Bobby Seale holds forth in Cambridge MA...

Going to see old heroes is never straightforward - you have starry-eyed expectations, visions of towering achievement and bravado - but in many cases the present-day version of that vision that you see seems...almost banal...As the renowned co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, one expected a legend with all attendant reputation of taking on the state and making Black Power come alive and ready to spring...like a black panther.

Seale, now old, almost benign. recounted his background and how he came to found the Black Panther Party. Never had the word "party" in the name of the organization meant more - it always seemed to be a stand-in for any other word for organization or something like that - till Seale emphasized that his chief aim was to take over political power - and hence the need for a party. Everything else - the confrontations with Bay Area police, the repeated run-ins with state and federal authorities, the show of defiance, the clenched fist, the uniform with guns...and Huey Newton - seemed a sideshow to Seale's recollection of the grand project.

This obviously came as a jarring piece of news to most of the attendees who had wanted a piece of the wildly gidy days of defiance, boldness and a new order of things based on black-power coming forth. And with the dashing Huey Newton certainly at the center of things. Not so in Bobby's script - Huey was no organizer, certainly nothing compared to Seale, no orator who could captivate an audience, and hence mostly a cad who wanted to take credit for things he did not do or had a claim to, like the co-founding of the Party.

What also surprised many was also the de-emphasis on the mode of, shall we say, aggression that Seale pushed for throughout the lecture. "Forget the guns, the guns were secondary," he kept saying, much to the consternation of the overflow audience. True as that may be, the Black Panthers with their power salutes etc cannot be easily separated from a certain show of defiance and dogged resistance, backed by the instruments of (righteous?) aggression...

I had a similar feeling of some sort of a disappointment when I went to seen Kathleen Cleaver - she is a corporate attorney now and something of the shine of the panther seemed to have rubbed off; and Huey was at the receiving end from her too...