Bobby Seale: As Radical As The People

BOBBY SEALE: AS RADICAL AS THE PEOPLE

The following article is excerpted from an interview with and speech given by Bobby Seale 2 weeks ago at Wayne State University in Detroit. Bobby, Chairman of the Black Panther Party and candidate last year for Mayor of Oakland. California, was in town as part of a national speaking tour to promote the electoral process and alternative programs as vehicles for revolutionary social change,

SUN: Back in the 60's the Black Panther Party insisted it was being attacked for its political activities by the Nixon Administration, that the Nixon interests consciously worked to keep the BPP from organizing communities to gain power for the people. You yourself were bound and gagged in Chicago as part of that harassment and spent almost two years in prison awaiting trial on a New Haven manslaughter charge that you were later acquitted of by jury. And now Watergate has brought the reality of governmental political harasment to mass attention. How do you react to these recent disclosures?

BOBBY: I think it's quite clear. People know what the Black Panther Party said all along, based on our objective analysis of the situation. We've been talking about criminals and corruption within the governmental systems of this country which control and run the institutions that affect our lives in a very oppressive way. This has been a long overdue thing, to hopefully see masses of people who may racistly still despise the BPP, but yet their naivete, their unconsciousness may now loosen up somewhat to a conscious level, where they understand that this is a corrupt system. I think. it's a good attack, it's a necessary contradiction going on within the framework of the government at this time. But we can only accomplish something if the people move. I would hope to see the college campuses on this country form impeachment movements. The students who were able to get up and demonstrate against that unjust war in Vietnam, something far, far away, are they ready to demonstrate in another fashion, to educate and organize people around the need to impeach Nixon?

SUN: But after impeachment you get another President, and I know the BPP doesn't believe that change is going to ultimately come about through the current system.

BOBBY: It's not going to ultimately come that way with the present elected officials and system, no. But there's a necessary dialectical step we need to go through. A lot of black candidates are getting elected, and this is a good conscious thing on the part of blacks, pulling away from voting for the same old racist candidates.

SUN: Like Coleman Young in Detroit?

BOBBY: Yes. Now in the future I can hopefully see more revolutionary type candidates, like myself, getting elected. This is what's going to have to happen all across the board, and I don't see how we can get around it, because of the particular situation that exists here. We have a very complex electoral process interconnected and interrelated with the corporate capitalist system in such a way that they're able to use it very effectively in their own behalf. The people are not yet able to use it in their behalf. My purpose for running is very acutely different from Nixon's, and also from many of the black candidates. 

SUN: And you did get a substantial number of votes.

BOBBY: Around 45.000 votes in a city that has 195,000 potential electorate. And close to 30% of those didn't even go the polls. We did everything we could to get people down to vote, though. The election fell on the day that mothers get their welfare checks. So we got up about 100 cars and took them to at least 100 welfare lines where people were cashing checks that morning, then we gave people rides to their precincts and then back downtown.

SUN: How do you plan to build on this base in the future?

BOBBY: Well I was the only candidate - if you want to say black candidate go ahead, I prefer to say a candidate in opposition to the corrupt politicians - who has ever received that amount of votes. The apathy that existed in Oakland, California for the previous election in 1969 was this: two avowed racist candidates ran for city council unopposed, uncontested. So now that apathy no longer exists. and people are very interested in the things the Party is doing. Many of them are subscribing to the BPP Intercommunal News Service, and participating in our breakfast for children program, free legal aid, pest control, food and employment programs, the intercommunal youth institute, free busing lo prisons and the other programs we're operating in Oakland.

SUN: Wouldn't you say it's important for students and other young people to not only organize impeachment protests, but also to form their own programs to raise consciousness in their own communities?

BOBBY: Definitely. A lot of white communities need that, and I think that would blow a lot of white people's minds. That the youth would come down with some food coops and other programs and explain to them what they don't have and why. And explain to them that they're gonna have to coalesce and vote along with the blacks and Chícanos and others. I'm talking about voting for candidates who have a real philosophy of a people's struggle internalized. We can do that, I would suspect in the next 4-5-10 years, I can't say exactly. This is a phase we're going to have to go through, and I'm going to speak about that here today.

BOBBY AT WAYNE STATE: I've been hopping all across the country in and out of different colleges trying to run down some basic strategic moves the black community's going to have to make in a coalition with other oppressed people, which is most of the people in the US.

