They Huey P. Newton Reader

Bobby Seale
llt of jail and back on the street in 1965, I again took up with
OBobby Seale. We had a lot to talk about; I had not seen him in
morc than a year.
Bobby and I had not always agreed. In fact, we disagreed the first
time we met, during the Cuban missile crisis several years before. That
was the time President Kennedy was about to blow humanity off the
face of the earth because Russian ships were on their way to liberated
territory with arms for the people of Cuba. The Progressive Labor Party
was holding a rally outside Oakland City College to encourage support
for Fidel Castro, and I was there because I agreed with their views.
There were a number of speakers and onc of them, Donald Warden,
launched into a lengthy praise of Fidel. He did this in his usual opportunistic
way, tooting his own horn. Warden was about halfWay through
his routine, criticizing civil rights organizations and asking why we put
our money into that kind of thing, when Bobby challenged him,
expressing opposition to Warden and strong support for the position
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
He felt that the NAACP was the hope of Black people and because
of this, he supported the government and its moves against Cuba. I
explained to him afterward that he was wrong to support the government
and the civil rights organizations. Too much money had already
been put into legal actions. There were enough laws on the books to
permit Black people to deal with all their problems, but the laws were
not enforced. Therefore, trying to get more laws was only a meaningless
diversion from the real issues. This was an argument I had heard
in the Afro-American Association and in Oakland by Malcolm X. who
made the point over and over again. Bobby began to think about this
and later came over to my point of view.
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