Bobby Seale

Out of jail and back on the street in 1965, I again took up with Bobby Seale. We had a lot to talk about; I had not seen him in more than a year.

Bobby and I had not always agreed. In fact, we disagreed the first time we met, during the Cuban missile crisis several years before. That was the time President Kennedy was about to blow humanity off the face of the earth because Russian ships were on their way to liberated territory with arms for the people of Cuba. The Progressive Labor Party was holding a rally outside Oakland City College to encourage support for Fidel Castro, and I was there because I agreed with their views. There were a number of speakers and one of them, Donald Warden, launched into a lengthy praise of Fidel. He did this in his usual opportunistic way, tooting his own horn. Warden was about halfway through his routine, criticizing civil rights organizations and asking why we put our money into that kind of thing, when Bobby challenged him, expressing opposition to Warden and strong support for the position of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He felt that the NAACP was the hope of Black people and because of this, he supported the government and its moves against Cuba. I explained to him afterward that he was wrong to support the government and the civil rights organizations. Too much money had already been put into legal actions. There were enough laws on the books to permit Black people to deal with all their problems, but the laws were not enforced. Therefore, trying to get more laws was only a meaningless diversion from the real issues. This was an argument I had heard in the Afro-American Association and in Oakland by Malcolm X, who made the point over and over again. Bobby began to think about this and later came over to my point of view.

Whatever our early disagreements, Bobby and I were close by 1965. Later, I recruited him into the Afro-American Association, but when I left it, he continued to stick with Warden. At that time I was still going through my identity crisis, looking for some understanding of myself in relation to society. While I took a back seat in the Association and refused to make a stand on any position, Bobby threw all his energy into it, even after I left.

Still, we did not establish close contact until I got out of the hole in 1965. At that point, Bobby was planning to get married, and he needed a bed for his new apartment. I was breaking up with my girl friend and had a bed I no longer wanted. I sold it to him, and we hauled it to his home. That afternoon we began to talk; he told me that he also had left the Afro-American Association to hook up with Ken Freeman and his group, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). Most of the brothers in this group attended Oakland City College, but the organization was a sort of underground, off-campus operation. They also had a front group called Soul Students Advisory Council, which was a recognized campus organization. The RAM group was more intellectual than active. They did a lot of talking about the revolution and also some writing. Writing was almost a requirement for membership, in fact, but Bobby was no writer. At the time I got out of jail, Bobby had been involved in an argument with the members and had been suspended for a time. Still angry about this, he told me he intended to break with them. Like me, like thousands of us, Bobby was looking for something and not finding it.

Bobby and I entered a period of intense exploration, trying to solve some of the ideological problems of the Black movement; partly, we needed to explain to our own satisfaction why no Black political organization had succeeded. The only one we thought had promised long-term success was the Organization of Afro-American Unity started by Malcolm X, but Malcolm had died too soon to pull his program together. Malcolm’s slogan had been “Freedom by any means necessary,” but nothing we saw was taking us there. We still had only a vague conception of what freedom ought to mean to Black people, except in abstract terms borrowed from politicians, and that did not help the people on the block at all. Those lofty words were meant for intellectuals and the bourgeoisie, who were already fairly comfortable.

Much of our conversation revolved around groups in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley areas. Knowing the people who belonged to them, we could evaluate both positive and negative aspects of their characters and the nature of their organizations. While we respected many of the moves these brothers had made, we felt that the negative aspects of their movements overshadowed the positive ones.

We started throwing around ideas. None of the groups were able to recruit and involve the very people they professed to represent—the poor people in the community who never went to college, probably were not even able to finish high school. Yet these were our people; they were the vast majority of the Black population in the area. Any group talking about Blacks was in fact talking about those low on the ladder in terms of well-being, self-respect, and the amount of concern the government had for them. All of us were talking, and nobody was reaching them.

