Robert George "Bobby" Seale (born October 22, 1936, in Dallas, Texas), is an American civil rights activist, and revolutionary, who along with Huey P. Newton, co-founded the Black Panther Party For Self Defense on October 15, 1966.
Seale was one of the three children born to his mother, a homemaker, and his father, a carpenter, in the segregated South of Dallas, Texas. After moving to various places within Texas, his family relocated to Oakland, California during World War II. Seale attended Oakland High but dropped out and joined the U.S. Air Force. He spent three years in the Air Force before being kicked out for disobeying orders given to him by a colonel in South Dakota at Ellsworth Air Force Base. Upon his arrival back in Oakland, Seale began working at different aerospace plants as a sheet metal mechanic and attending night school to earn his high school diploma.
In 1962, at the age of 25, Seale began attending Oakland City College, located on Grove Street, near the Berkeley city limits, where he would join the Afro-American Association (AAA) and as a result meet Huey Newton, later his co-founder of the Black Panther Party. Seale and co-member Newton became increasingly skeptical about the direction of the AAA, and in particular, the AAA's tendency to analyze rather than act on the problems facing black Americans.
Both 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 adapt 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 its COINTELPRO program.
Bobby Seale was one of the original "Chicago Eight" defendants charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot, in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago. Judge Julius Hoffman sentenced him to four years of imprisonment for contempt because of his outbursts, and eventually ordered Seale severed from the case, hence the "Chicago Seven." During the trial, one of Seale's many outbursts led the judge to have him bound and gagged, as commemorated in the song "Chicago" written by Graham Nash and mentioned in the poem and song "H2Ogate Blues" by Gil Scott-Heron.
Seale was put on trial again in 1970 in the New Haven Black Panther trials. Several officers of the Panther organization had "executed" a fellow Panther, Alex Rackley, because they believed he was informing for the FBI. The leader of the murder plan, George Sams, Jr., turned state's evidence and testified that he had been ordered to kill Rackley by Seale himself, who had visited New Haven only hours before the murder. The jury was unable to reach a verdict in Seale's trial, and the charges were eventually dropped. The New Haven trials were widely decried as an example of political repression by such relative moderates as Yale University president Kingman Brewster, Jr., and were accompanied by a large demonstration in New Haven on May Day, 1970, which coincided with the beginning of the American college student strike of May, 1970.