Founding chairman and national organizer of the Black Panther Party from 1966-1974, Bobby Seale, focused his speech on the power of revolution amongst people, and how standing up for what you believe in can lead to magnanimous results.
    
“Whether you’re black, green, polka dot, whatever, we’re in this struggle together,” Bobby Seale said in his lecture last Thursday evening.
   
Seale used the current Wall Street protests as an example of the power of organized action against oppression.
    
“This Wall Street movement has got to be a continuous, growing movement,” Seale said.
    
Seale then used examples of the Black Panther Party’s successes to declare that with organized action, anything is possible.
    
“We as human beings are cross-involved in everything going on in the world ... Coalition politics is a statement of what we are about,” Seale said, adding that every person should work together to throw off the yoke of oppression.
    
Seale relayed the official formation of the Black Panther Party in 1966, stating that the movement began with the establishment of a 10-point plan that outlined the grievances of African-Americans and their call for equal treatment under the law. Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale also used the Declaration of Independence as the basis for their plan and used the platform they had created to spur a movement whose social and political impact resonated across the country.
    
“It was great,” Jordan Welsh, freshman in history, said. “I had been reading up on the Black Panther Party because I was interested in it. This was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I think it broke away a lot of preconceptions of the Black Panther Party.”
    
Hosted by the Issues Committee and the Central Program Council of UT, the lecture attracted the attention of hundreds of UT students, who piled into the UC auditorium to listen to Bobby Seale.
    
“It’s about constitutional civil rights,” Seale said — stating that no matter the ethnicity, everyone deserves to be treated with equality and respect.
    
Seale also detailed many of the struggles the Black Panther Party faced when others attempted to get them to fold and surrender their beliefs, but Seale said the party prevailed because of the confidence it had in its platform and beliefs.
    
Technology, Seale said, is such a major factor in how people relate to one another, and he stressed that it must be used to educate people on issues occurring around them. In this way, the people are given the opportunity to act should their civil liberties be threatened.
    
“It was highly interesting,” Jeminaka Al-Bawi, a junior in social work, said. “I’ve been interested in the Black Panther Party since I was little. There was no way I was going to let this opportunity pass by.”
    
“When we say ‘all power to the people,’ we’re talking about all power to all people,” Seale said. “We as homosapiens own this earth ... we have to get it to where people have the control to have power in their communities.”