A federal judge had Bobby Seale's mouth taped shut, his jaw tied closed with cloth, and his body chained to a metal chair in front of a jury. A juror started crying. His crime was asking for a lawyer.
That is how Bobby Seale became chairman of the Black Panther Party. In October 1966, in Oakland, California, two college students who had met four years earlier at Merritt College decided to start an organization, and they flipped a coin to see who would lead it.
Seale got chairman. Newton got Minister of Defense.
A coin, turning in the air in Oakland, in 1966, landing on one side instead of the other. That is where one of the most consequential Black political movements of the twentieth century found its shape.
Bobby Seale was born in Dallas, Texas on October 22, 1936, to George Seale, a carpenter, and Thelma Seale. The family had almost nothing.
They moved through Texas the way poor Black families did in those years, from Dallas to San Antonio to Port Arthur. When Bobby was eight, the family joined the Great Migration and relocated to Codornices Village, a public housing project in Berkeley, California.
Bobby attended Berkeley High School. He dropped out in 1955 and joined the Air Force, and three years later he was court-martialed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota for fighting with a commanding officer.
They gave him a bad conduct discharge. He came back to the Bay Area and worked as a sheet metal mechanic at aerospace plants while studying for his high school diploma at night.
In 1962, at twenty-five years old, he enrolled at Merritt College in Oakland. That was the year he first heard Malcolm X speak.
It changed him. He joined the Afro-American Association on campus, and through that group he met Huey Newton, a younger student who carried law books everywhere and had memorized the California penal code the way other men memorized scripture.
They argued constantly about what to do. The association studied and debated, but Seale and Newton wanted action, not analysis.
They split from the group and created the Soul Students Advisory Council. They formed the Black History Fact Group, which eventually pushed Merritt College to establish its Department of Black Studies.
In the summer of 1966, Seale took a job at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center, running a youth program. It was there he met sixteen-year-old Bobby Hutton, who would become the first member recruited to the organization Seale and Newton were about to build.
That October, they sat down and wrote the Ten-Point Platform and Program. They canvassed the community first, knocking on doors in Oakland, asking people what they needed.
The answers became the platform. Freedom, full employment, decent housing, education that taught Black history, an end to police brutality, an end to murder, land, bread, justice.
They called the organization the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, borrowing the panther symbol from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama. Newton explained the choice by saying a panther never attacks first, but if someone comes at it, the panther destroys the aggressor completely.
Newton had studied California gun law until he knew it cold. It was legal in the state to carry a loaded weapon in public, as long as it was not concealed, and he had an idea.
They went to the Chinese Book Store in San Francisco and bought copies of Mao Zedong's Little Red Book in bulk. Then they drove to the gate at the University of California, Berkeley and started selling them to students for a dollar apiece.
Two hundred copies gone in an hour. They jumped in the car, drove back, got more, sold more, bought a shotgun, paid the rent, paid the phone bill.
They had not even read the book yet.
Bobby Seale described it later with a plain-spoken honesty that tells you everything about the man. They were selling books for dollars to get rent, to buy more shotguns, to buy more books for the reading list for the party members they had going.
The patrols started in November 1966. Armed Panthers followed Oakland police through Black neighborhoods, standing at a legal distance, carrying loaded shotguns and law books.
When officers stopped Black citizens, the Panthers would call out their rights. When officers told them to leave, Newton would recite the relevant section of the penal code.
An officer once demanded to know what Newton was doing with a gun. Newton's answer was a question of his own.
The police were furious, but the Panthers broke no laws. Newton knew the statutes better than the officers who were supposed to enforce them.
By January 1967, the Party had opened its first official headquarters in an Oakland storefront. By 1968, membership exceeded two thousand, with chapters in cities across the country.
But the FBI was watching. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panther Party the most dangerous extremist group in the country and deployed the Bureau's illegal COINTELPRO program to destroy them through surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and lethal force.
