NIR Radio For March 20, 2013

In 1962, at the age of 25, Bobby Seale began attending Merritt College, a community college located in what was then Grove Street, now Martin Luther King Jr. Way, in Oakland California.

 

There he would join the Afro-American Association, and met Huey Newton, with whom he later co-founded the Black Panther Party.

 

Seale and Newton, heavily inspired by Malcolm X, a civil rights leader assassinated in 1965, and his teachings, joined together in October 1966 to create the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and adopt the slain activist's slogan "Freedom By Any Means Necessary" as their own. Seale became the chairman of the Black Panther Party and underwent FBI surveillance as part of the COINTELPRO program. The Black Panther Party ran a very successful school in and breakfast program in Oakland, California.

 

Bobby Seale was one of the original Chicago Eight' defendant charge with conspiracy and inciting to riot, in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago. .