Bobby had a talent that could help us. He was beginning to make a name for himself in local productions as an actor and comedian. I had seen him act in several plays written by brothers, and he was terrific. I had never liked comedians, and I would not go out of my way to hear one. If a person presents his material in a serious way and uses humor to get his points across, he will have me laughing with all the rest, but stand-up, wisecracking comedians leave me cold. Still, I recognized Bobby’s talent and I thought he could use it to relate to people and persuade them in an incisive way. Often, when we were rapping about our frustrations with particular people or groups, Bobby would act out their madness. He could do expert imitations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, James Cagney, Humphrey Bog-art, and Chester of “Gunsmoke.” He could also imitate down to the last detail some of the brothers around us. I would crack my sides laughing, not only because his imitations were so good, but because he could convey certain attitudes and characteristics so sharply. He caught all their shortcomings, the way their ideas failed to meet the needs of the people.

We planned to work through the Soul Students Advisory Council. Although SSAC was just a front for RAM, it had one large advantage—it was not an intellectual organization, and for that reason it would appeal to many lower-class brothers at City College. If these brothers belonged to a group that gave them feelings of strength and respect, they could become effective participants. It was important to give them something relevant to do, something not degrading. Soul Students was normally an ineffective and transitory group without a real program. Only if something big was happening did their meetings attract a lot of people. In the quiet times only two or three would show up.

Just then, however, Soul Students had a hot issue—the establishment of a program of Afro-American history and culture in the college’s regular curriculum. Although it was a relevant program, the authorities were resisting it tooth and nail. Every time we proposed a new course, they countered with reasons why it could not be; at the same time, ironically, they encouraged us to be “concerned.” This was simple trickery; they were dragging their feet.

Bobby and I saw this as an opportunity to move Soul Students a step further by adopting a program of armed self-defense. We approached them, proposing a rally in front of the college in support of the Afro-American history program. We pointed out that this would be a different kind of rally—the Soul Student members would strap on guns and march on the sidewalk in front of the school. Partly, the rally would express our opposition to police brutality, but it would also intimidate the authorities at City College who were resisting our program. We were looking for a way to emphasize both college and community, to draw them in together. The police and the school authorities needed a strong jolt from Blacks, and we knew this kind of action would make them realize that the brothers meant business. Carrying guns for self-defense was perfectly legal at the time.

We explained all this to Soul Students and showed them that we did not intend to break any laws but were concerned that the organization start dealing with reality rather than sit around intellectualizing and writing essays about the white man. We wanted them to dedicate themselves to armed self-defense with the full understanding that this was defense for the survival of Black people in general and in particular for the cultural program we were trying to establish. As we saw it, Blacks were getting ripped off everywhere. The police had given us no choice but to defend ourselves against their brutality. On the campus we were being miseducated; we had no courses dealing with our real needs and problems, courses that taught us how to survive. Our program was designed to lead the brothers into self-defense before we were completely wiped out physically and mentally.

The weapons were a recruiting device. I felt we could recruit Oakland City College students from the grass roots, people who did not relate to campus organizations that were all too intellectual and offered no effective program of action. Street people would relate to Soul Students if they followed our plan; if the Black community has learned to respect anything, it has learned to respect the gun.

We underestimated the difficulty of bringing the brothers around. Soul Students completely rejected our program. Those brothers had been so intimidated by police firepower they would not give any serious consideration to strapping on a gun, legal or not. After that setback we went to the Revolutionary Action Movement. They did not have many members, just a few guys from the college campus who talked a lot. We explained that by wearing and displaying weapons the street brothers would relate to RAM’s example of leadership. We also talked about a new idea, patrolling the police, since the police were the main perpetrators of violence against the community. We went no further than those two tactics: armed self-defense and police patrol. A more complete program was sure to get bogged down on minor points. I just wanted them to adopt a program of self-defense, and after that was worked out, we could then develop it more fully. We were not aiming then at party organization; there were too many organizations already. Our job was to make one of them relevant; that would be contribution enough. However, we were having a lot of trouble breaking through. RAM rejected the plan, too. They thought it was “suicidal,” that we could not survive a single day patrolling the police.

This left us where we had been all along: nowhere.