Bobby Seale , As co-founder and Chairman of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale was an important leader of the Black Power movement. Born in Texas, Seale joined thousands of African Americans when his family migrated to Oakland during World War II. At the age of 18, Seale joined the Air Force. He returned to Oakland and began attending Merritt College, where he majored in engineering . At Merritt is where he first met Huey P. Newton. Inspired by Malcolm X, independence movements in Africa, and anti-colonialist intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, he founded with Newton in 1966 the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
While working at a War on Poverty program, he and Newton wrote a ten-point program that outlined the outlook and goals of the BPP. The Ten-Point program demanded that blacks have the “power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.” Control of their own community would allow blacks to gain “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.”
