Existing comment:
Bobby Seale, born 1937
Together with Huey Newton, Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in the fall of 1966. Having previously worked together at a neighborhood anti-poverty center, the two broke with the NAACP to create a militant response to police brutality and to provide assistance programs to the city's poor African American residents.
When Newton was arrested for the murder of a policeman the following year, the Black Panthers became the national icon of militant black nationalists who advocated armed resistance to white society. In this 1968 photograph, Seale speaks to an audience in Oakland that had gathered during Newton's trial. Given the fiery rhetoric of its leaders, in 1969 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was moved to describe the Panthers as the greatest threat to American national security.
Stephen Shames, reproduction of 1968 photograph |