From AP Wire Service
By MICHELLE LOCKE
Associated Press Writer

BERKELEY, CA (AP) -- Bobby Seale never expected to see the 40th anniversary of the Black Panther Party he co-founded with Huey Newton.

"A lot of times I thought I would be dead," he says.

The Black Panther Party - famous for its Black Power slogans and gun-toting members - officially existed for just 16 years. But its reach has endured far longer, something Seale and other party members will commemorate as they reunite in nearby Oakland this weekend.

"Grass roots, community, programmatic organizing for the purpose of evolving political, electoral, community empowerment," he says. "This was my kind of revolution. This was what I was after."

The Panthers were born on Oct. 22, 1966, the night Newton and Seale completed the Panthers' 10-point program and platform. At the time, Newton was a law student and Seale was a social worker for the municipal government in Oakland, which is across San Francisco Bay from the city of San Francisco.

When they were done, they flipped a silver dollar to see who would be chairman. Seale called heads. Heads it was.

Later, when he saw Newton looking sharp in a black leather jacket, he decided that members should wear something similar as a kind of uniform. They added berets after watching a movie about the French resistance in World War II.

Of course, the Panthers' most infamous accessories were the (then-legal) weapons they carried when they began monitoring police activity in predominantly black neighborhoods.

In 1967, when state legislators were considering gun restrictions that eventually passed, armed Panthers showed up at the state Capitol in protest, grabbing national attention.

The militant approach, which frightened many white Americans, set the Panthers apart from other activist groups.

"They filled a critical kind of void in the civil rights struggle," says Charles E. Jones, chairman of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University. "At a time when folks began to reassess the utility of nonviolence and turning the other cheek, the Black Panther Party offered an alternative."

The Panthers are often remembered for gun fights with police that left casualties on both sides.

Still, former Panthers point out that they were about more than guns. They ran breakfast programs for children, set up free health clinics, arranged security escorts for the elderly and testing for sickle cell anemia - mainstream concepts these days, along with police conduct review boards.

At its high point, the party had about 5,000 members across the country, says Seale.

Looking back, he still thinks the guns were necessary. A year before the Panthers were founded, he says, another group called Community Alert Patrol had tried monitoring police activity armed with tape recorders, walkie-talkies and law books.

"After a month of them doing this, they in effect got their law books taken and torn up, their tape recorders and their walkie-talkies smashed up, with billy clubs their heads were cracked up and drug downtown and locked up," he says. "That's what happened to them."

A number of factors led to the Black Panther Party's demise, starting with government opposition, says Jones. In 1967, the FBI launched a counterintelligence program - COINTELPRO - against what it termed "black hate groups" as well as other activists.

Internal disagreement on tactics and leadership weakened the party further and, "ultimately, people just got burned out. It's hard being a full-time revolutionary in the United States," says Jones.

Several Panthers were arrested on a variety of charges and some still remain in jail.

Seale and others were charged with conspiring to murder a party member who was believed to be a police informant, but those charges were later dropped. Seale was also a defendant in the renowned Chicago Seven trial of defendants accused of conspiring to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention with protests against the Vietnam War. Seale was gagged and bound in court after he called the judge a racist. All the defendants eventually were cleared.

Seale, who turns 70 this month (the party was founded on his birthday), moved back to Oakland in the 1990s and keeps busy with speaking engagements.

Newton was convicted of manslaughter in the 1967 death of an officer shot when police stopped a car Newton was driving. That verdict was overturned. Newton struggled with addiction and was shot to death by a drug dealer in Oakland in 1989.

For their reunion, which was to run Friday through Sunday, former Panthers planned a mix of events including workshops on topics ranging ethnic studies in higher education to Hurricane Katrina, as well as presentations on party history.

Continued interest in the Panthers is "a fascinating phenomenon," says Jones, editor of an anthology, "The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered)." For him it comes down to "a certain kind of boldness. It really stems from their community organizing, their commitment to serving not only black folks but all oppressed people."
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