Bobby Seale, the founding member of the Black Panther Party, spoke at UWM on February 25.

The public event, which was sponsored by the Milwaukee Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Graduate Student Alliance, drew a crowd of several hundred people to the UWM Wisconsin Room. Bobby Seale, who is now 72, spoke for a little over two hours with a signature beret on his head.

Seale’s main theme of the speech was the misperception of the Black Panther Party created by governmental figures in the decades since the sixties. In between anecdotes about his old age, Seale started the talk by humorously recounting multiple attempts by HBO and Steven Spielberg to receive rights for a miniseries about the Black Panther Party. To Seale’s dismay, the writers of the miniseries were relying on historical documents and tangential accounts of the actions of the Black Panther Party rather than consulting any members of the original party. Seale used this story to segue into a colorful description of his civil rights activism in the sixties and an explanation of his reasoning at the time.

Seale had his first protest experience in Oakland, California in 1962 when he was taking engineering classes at a local college. He walked past a civil rights protest on his way to a class, and he talked to the leader of the protest to learn about it. When the leader started talking about Afro-Americans, Seale became confused: “Afro-Americans, I said I never heard that,” he said. But this experience engendered a seed of curiosity in him, and Seale began learning about activism by reading books at local college libraries.

The part of the speech where Seale most captured the audience’s attention was when he explained his re-education. He, like many other activists at the time, read deeply into the history of African colonialism, as well as anthropology books like “The Myth of the Negro Past” and “Facing Mount Kenya.” Seale also talked about the greater awareness his knowledge of African linguistics gave him when he learned that the supposed grammatical mistakes African Americans commonly make in speech are actually legitimate linguistic signs that have an uncanny correlation to indigenous African languages. Seale learned to have pride in his cultural heritage by knowing “why we say ‘dis, ‘dat, ‘dem, yo’, mo’, and fo’ rather than this, that, them, your, more, and for.”

Seale then juxtaposed the image governmental figures gave the Black Panthers at the time with his and his colleagues’ intellectual awareness. When the Black Panthers, staged a protest in Berkeley, California, Seale said, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, warned the public against them. “He called me a thug and a hoodlum; I was getting my first lesson in politics,” Seale said. Seale tried to dispel the popular image of the Black Panthers as a violent group of hate-mongers; he held graduate degrees in engineering and had worked on the Gemini missile program, and his partner Huey Newton was a doctoral candidate at the University of California at the time of the protests. He also mentioned that, unlike the rumors, Black Panthers didn’t hate all white people. “We were running up and down the streets with our white left brothers—a few of them were even screwing each other,” said Seale.

Later, Seale talked of his famous involvement in the Chicago Seven trial, a prosecution of eight activists for inciting a riot outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Seale was the eighth defendant, but he attacked the court on the premise of racism so much that the judge first had him tied and gagged, and then put him in prison for contempt of court. “We wanted to put social and political power back in the hands of the people,” Seale said.

Seale’s cell phone rang while he was speaking, and he answered it in front of an astonished audience. “Let me try to finish this speech,” he said. “Get back to me in two hours.” The audience then applauded as he hung up the phone.