In December 1969, the FBI orchestrated a raid on the Chicago apartment of Fred Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter. Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark were both killed.
Through all of it, the Panthers were also feeding children.
The Free Breakfast for School Children program started in January 1969 at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Oakland. Within a year, the Panthers were serving free breakfast to twenty thousand children every day across the country.
They ran free medical clinics and free clothing programs. They called these "survival programs," because that is what they were.
Bobby Seale was not in Oakland for most of 1969. He was in a federal courtroom in Chicago, and what happened to him there is the thing America should never be allowed to forget.
In August 1968, the Democratic National Convention came to Chicago. More than ten thousand people arrived to protest the Vietnam War, and police met them with batons, tear gas, and mass arrests.
Seale had been in Chicago for less than twenty-four hours. He was a last-minute replacement for Eldridge Cleaver, invited to give a single speech.
The federal government charged him anyway, along with seven other men, with conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot. They became known as the Chicago Eight.
The trial was assigned to Judge Julius Hoffman, a seventy-four-year-old jurist known for favoring the prosecution and demanding strict courtroom decorum. Seale's chosen attorney, Charles Garry, was in the hospital recovering from gallbladder surgery.
Seale asked the judge to delay his portion of the trial until Garry recovered. The judge refused.
Seale asked to represent himself. The judge refused again.
The judge insisted that William Kunstler, who represented some of the other defendants, was Seale's lawyer. Seale had fired Kunstler and said so on the record.
The judge told Bobby Seale to sit down and be quiet. Bobby Seale would not sit down and be quiet.
He demanded his constitutional right to counsel, his right to cross-examine witnesses, his right to make an opening statement. Every demand was denied.
Seale called the judge a racist, a fascist, and a pig. On October 29, 1969, Judge Julius Hoffman turned to the marshals and said, "Take that defendant into the room in there and deal with him as he should be dealt with in this circumstance."
They chained Bobby Seale to a metal chair and gagged his mouth with tape and cloth. They wrapped a strip from his chin to the top of his head to hold his jaw shut.
Then they brought him back into the courtroom and sat him in front of the jury.
For three days, Bobby Seale appeared before an American court of law bound and gagged, struggling against his restraints, making muffled sounds through the cloth that covered his mouth. One juror wept at the sight while others squirmed in their seats.
William Kunstler stood and said what needed to be said. He called it a medieval torture chamber.
On November 5, the judge declared a mistrial for Seale and severed his case from the other defendants, turning the Chicago Eight into the Chicago Seven. He found Seale guilty of sixteen acts of contempt of court and sentenced him to four years in prison.
As marshals carried him out, the courtroom erupted. Spectators screamed two words: Free Bobby.
The contempt conviction was later reversed on appeal. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked Judge Hoffman, and all the convictions from the trial were eventually overturned.
While serving his sentence, Seale faced another trial in New Haven, Connecticut, charged with ordering the murder of a fellow Panther named Alex Rackley who had been suspected of being an informant. The jury could not reach a verdict, and the charges were dropped.
Seale was released from prison in 1972. He came home to find the Party decimated by FBI counterintelligence, internal conflict, and the sheer weight of what the government had done to destroy it.
He ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973 and finished second out of nine candidates, forcing the incumbent into a runoff election. In a single day of campaigning, he handed out more than six thousand bags of groceries and registered thirty thousand new voters.
He lost the runoff. He did not make a concession speech.
He told his supporters he would not concede the rights of human beings. That was all he had to say.
Bobby Seale is eighty-nine years old. In 2025, the City of Oakland proclaimed October 22, his birthday, as Bobby Seale Day and named the block of 57th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way as Bobby Seale Way.
He published a cookbook in 1988 called Barbeque'n with Bobby. He taught African American studies at Temple University, wrote books, gave lectures, and kept showing up.
The man they chained to a chair in a federal courtroom is still talking. The gag did not hold.
The chains did not hold. The coin is still in the air.
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