Remembering the life of Revolutionary Black Panther Huey P Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989)

Huey Percy Newton was an American revolutionary and political activist who was born on February 17, 1942 in Monroe, Louisiana the youngest of Walter Newton and Armelia Johnson’s seven children. Walter Newton was a Baptist preacher, sharecropper, and, at one time or another, worker in the local sawmills and sugarcane mills. He co-founded the Black Panther Party, a Marxist-Leninist political organisation, that played a pivotal role in the 1960'-70's  in defending Black communities against discrimination and the harsh economic and social conditions these communities faced in the US.

Long an iconic figure for radicals, Huey Newton is now being discovered by those interested in the history of America's social movements and since its Black History month I figured it be a good  idea to give some insight on who Huey was and who the Panthers were.

Newton and his  family moved to Oakland, California, in his childhood because of the racial discrimination against Black communities in the Southern states.As Newton later recalled in his autobiography, Oakland was subdivided into two worlds where radically different class realities seemed to be sculpted into the local topography. The hills and the affluent area known as Piedmont were the exclusive enclaves of the white middle classes and the wealthy. “The other Oakland—the flatlands,” Newton wrote, “consists of substandard income families that make up about 50 per cent of the population of nearly 450,000. They live in either rundown, crowded West Oakland or dilapidated East Oakland, hemmed in block after block, in ancient, decaying structures, now cut up into multiple dwellings.” 

Newton had a difficult childhood and was arrested many times as a teenager for minor crimes, such as vandalism or gun possession. In school Newton struggled with disciplinary problems, reading, and his teachers’ racist low expectations, and when he graduated from high school he was functionally illiterate. With the help of his older brother Melvin, he taught himself to read. His path to literacy and intellectual life was similar to Malcolm X’s: a combination of crude methods, self-discipline, the solitude of the prison cell, and ultimately the camaraderie and lively debates of the various political study groups he encountered after enrolling at Oakland City College in 1959.

Newton was a voracious reader, and during his tenure at the  college, he read the works of Marx, Lenin, Malcolm X, and other communist thinkers and civil rights leaders and he became involved in politics, joining a handful of Black organisations and partnerships.He developed a Marxist/Leninist view of the Black community. He saw Black people as a community controlled by the police, white business people, and local authorities. Following his Marxist-Leninist approach, he believed that the Black community should empower themselves and seize control of the oppressing institutions.

 In October 1966, he founded, along with Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense.Seale and Newton had become  friends  with at college. They started working with the Afro-American Association to organise students and demand representation on Pioneer Day.The duo later joined more radical organisations, such as the Maoist Revolutionary Movement. Both wanted to create a new way of doing Black politics.

Together Seale and Newton wrote the doctrines that formed the Black Panther's Ten-Point Program which encompassed  the founders' calls for Black self-determination, a decent education, for Black children free of racist and historical bias, as well as "land, bread, housing… justice and peace." (Huey P. Newton, War Against the Panthers, 1966) It also called for an end to economic exploitation of Black communities, along with military exemption.

The organization itself was not afraid to punctuate its message with dramatic appearances. For example, to protest a gun bill in 1967, members of the Panthers entered the California Legislature armed. (Newton actually wasn't present at the demonstration.) The action was a shocking one that made news across the country, and Newton emerged as a leading figure in the Black militant movement.

Seale was one of the “Chicago Eight” (later the Chicago Seven), a group of activists who protested against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic Convention and were accused of conspiracy and inciting a riot in the Convention.

The movie “Chicago 7” recalls the trial of these activists and received an Oscar Nomination in 2021.

Newton's role in the Black Panther Party was the Minister of Defense and ideologist. The slogan of the movement was “freedom by any means necessary”.

The Black Panthers arose out of the radicalizing Black freedom movement, inspired by the surging anti-imperialist and socialist movements around the world. The party's original purpose was to protect African American communities from police brutality, arming patrols who would oversee black neighbourhoods, but eventually called for arms to every member of the black community and called on the government to exclude black people from the Army's draft.and upholding the right of armed self-defense. They burst onto the scene and inspired a generation of young people to move toward revolution and socialism.

Newton would frequent pool halls, campuses, bars and other locations deep in the black community where people gathered in order to organize and recruit for the Panthers. While recruiting, Newton sought to educate those around him about the legality of self-defense. One of the reasons, he argued, why black people continued to be persecuted was their lack of knowledge of the social institutions that could be made to work in their favor. In Newton's autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, he writes, "Before I took Criminal Evidence in school, I had no idea what my rights were." Newton also wrote in his autobiography, "I tried to transform many of the so-called criminal activities going on in the street into something political, although this had to be done gradually." He attempted to channel these "daily activities for survival" into significant community actions.

Newton led the Black Panther Party to found more than 60 social programs for Black communities, such as medical clinics, legal advice seminars and even an ambulance service.The Black Panthers quickly expanded to many cities in the US, such as Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit. In 1967, the organisation had over 10,000 members in 68 chapters across the United States. 

