Black Panthers Reunite 40 Years Later

Former Black Panther Party national chairman Bobby Seale holds a February 1967 photo at his home in Oakland, Calif., Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006, of himself, left, wearing a Colt .45, and his Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton, right, with a bandoleer and shotgun in Oakland. The Black Panther Party officially existed for just 16 years. Seale never expected to see the 40th anniversary of the Black Panther Party. Seale and other party members are to commemorate the anniversary when they reunite in Oakland this week. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma) (Paul Sakuma - AP)

BERKELEY, Calif. -- The Black Panther Party officially existed for just 16 years, but its reach has endured far longer.

Co-founder Bobby Seale never expected to be around to see that reach 40 years later.

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

Seale and other former members will commemorate the party's founding when they reunite in Oakland this weekend. They plan a mix of events, including workshops on topics ranging from Hurricane Katrina to ethnic studies in higher education, as well as presentations on party history.

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

The Panthers were born Oct. 22, 1966, the night Seale and Huey Newton completed the party's 10-point program and platform. At the time, Newton was a law student and Seale was working for the Oakland Department of Human Resources as a community liaison.

When they were finished, 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.

The Panthers' most controversial accessories were the then-legal weapons they carried when they began monitoring police activity in predominantly black neighborhoods.

In 1967, as 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."