Huey P. Newton

• Born: February 17, 1942
• Birthplace: Monroe, Louisiana
• Died: August 22, 1989
• Place of death: Oakland, California

Activist and writer

Newton is the cofounder of perhaps the most effective American revolutionary organization of the late twentieth century. He became an internationally known figure when he was tried for killing one Oakland police officer and injuring another. His rebellious attitude toward law enforcement officials and unwillingness to accept oppression or repression of any kind made him an iconic and controversial figure.

Areas of achievement: Civil rights; Scholarship; Social issues

Early Life

Huey Percy Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, on February 17, 1942. The youngest of seven children, Newton was named after Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, Jr., one of the state’s most popular and colorful governors. Long had impressed Newton’s father, a Baptist minister, with his propensity for bringing about programs that benefited African Americans such as free books for schools in black communities and road and bridge construction projects that provided African Americans with jobs. Two years after Newton was born, his father went to California in search of wartime employment and landed a job at the Oakland Naval Supply Depot. Eventually, the entire family left Louisiana and settled in Oakland.

As Newton got older, he found it difficult to resist the allure of Oakland’s streets. He enjoyed pitching pennies, shooting craps, and committing minor crimes. While in junior high school, Newton and another youth formed a gang called the Brotherhood to combat racist students, faculty, and administrators at school. According to Newton, white staff members and students alike used racial epithets to refer to African Americans, thus creating a tense atmosphere. Newton often was kicked out of class for rebelling against racist attitudes. He spent almost as much time on the streets as he did in school. By his accounts, he was suspended from high school anywhere from thirty to forty times. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide (1973), Newton wrote that during his years in the Oakland public school system, he did not have one teacher who taught him anything relevant to his own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in him a desire to learn more or to question or explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. In fact, he wrote, they nearly robbed him of his sense of self-worth.

By the time Newton entered his senior year of high school, he was functionally illiterate. Newton recalled that his brother Melvin was shocked and disgusted when he learned that his brother could not pronounce easy words. Melvin’s disgust hurt Newton deeply. After much painstaking work, Newton became a voracious reader. When he began to read, a new world opened up to him. What he discovered in books led him to think, question, explore, and finally redirect his life.

Newton wanted to learn to read for two reasons. First, he associated reading with adulthood. Second, he wanted to go to college and prove his high school counselor wrong. The counselor had pronounced Newton unfit for college based on an IQ test on which Newton scored a seventy-four.

Life’s Work

Newton enrolled in Merritt Junior College, where he joined the Afro-American Association and played a part in getting the first African American history course adopted as part of the school’s curriculum. In college, Newton honed his analytical and critical-thinking skills; he also became politically and socially conscious. Attuned to the harsh realities of African American oppression, Newton began to believe that most campus organizations were irrelevant outside the university walls and that there were few organizations in the area willing to address racism head-on. Hence, in 1966, Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, with Newton as the group’s minister of defense and Seale as its chairman.

Upon establishing the organization, Newton and Seale set out to find out what local residents needed and wanted. The pair drew up a questionnaire and surveyed as many people as they could. To their surprise, they found that people’s number-one concern was police brutality. Newton and Seale had anticipated that people would be most concerned about unemployment, inadequate housing, or lack of health care. Still, they knew well the reputation of the Oakland Police Department for harassing members of the African American community. In response, Newton and the Panthers began patrolling the police. Newton familiarized himself with the California penal code and the state’s laws regarding weapons, then armed his fellow Panthers not only with guns but also with cameras, tape recorders, and copies of the state constitution so as to ensure the safety of motorists and pedestrians when stopped by police officers.

Not long after the Panthers began their patrols, state legislators passed a bill that prohibited the carrying of firearms within residential and incorporated areas, thus rendering the Panthers’ police surveillance ineffective. Newton sent Seale and a delegation of Panthers to the state capital to protest the bill. The event garnered national attention and made the Black Panther Party a household name almost overnight. In addition to patrolling the police, the Panthers sponsored an array of other programs designed to improve poor people’s lives, including free breakfasts, buses to prisons, and health clinics. When some members of the Black Panther Party urged the use of violence to escalate the revolution, Newton thought it best to concentrate on meeting the needs of the community. In Newton’s view, a revolution could only be launched by the people; in order for the people to launch a revolution, their consciousness had to be raised.

In 1967, Newton was pulled over by Oakland police officer John Frey. Another officer arrived, and a scuffle ensued in which all three men were shot. Although he denied guilt, Newton was convicted of killing Frey and wounding the second officer, sparking supporters’ “Free Huey” protests nationwide. Newton’s conviction was overturned in 1970 because of errors in his trial. Two ensuing retrials ended in hung juries before the charges were dropped.

In 1974, Newton fled to Cuba to escape prosecution on murder and assault charges. After three years, he returned to the United States to stand trial. After two more mistrials, the charges were dismissed. He later spent several stints in prison for various offenses, many related to weapons and drugs. In 1980, Newton earned a Ph.D. in the history of consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1989, he was shot to death by drug dealer Tyrone Robinson in the same neighborhood in which the Black Panther Party was born decades earlier.

Significance

Newton was one of the most widely known and controversial activists of the last twentieth century. While he was characterized as a radical and regarded with fear and suspicion by the mainstream, Newton became a counterculture hero. He had an international reputation forged as much from his passionate defense of African American rights as from his highly publicized confrontations with police. Newton gave the Black Power movement a compelling urgency and played a vital part in the politics of black liberation during the 1960’s and 1970’s. In the early 1970’s, Ebony magazine rated Newton as one of the one hundred most influential African Americans.

Bibliography

Hilliard, David, and Donald Wiese, eds. The Huey P. Newton Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002. A collection of writings by and about Newton and his social impact.

Newton, Huey P. Revolutionary Suicide. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. A must-read for anyone interested in learning about Newton’s life and the development of the Black Panther Party.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. To Die for the People. New York: Random House, 1972. A collection of many of Newton’s writings that first appeared in the Black Panther Party’s newspaper.

Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time. New York: Random House, 1970. Seale’s autobiography includes a wealth of information on Newton’s life and the founding of the Black Panther Party.