You may have noticed in the newspapers when I ran for Mayor they were all saying Bobby Seale is all of a sudden changed and become a moderate, because he's got a tie and a suit and is running for political office. Well, what about the tie, the suit, or the sportcoat? You see that's why I can't stand that rotten press. They didn't say anything about Malcolm X wearing a tie, did they? No, and I'm preaching the same thing that I preached before, right straight from the beginning. It's just that we've got more programs and details to run down on how this organization and the people have developed. And we now need to know where we're going to go next. So we've implemented a number of survival programs. A survival program is not a reformist program. It's a means, a method by which you can organize and unify the people for future liberation.

Now wait a minute! There's a racist fascist that is the Mayor of Oakland, or any other town. We could sit back on our butts and let him run for office and let him be there, or we can get up off our butts and get out and organize and work and get other people to help make sure that fascists don't get elected. So why should I just sit there? John Redding, who I ran against, was the Mayor of Oakland at the time Bobby Hutton became the first BPP member to be murdered by police. He's the man who's controlling the second largest containerized shipping port in the world, ripping the community off, making us live in dilapidated conditions, giving the police department any kind of money and funds they want from the City Council. Buying new surveillance helicopters flapping around the sky. Some of you have read George Orwell's 1984. You say this country is becoming just like 1984, just look at the helicopters, man. I'm dropping out of the system. It's no use. No, you don't do it like that.

It so happens that when they were getting ready to buy a second police helicopter in the city of Oakland, two senior citizens came to see me from a group made up of all the senior citizens, black, white, etc. organized together into this group called Breakout. And they asked us what could we do about senior citizens getting mugged in our community. And that hit me quick, because my mother'd already been mugged twice. So we said wait a minute, there's something that we can do, right now when the city council is talking about putting up another few hundred thousand dollars for the damned helicopter. We need to create a new program, but first I've got to find out how many crimes are being committed against the senior citizens.

Well. we found out that thirty-three percent of all the crimes committed in the city were against senior citizens. Wow, man, get back! So we went over to the YMCA and got a van from a brother I knew, a twelve passenger van. And then we went to Synanon and got two twelve passenger vans there, then we went to the BPP's People's Free Health Clinic and got two more vans there. And we polished those vans up and cleaned them and got us some brothers and sisters, the ones who knew karate and this kind of stuff, and we dressed them up in ties and everything and went on down to the senior citizen satellite home. We had leafletted the day before and told them that they could get personal transport and escort services. And this was on the day they cashed their social security checks at the banks. And we would have vans leaving every half hour on the half hour from the time the mailman brought their checks in the morning to three o'clock that afternoon. And I had a press conference and called on all the muggers and said that they'd better cease their wanton mugging of our senior citizens, whether they're black, white, yellow or polka dot. You'd better stop it right now because we're gonna escort these senior citizens right up to the bank window. And then take them to buy their groceries.

What I'm trying to point out is that here you have a city government, abusing the people's tax money to buy more needless helicopters, and more armored equipment to "cut down on crime." When what we need is a two million dollar program, from the city budget, to get a couple hundred vans together, and to train young brothers and sisters in karate and first aid. And we want to teach them about the senior citizens, without whom we wouldn't have been here in the first place. We want to employ people to transport senior citizens, and we predicted this would stop the crimes committed against them. That's what we need to do.

But then the Socialist Workers Party called us reformists. But let me tell you something. We transported a lot of people who before had voted for the Nixons, those for the Agnews and the Reagans. A lot of those same people found out that Elaine Brown and I implemented that program, and they started voting for us revolutionaries! A program where we dealt not only with the black community, the Chicano people and the other peoples in Oakland, but even with hardcore racists. That blew my mind when I found out that we were getting those kind of votes. I even heard of nine or ten black and Chicano policemen voting for me. I couldn't figure that in my mind at all, l'm still tryin' to. But I met two of them.

