the Chicago 8 (October 1968)

• We're hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people. You got that?
  • Transcript from Seale's conspiracy case as part of the Chicago 8 (October 1968)

• When we use the term pig, for example, we are referring to the people who systematically violate the peoples' constitutional rights- whether they be monopoly capitalists or police. The term is now being adopted by radicals, hippies, and minority peoples. Even the workers, when the pigs supported strike-breakers like they did as Union Oil where 100 local police came in a cracked strikers' heads, began to call them by their true name.
  • Interview with The Guardian (February 1970)

• But I think people, especially white people, have to come to understand that the language of the ghetto is a language of its own, and as the party- whose members for the most part come from the ghetto- seeks to talk to the people, it must speak the people's language.
  • Interview with The Guardian (February 1970)

• All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.
  • Interview with The Guardian (February 1970)

Seize the Time (1970)

• Racism and ethnic differences allow the power structure to exploit the masses of workers in this country, because that's the key by which they maintain their control. To divide the people and conquer them is the objective of the power structure. It's the ruling class, the very small minority, the few avaricious, demagogic hogs and rats who control and infest the government. The ruling class and their running dogs, their lackeys, their bootlickers, their Toms and their black racists, their cultural nationalists - they're all the running dogs of the ruling class. These are the ones who help to maintain and aid the power structure by perpetuating their racist attitudes and using racism as a means to divide the people. But it's really the small, minority ruling class that is dominating, exploiting, and oppressing the working and laboring people.
  • pp. 71-72

Quotes about Bobby Seale

• I really don't think the government practically cares whether it is right or wrong or even if it can win the case. I think the whole attempt is to simply grind you down, a process of harassment and intimidation, a process of tying up peoples' energies and money so that nothing can be done…Like the case of Bobby Seale. His years in prison can't be returned. Still he is a man under a stigma. The whole adventure was so ambivalent so that there has to be a doubt left in the public mind-which is the point.
  • 1972 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)