Huey P. Newton
Huey Percy Newton was an African American revolutionary and political activist who co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. He ran the party as its first leader and crafted its ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale. Under his leadership, the party organized numerous social programs and community events, advocated for collective defense, and threatened political violence in service of their goals.
Newton learned to read using Plato's Republic, which influenced his philosophy of activism. He went on to earn a PhD in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program in 1980.
He was tried for, but ultimately not convicted of the criminal homicides of a police officer and a sex worker. He was convicted of, and incarcerated on separate occasions for weapons and embezzlement offenses. He was accused of rape, and complicity in other targeted violence. He was murdered in 1989.
Biography
Early life and education
Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1942 during World War II, the youngest child of Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, a sharecropper and Baptist preacher. His parents named him after Huey Long, former governor of Louisiana. The surrounding Ouachita Parish has had a history of violence against Black people since the Reconstruction era.To escape the violence of Louisiana, the Newton family migrated to Oakland, California, participating in the second wave of the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South. The family was close-knit but quite poor, and they moved often within the San Francisco Bay Area during Newton's childhood. Despite this, Newton said he never went without food and shelter as a child. As a teenager, he was arrested several times, including for gun possession and vandalism at age 14. Growing up in Oakland, Newton stated that he was "made to feel ashamed of being black".
In his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, he wrote:
Newton graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1959 while being functionally illiterate. He later learned to read through the help of his older brother Melvin Newton reading him poetry as well as studying Plato's Republic. He attended Merritt College, where he earned an Associate of Arts degree in 1966. Plato's Republic influenced Newton's early adult world view; he told the court during the trial for the killing of officer John Frey, that he had learned to read from studying the Republic. After that, he started "questioning everything". In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, he states: "Most of all, I questioned what was happening in my own family and in the community around me."
Newton continued his education, studying at San Francisco Law School, and the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he earned a bachelor's degree. He was a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. He later continued his studies and, in 1980, he completed a PhD in social philosophy at Santa Cruz.
Founding of the Black Panther Party
As a student at Merritt College in Oakland, Newton became involved in Bay Area politics. He joined the Afro-American Association, became a prominent member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity's Beta Tau chapter, and played a role in getting the first African-American history course adopted as part of the college's curriculum. Newton learned about black history from Donald Warden, the leader of the AAA. Later Newton concluded that Warden offered solutions that didn't work. In his autobiography, Newton says of Warden, "The mass media, the oppressors, give him public exposure for only one reason: he will lead the people away from the truth of their situation." In college, Newton read the works of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, Émile Durkheim, and Che Guevara. Newton began following developments in China following Mao's August 8, 1963 Statement Supporting the Afro-American in their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by US Imperialism.During his time at Merritt College, he met Bobby Seale, with whom he co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in October 1966. Based on a casual conversation, Seale became chairman and Newton became minister of defense. The Black Panther Party was an African-American left-wing organization advocating for the right of self-defense for black people in the United States. The Black Panther Party's beliefs were greatly influenced by Malcolm X. Newton stated: "Therefore, the words on this page cannot convey the effect that Malcolm has had on the Black Panther Party, although, as far as I am concerned, the Party is a living testament to his life work." The party achieved national and international renown through their deep involvement in the Black Power movement and the politics of the 1960s and 1970s.
The party's political goals, including better housing, jobs, and education for African-Americans, were documented in their Ten-Point Program, a set of guidelines to the Black Panther Party's ideals and ways of operation. The group believed that violenceor the threat of itmight be needed to bring about social change. They sometimes made news with a show of force, as they did when they entered the California Legislature fully armed in order to protest a gun bill aimed at disarming them.
Under Newton's leadership, the Black Panther Party founded over 60 community support programs including food banks, medical clinics, sickle cell anemia testing, prison busing for families of inmates, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing cooperatives, and their own ambulance service. The most famous of these programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program which fed thousands of impoverished children daily during the early 1970s. Newton also co-founded the Black Panther newspaper service, which became one of America's most widely distributed African-American newspapers.
Newton adopted what he termed "revolutionary humanism". Although he had previously attended Nation of Islam mosques, he wrote that "I have had enough of religion and could not bring myself to adopt another one. I needed a more concrete understanding of social conditions. References to God or Allah did not satisfy my stubborn thirst for answers." Later, however, he stated that "As far as I am concerned, when all of the questions are not answered, when the extraordinary is not explained, when the unknown is not known, then there is room for God because the unexplained and the unknown is God." Newton later decided to join a Christian church after the party disbanded during his marriage to Fredrika.
According to Bobby Seale, in 1967 he and Newton obtained copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong from the Chinese Book Store in San Francisco to sell at University of California, Berkeley. With the proceeds, they purchased weapons to arm BPP members for self-defense against police brutality.
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. Eventually, the illicit activities of a few members would be superimposed on the social program work performed by the Panthers, and this mischaracterization would lose them some support in both black and white communities.
Newton and the Panthers started a number of social programs in Oakland, including founding the Oakland Community School, which provided high-level education to 150 children from impoverished urban neighborhoods. Other Panther programs included the Free Breakfast for Children Program and others that offered dances for teenagers and training in martial arts. According to Oakland County Supervisor John George: "Huey could take street-gang types and give them a social consciousness."
In 1982, Newton was accused of embezzling $600,000 of state aid to the Panther-founded Oakland Community School. In the wake of the embezzlement charges, Newton disbanded the Black Panther Party. The embezzlement charges were dropped six years later in March 1989, after Newton pleaded no contest to a single allegation of cashing a $15,000 state check for personal use. He was sentenced to six months in jail and 18 months probation.
Fatal shooting of John Frey
In 1967, he was involved in a shootout which led to the death of police officer John Frey and injuries to himself and another police officer. In 1968, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for Frey's death and sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. In May 1970, the conviction was reversed and after two subsequent trials ended in hung juries, the charges were dropped.Newton had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon for repeatedly stabbing another man, Odell Lee, with a steak knife in mid-1964. He served six months in prison. By October 27–28, 1967, he was out celebrating the release from his probationary period. Going to get take-out food just before dawn on October 28, Newton and a friend were pulled over by Oakland Police Department officer John Frey because the car he was in was listed by the Oakland Police as being associated with the Black Panthers. Realizing who Newton was, Frey called for backup. After fellow officer Herbert Heanes arrived, shots were fired, and all three were wounded.
Heanes testified that the shooting began after Newton was under arrest, and one witness testified that Newton shot Frey with Frey's own gun as they wrestled. No gun on either Frey or Newton was found. Newton stated that Frey shot him first, which made him lose consciousness during the incident. Frey was shot four times and died within the hour, while Heanes was left in serious condition with three bullet wounds. Black Panther David Hilliard took Newton to Oakland's Kaiser Hospital, where he was admitted with a bullet wound to the abdomen. Newton was soon handcuffed to his bed and arrested for Frey's killing. A doctor, Thomas Finch, and nurse, Corrine Leonard, attended to Newton when he arrived at the hospital, and Finch stated that Newton was "agitated" when asking for treatment and that Newton was given a tranquilizer to calm him.
Newton was convicted in September 1968 of voluntary manslaughter for the killing of Frey and was sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. In May 1970, the California Appellate Court reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. After two subsequent trials ended in hung juries, the district attorney said he would not pursue a fourth trial, and the Alameda County Superior Court dismissed the charges. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, Newton wrote that Heanes and Frey were opposite each other and shooting in each other's direction during the shootout.
Hugh Pearson, in his book Shadow of the Panther, writes that Newton, while intoxicated, boasted about having willfully killed Frey.