Bobby Seale was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party in the USA and like many of its activists bore the brunt of repression from the American state. Infamously in the 1969 trial of the 'Chicago 8' Vietnam war protestors he was ordered by the judge to be bound and gagged to prevent him speaking.
In 1992 Seale came to London and spoke at a huge meeting to a mainly black crowd at Brixton Recreation Centre and I was one of the many who attended. I believe it was organised by Panther UK, a black organisation with links to Militant (later the Socialist Party)
This was a time when 1960s black radicalism was being rediscovered by a new generation. Public Enemy had adopted the Panther aesthetic and indeed recorded a track that name checked Seale (Party for your Right to Fight). They played a number of iconic gigs at Brixton Academy and I saw them there myself in 1993. The Nation of Islam was also having a revival, I remember guys in suits and bow ties selling their paper The Final Call by Red Records in Brixton.
Not going to lie, this was a period of inspiring anti-racist mobilisation but also intense pressure (racist murders, heavy policing, political egos) which manifested itself in exhausting bad tempered arguments and splits. I recall that 'Panther UK' itself broke up into different factions, and I think Seale himself may have walked off at some point in the meeting due to the politicking. But the Brixton meeting was remarkable and certainly one of the biggest events of this kind I had ever attended. The hall was packed to capacity with many more being turned away.
As reported by Julian Kossoff in the Independent (5 October 1992):
'The black beret and the leather jacket have given way to a woolly jumper, jeans and sensible shoes. Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panthers whose clenched-fist salute became a symbol of the late 1960s, is now 56 years old and a teacher, the pistol that once hung from his waist replaced by a paunch. But even so, a 2,000-strong audience crowded into the Brixton Recreational Centre in south London at the weekend to hear his message of black power.
The passion and anger of the Panthers endures. Mr Seale, invited to speak by a newly-formed group of black and Asian people, Panther UK, can still preach the evangelical message of black socialist unity. Stalking the platform, he expounded the movement's 'race-class line', emphasising that different peoples - black, brown and white - had similar experiences of oppression and should unite against their common oppressor, the exploitative capitalist system. 'Don't you get the connection?' he asked repeatedly. The ideology had not changed substantially since the new left hailed the Panthers as the first genuine American revolutionaries since 1776 and Herbert Hoover, the FBI chief, called them 'the number one threat to the internal security of the nation'.
When he remembered the past he preferred to recall when the Panthers had stopped snarling. Armed defence, the controversial concept that all black people have the right to bear weapons to defend themselves from the racist state, was outdated, he argued. 'We don't need guns in the USA, at the moment . . . co-operation, humanism and grass roots organisations is where it's at.'
But Kossoff wasn't the only one present filing a report. From the Undercover Policing Inquiry we can now see a report written by an undercover cop infiltrating radical groups at the time. Spycop HN78 (who went under the name of Anthony 'Bobby' Lewis) reported that 2100 had attended with 500 turned away and that Seale has held:
'the more or less undivided attention of the audience for fifty minutes. He spoke of the reason for forming the Black Panther Party for Self Defence (BPPSD) back in the mid sixties, of its criminalization by the capitalist media and in particular of its infiltration and destruction by the FBI. He made it clear that the battle he had fought then bore little resemblance to that being fought in the USA today. The current right of activists to demonstrate peacefully had been won for the present generation by the BPP amongst others, back in the sixties. Law books rather than guns must be their chosen weapon.
SEALE went on to stress that the BPP was a disciplined, community based movement, enthused in the belief that only self defence was permissible if black people were prevented from peacefully marching to obtain their civil rights. However, should circumstances change and perhaps reflect those pertaining in South Africa at the present time, then he would again advocate the use of weapons. He spoke next of the part progressive whites had to play, reminding the audience of the international nature of the struggle against injustice and that racism from whatever quarter was not to be tolerated. He concluded with the words paraphrased from the title of his book published over twenty years ago 'Seize the time'' .
On a more sinister note the report went on to note the ' impassioned pleas for justice' of speakers from contemporary campaigns including Clara Buckley of the Orville Blackwood Community Campaign and Nellie Fergus of the Ivan Fergus Campaign as well as 'George Silcott who asked people to sign the petition on behalf of his brother which was to be handed in to the Home Office during the forthcoming picket of that establishment on the 21st October'.
It is now well established that undercover police spied on family justice campaigns who posed no threat other than exposing Metropolitan police wrong doing. Nellie Fergus was just a Peckham mum campaigning to prove the innocence of her teenage son who had been convicted of attacking somebody with very questionable evidence; Orville Blackwood was a black man who died in Broadmoor Hospital; Winston Silcott was one of the Tottenham 3 convicted of killing a policeman in the 1985 Broadwater Farm uprising, for which his conviction was ultimately quashed.
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