The Black Panthers wanted to improve life in Black communities and took a stance against police brutality in urban neighborhoods by mostly white cops. Members of the group would go to arrests in progress and watch for abuse. Panther members ultimately clashed with police several times and faced severe repression from the FBI's insidious COINTELPRO program, which sought to break apart many of the powerful civil rights and Black activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover reportedly caused dissent and unrest between the Black Panthers and other Black nationalist groups. Revolutionary ideas and socialist movements were seen as a significant national security threat in the United States. Dozens of activists were arrested and beaten in the protests at that time.Hoover described the Panthers as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and in November 1968 ordered the FBI to employ “hard-hitting counter-intelligence measures to cripple the Black Panthers” Also, many leftist organisations were infiltrated by the FBI to be undermined. The Black Panther party's treasurer, Bobby Hutton, was killed while still a teenager during one of these conflicts in 1968.

Newton himself was arrested the previous year for allegedly killing an Oakland police officer during a traffic stop. He was later convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to two to 15 years in prison. But public pressure — "Free Huey" became a popular slogan of the day — helped Newton's cause. He was freed in 1970 after an appeals process deemed that incorrect deliberation procedures had been implemented during the trial.

The global success of the Black Panther resulted in many opportunities for Newton. For example, Newton visited China in 1970. He was welcomed by large crowds of Chinese people who supported the Black Power movement and criticised American imperialism.

After being released from prison Newton renounced political violence. Over a six year period 24 Black Panthers had been killed in gun fights with the police. Another member, George Jackson, was killed while in San Quentin prison in August, 1971.

In the 1970s, Newton aimed to take the Panthers in a new direction that emphasized democratic socialism, community interconnectedness and services for the poor, including items like free lunch programs and urban clinics but by the mid-1970s, factionalism began to tear the Black Panthers apart. Newton wanted an approach favouring gradual social change, while other members wanted to build relationships with foreign revolutionary movements.By 1980, the Panthers were a former shadow of themselves. Much of what the group stood for had been rendered unrecognizable by bouts of infighting and a general shift in public perception of the group. There were also some Panthers who were allegedly involved in criminal activity, using the group to mask their intentions.

While Newton is primarily known for his activism, some controversies surrounded him. In 1974, Newton was accused of killing a sex worker. That led him to exile to Cuba in 1973 to avoid prosecution. Though he stood trial for the murder in 1977 and was acquitted in 1978, other accusations of violence persisted. 

Huey Newton returned to college and earned a PhD in Social Philosophy at the University of California in 1980. In his final years, however, he suffered from major drug/alcohol problems and faced more prison time for weapons possession, financial misappropriations and parole violations.In 1982, Newton was charged with stealing $600,000 of state funds that was supposed to go to the Oakland Community School. As the case went on, Newton disbanded the Black Panther Party. The charges were dropped six years later, and Newton took a plea deal.

The once popular revolutionary died on August 22, 1989, in Oakland, California, after being shot on the street by  a member of the Black Guerrilla Family that had clashed with the Panthers over the decades.

His rhetoric and political courage had inspired thousands to stand against war, racism, and imperialism, and yet at other moments he succumbed to personal acts of brutality and self-destruction. Newton's funeral was held at Allen Temple Baptist Church. Some 1,300 mourners were accommodated inside, and another 500 to 600 listened to the service from outside. Newton's achievements in civil rights and work on behalf of Black children and families with the Black Panther Party were celebrated. Newton's body was cremated, and his ashes were interred at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland.

Whatever mistakes he made during his time as leader of the Black Panther Party do not outweigh his great achievements and contributions to the historic struggle for social liberation. for this I remember him. Newton and the Panthers deserve to be studied and debated because so much of their analysis and political practice addressed ghettoization, racist policing and incarceration, mass unemployment, and failing schools, problems that defined the urban crisis of the 1960s and have grown more intense and graver in our own times.

Few organizations from the Black Power era are as venerated as the Black Panther Party. Their courageous words and deeds have grown more radical as American life has become more conservative, and as the very social contradictions they attempted to address have expanded in scale and consequences. Their survival programs, armed patrols, popular education campaigns, and revolutionary aspirations continue to resonate in a context where urban poverty, police brutality, crime, and neoliberalism produce heartache within black working-class life and across U.S. society.

Newton had published a memoir/manifesto Revolutionary Suicide in 1973, with Hugh Pearson later writing the 1994 biography The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America. Newton's story was later depicted in the 1996 one-man play Huey P. Newton, starring Roger Guenveur Smith. A 2002 filmed presentation of the project was created by Spike Lee, and documentarian Stanley Nelson looked at the history of the Panthers in the 2015 film The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.

The following poem was written was written for Huey P. Newton by  the late Tupac Shakur whose mother was in the black panthers.

 

Fallen Star: Dedicated to Huey P.Newton - Tupac Shakur

 

They could never understand
what u set out 2 do
instead they chose 2
ridicule u

when u got weak
they loved the sight
of your dimming
and flickering starlight

How could they understand what was so intricate
2 be loved by so many, so intimate
they wanted 2 c your lifeless corpse
this way u could not alter the course
of ignorance that they have set
2 make my people forget

what they have done
for much 2 long 2 just forget and carry on
I had loved u forever because of who u r
and now I mourn our fallen star.

 

Huey Newton Interview on his book  Revolutionary Suicide (1972)