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Jun 22, 2018
Printed poster, 23 x 29 in. Kidnapped. Oakland: Black Panther Party, n.d., ca 1970. Poster features large portrait of Bobby Seale speaking into a microphone, with a look of concern on his face. Bottom margin features caption, "Bobby Seale / Chairman, Black Panther Party" flanked by two Black Panther Party logos at center. Address for the "Bobby Seale Defense Fund" is listed in bottom margin at right.
Robert George "Bobby" Seale (b. 1936) was born in Texas before his family migrated to Oakland, California during World War II. At the age of 18, Seale joined the Air Force, but was dishonorably discharged after three years of service due to a fight with a commanding officer. After earning his high-school diploma at night, Seale enrolled in Merritt College in Oakland, where he studied to become an engineer. His plans shifted, however, after meeting Huey Newton in the Afro-American Association, and being exposed to the radical ideas of Malcom X and the black separatist agenda of the AAA. Together, Seale and Newton authored the written premises of the Black Panther Party such as "What We Want Now!" and "What We Believe," which became part of the Party's infrastructural Ten Point Program.
In the same year he that he wrote Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, Seale became a part of the "Chicago Eight," a group of defendants charged with inciting a riot outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Though Seale was eventually severed from the group case by Judge Julius Hoffman, his trial and resulting imprisonment gained plenty of notoriety on their own. Seale's requests for delays and the ability to represent himself in court were repeatedly refused by Judge Hoffman, and his protests were met with the severe order that he be literally bound and gagged, and a four year prison sentence for contempt of court. Many, including himself, saw Seale as a revolutionary, kept as a political prisoner by the state, perhaps lending to the theme of the poster featured here.
Seale was charged and implicated in the murders of two Black Panther Party members while in prison, one of whom was suspected to be a police informant (Alex Rackney), and the other of whom had allegedly fathered a child with Seale's wife (Fred Bennett). Though he was not convicted in either case, he was tried for Rackney's murder. Spectacularly, Seale ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, coming in second place to the winner, Mayor John Reading. The next year, citing exhaustion, Seale officially resigned as Chairman of the Black Panther Party. Seale remains an advocate for social justice, having summed up the constant and urgent need for equality very clearly when he explained in Seize the Time, "A people who have suffered so much for so long at hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere...the black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction.”
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