Anyway, we have to show alternative programs to people about the 1984 fascist system. If there are helicopters, we've got to show them a concrete alternative program by which the people can use their money to change the system. The program becomes a means by which to organize and unify the people around. And when John Redding was calling me a radical, when the papers were calling me the big militant, well I knew that I'm no more radical and militant than the people, When a hungry baby is hungry, he wants a radical change where he or she isn't going to be hungry anymore. When a senior citizen is being mugged, they want a radical change where he or she ain't getting mugged no more. When a person needs preventive medical health care or attention and is SICK, they want a radical change, I mean a militant change to where they ain't sick no more. When you grow up and see rats running around you get militant against those rats with a broom. So what do they mean, radical, militant? No more radical and militant than the masses of people. No more radical than a black brother who might have a family that's home starving and he says, later, man, I'm going to rip off one of these here banks and get some money for my children. Yeah, we're radical and we're militant. We want some radical change. But it comes about through a process of organization.

And when we talk about it, it's one thing. But when we go out and DO something about it, it becomes another thing. In Oakland, for example, there's a People's Free Medical Research Health Clinic, where we have thirteen doctors there, coming in. And some of them even have hundred thousand dollar homes. But we don't go around calling them bourgeois brothers, because they donate their time. I mean we built this clinic with our hands, and we asked the doctors what we should put in it. Whatever they wanted we went out and hustled it up. We built the framework for the people who were skilled, the doctors, nurses, technicians, etc. That clinic has been there for three years.

And in the north Oakland area where it's located almost ten thousand different people, by name, have actually visited and used that clinic. If you want to know where my vote constituency came from it came from these types of programs. When you organize these programs you are organizing people politically. and you try to direct them in conscious opposition to the power structure.

Another way we did this was when we had the March 9th Survival Conference, where we registered people to vote. I don't know what the laws of Michigan are, but in California you can become a deputy registrar by sitting in a classroom forty-five minutes and raising your hand to swear that you'll turn in the affidavit and that kind of stuff. So we made three or four hundred of our people into voter registrars, and went out and organized more registrars from the churches. And we organized all the gangs in the community, we don't have gang wars anymore, to become registrars. And we got about four or five thousand dollars worth of leaflets, literature, posters, advertising materials and that sort of stuff, and bought about three thousand dollars worth of radio time. And then every day and every hour on the hour on the main black radio station for about a two week period, you would hear, "Come on down to the Oakland Auditorium, see JohnLee Hooker and Tower of Power free, and you can register to vote. We're going to have a lot of people there like Bobby Seale and Congressman Ron Dellums, while you're registering to vote. And while you're down there be sure to get one of these fourteen hundred cubic inch bags full of free groceries with a fat three pound healthy chicken in every bag for everyone and register to vote!" And when the brothers and sisters came out to the conference they were seventeen thousand strong. We gave away ten thousand bags of groceries and still didn't have enough. And these were largely people who had given up on ever voting again.

Now this takes hard work. It's not easy to get ten thousand grocery bags together. You have to imagine the skills that go into that. We had to get a couple of brothers who were good mathematicians and use slide rules to find out how many groceries we could get on two levels on a stage eighty feet long and forty feet deep and still have aisle space. We had diesel truck loads of food coming in, freezer trucks bringing in the chickens. That is a feat! And that was only ten thousand at a time. Now in New York they ain't seen nothing yet. Because that's our next baby. What we're gonna do is this. They're talking about making a major movie, a history of the Black Panther Party with all the shootouts and battles you heard about, the true stuff. This won't be phony violence. Well they're going to adapt the story from Huey's book "Revolutionary Suicide" and from my book "Seize the Time!" We're going to ask for a million dollars flat for that. I mean we need money for these programs! And they've already ascertained that the best person to play Bobby Seale, since I have done some stage acting, is myself. If we get next to these kinds of funds, watch out New York, watch out Chicago, watch out Detroit. Because I'm talking about diesel truck loads bringing the food blocks long, and I'm going to be sitting on top of one of those truck cabs with a megaphone saying, "Come on down and get these groceries, get these clothes, and those of you who ain't registered to vote let's do it now, because we're getting ready to blow this town wide open." We can develop some people's power, we can initiate some programs over this whole country that have never been seen before. We're talking about jamming up the power structure. Because I'm SURE it's easy now to get it across to at least black people, stop voting for these racist lackey candidates who promise this and promise that and never produce nothing! We're talking about controlling institutions, we're talking about our community and we're talking about our survival. We're talking about survival programs being used as a means by which we organize the people and unify the people for future liberation.

Note: Part II of Bobby's speech will appear next issue, on the History of the Black Panther Party, the development of the survival programs, and how you can't drop out of the system because you can 't drop out of the universe.

Edited by David Fenton