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)
