Email this story Print this story Bobby Seale, one of the last surviving architects of the Black Panther Party, came to Reno on Friday to set the record straight. The founding chairman of one of the most publicized movements in American history told an audience of 275 at the University of Nevada, Reno that the party has been mislabeled in mainstream media and popular culture. People called us hoodlums, called us thugs, said Seale, who founded the Black Panthers in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., along with fellow activist Huey Newton.
People still think that today, people who don t know what our history was all about.
For more than an hour, Seale the keynote speaker at UNR s annual Black Student Organization Ball guided listeners on a first-person journey through that history. He reminisced about his cultural awakenings as an engineering student at Merrit College in Oakland, revelations which led to the formation of an influential political organization aimed at restructuring American society to make it more politically, economically and socially equal. I m here to get you to try to understand that history, and get a feel for the whole movement of the 60s, he said. I want to reflect upon the positive things people were about, whether they were black, white, green, blue or polka-dot. Seale, who now works at the community liaison for the Department of African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, told the crowd that he and Newton s goals were far from thuggish.