Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, is speaking at Colorado State University in February as part of a celebration for Black History Month.

Seale’s keynote at CSU’s Lory Student Center on Feb. 13 is one of just a host of public events being organized throughout the month by the Black/African American Cultural Center, a student diversity office that supports Black students at CSU.

Events include lectures, in-depth student discussions, movie screenings and food samplings, among other attractions. This year’s theme — “Blackprint: The Original Blueprint” — focuses on examining the past to advance the Black community, according to organizers.

Duan Ruff, director of the Black/African American Cultural Center, explained that CSU students in the past year have become interested in learning more about the Black Panther Party. In February 2022, B/AACC hosted a Black Panther Day event in which students dressed up as Black Panther members, working to dispel some of the controversial myths about the party.

“Students definitely have an interest in the true story of the Black Panther Party,” Ruff said. “The Black Panthers are not a terrorist organization. They did a lot of community service work that is still in existence today.”

Seale, along with Huey P. Newton, founded the Black Panther Party in college during the 1960s. Known for wearing black berets, leather jackets and headline-grabbing means of protest, the Black Panther Party was a driving force during the civil rights movement in the United States, confronting police brutality, combating childhood hunger and supporting voting rights.

In 2020, Seale told The Washington Post: “The legacy of the Black Panther Party is our protest method of organizing the people and voter registration. Yeah, we had the breakfast program because people forget: What is attached to the breakfast program? What’s attached to the sickle cell anemia testing program, et cetera? It is voter registration. Because we want to get more and more political Black folks elected to political office, up and down the ballot on the state legislative bodies — the senator, the governors, the legislative frameworks, et cetera, right on down to cities and counties and stuff. And more community control input to the functions of the police.”