Panthers Seize the Time

429 pp.; $6.95.

BOBBY SEALE and Hucy Newton started the Black Panther Party on the streets of Oakland, following the cops around with M-Frifles and watching as they patrolled the black ghetto there. The Panther community patrol was an outstanding success: Oakland's police force, known as one of the worst in the West, was tamed temporarily by the sight of angry, armed blacks observing them with the expressed intention of preventing murder, beatings, and illegal harassment of black people.

The police and the people who rely on them could not tolerate this surveillance for long, and today the image of the Panthers has changed: where once we saw Huey Newton emerging from his heat-up 1956 Ford, jacking a round into the firing chamber of his rifle and facing down the cops, we now see the Panthers as experimental subjects strapped to an operating table and screaming in rage as clumsy butchers hack at them without anaesthetic.

Hney Newton, the Minister of Defense, is in jail-receiving monotonously regular rejections to his requests for parole-and many people think he is dead. Bobby Scale, the Panther Chairman, is in jail, too-and if the State of Connecticut has its way, he may soon really be dead. He wrote most of Seize the Time in jail.

Because of this, any sort of criticism of Seize the Time as literature would be greatly inappropriate. It really doesn't matter much if Bobby Seale's prose style strikes you as readable or not. As I read this book in the comfort of my room. I kept remembering that almost all the central characters were in exile, in jail, or dead. And that there was a good chance that, as I read, more Panthers would join them.

So I read this book for understanding: understanding of what Panthers stand for and what makes a Panther-but even more for understanding of what I could do to help stop the carnage and help the Panthers achieve some of the things they want: "Some land, some bread, some housing, some education, some clothing, some justice, and some peace," as Seale says.

But the book is not very helpful in this respect; Seale does not ask anything specific of his readers. The book explains that the Panther rhetoric and style is geared toward organizing the black lumpenproletariat: "the brothers off the block-brothers who had been out there robbing banks, brothers who had been pimping, brothers who had been peddling dope, brothers who ain't gonna take no shit, brothers who had been fighting pigs."

The book can help white readers understand some important elements in the history of the Panthers. It is most valuable for its portrait of Huey P. Newton and its explanation of the evolution of Party discipline.

HUEY NEWTON was the founder of the Party. The Panther uniform, the black community patrols, the ten-point platform and program, the Panther ideology-all are products of what the Panthers call "the genius of Hucy P. Newton." And after reading Seale's book, it becomes obvious why the Panthers call him a genius. He emerges as a brilliant man, completely dedicated to the goals of the platform-a man who has met and groped with the fear of death, the desire for personal glory, the desire for power, and all other temptations of leadership.

Seale, who freely admits that he is no ideologue, emerges as a contented executive officer for Newton-listening to his orders, and then acting as Party Chairman to make sure no small flaw undoes the grand design.

It is in this area-organizing the Panther recruits and educating them to execute Newton's program-that Bobby Scale is at his best. Newton laid down the strategy, and Seale at once grasped the tactical details necessary to keep it going. Probably the most interesting parts of the book deal with Seale's struggle to transform the hustlers who joined the Panthers for their snappy uniforms and reputation into a disciplined force. His successes and failures (and his total honesty about both) give the reader much more of a sense of what it means to be a Panther than the ideological explanations which precede them.

And it is the degree of their success, in the face of opposition from other black groups, misrepresentation in the white press, infiltration by the F. B. I., and genocide by the Justice Department that gives you an idea of what the Panthers could become, if they were allowed to live long enough.

You should buy this book-from a Panther, if possible. It may be the easiest thing they ever ask you to do. And buy it soon. There may not be much time left.