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Books by Huey P. Newton
Revolutionary
Suicide /
War Against the Panthers /
Huey P. Newton Reader /
To Die for the People /
The Genius of Huey P. Newton
In Search of Common Ground /
Insights and Poems /
Essays from the Minister of Defense
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Editorial Correspondence
Demythologizing
Huey Newton
By Cornish Rogers
Oakland.
WHAT I FOUND most striking about
Huey Newton was his eyes. We had been sitting for hours
around a dining-room table in intense conversation, and
his eyes had taken on an independent life of their
own—appearing at times to be the only sure and
unchanging reality I was confronting.
Perhaps it was because of the image
of Huey Newtown, co-founder of the Black Panther Party,
has for so long been clouded by myth and fantasy that I
now had some doubts as to whether this was the real Huey
or a figment of my imagination. He looked just as he
does in his pictures, although shorter than I had
expected. His handsome angular face rose above a
superbly muscled upper torso. He seemed to be from
another time and another world—the strident Afros—the
only prominent black activist leader of that decade not
now dead or in exile.
In appearance, this was the same
Huey Newton who had been convicted of murdering an
Oakland policeman in 1967 and had spent three years in
prison only to be released in 1970 following a
California appeals court’s overruling of his conviction.
After two subsequent trials ended in hung juries, the
state dropped it charges and he was set free.
In the view of many, the Huey who
emerged from prison is an entirely different person from
the brash young gun-toting militant who entered it back
in 1968. He seemed to have won not only a second life
but a markedly different one. Instead of stepping back
into the image of Eldridge Cleaver and the media and
projected of the Panthers, Huey adopted a nonmilitant
profile for his organization. He moved quickly to banish
from the party those gun-loving militants who had taken
control during his incarceration. He introduced food and
other aid programs for the poor. His most recent venture
was into the political arena where his party campaigned
vigorously on behalf of Bobby Seale’s unsuccessful but
impressive effort to win election as mayor of Oakland.
The party’s new socially benign
activities have led some observers to contend that Huey
Newtown has changed from a “panther to a pussycat.” Some
have even hinted that he must have been the victim,
while in prison, of a macabre behavior-altering medical
experiment—a “clock-work orange” type of treatment.
Refusing to respond to my queries
by telephone, Huey instead of invited me to his
apartment. Not far from a portrait of revolutionary
leader Che Guevara (a gift from an admiring fellow
prison) was a large telescope trained through the window
on the county courthouse jail. According to Huey, it was
focused on the very cell he had occupied for so long
while awaiting trial. Asked whether he harbors nostalgia
for the cell, he appeared amused at first; then, his
eyes hardening, he said: “No, I look through that
telescope each day not out of nostalgia but because, you
might say, that’s my Moby Dick—my personification of
evil.”
Thus began, for me, the process of
separating myth from reality. When he told me that his
father, whom he idolizes, is a Baptist preacher—and that
as a boy he went to church several times a week—a new
perspective on him and his work began to emerge. I was
genuinely surprised that he professed to be deeply
religious; he quoted liberally from Ecclesiastes, his
favorite book of the Bible. While he expressed the
prophet’s scorn for the religious establishment (“the
black preachers did not support us in the mayoral
election, but the members of their congregations did”),
he praised the church’s ideas. Although not a
traditional theist, he believes fervently that “wherever
two or three are gathered together to serve the people,
there is God.”
Explained Huey: “In order to
understand me and the Black Panther Party today, you
have to understand that we were always motivated solely
by a determination to protect the people—the black
people of Oakland. Everybody looks at that famous poster
of me sitting in that wide basket-backed chair with a
spear in one hand and a rifle in the other. But no one
sees the shield there next to me. The shield explains us
best: we intend to shield our people from the
brutalities visited upon them by the policy and other
racist institutions in the society.”
Huey placed much of the blame on
the media and Eldridge Cleaver, his former minister of
information, for the distorted image of the Black
Panthers as a paramilitary, cop-hating group of violent
revolutionaries. Cleaver, he claimed, had severe
personal problems which he tried to translate into
political terms. But Huey accepted some of the blame for
the Panthers’ militant image himself: he coined the term
“pigs”; he caused a sensation by sending Panthers armed
with loaded rifles into the California state legislature
to protest a proposed antigun bill; and he fostered the
Panthers’ audacious practice of following the police
around town to observe their treatment of citizens they
stopped—a practice regarded by the public as
cop-baiting.
If the prison authorities were
unable to inflict psychosurgical or biomedical “therapy”
upon Huey, his enforced solitary confinement must have
accomplished a similar purpose—but without destroying
his basic motivation. He emerged from prison convinced
that the Panthers’ “destructive tactics” had severely
harmed their “strategic interests.” Operating on the
assumption that politics is indeed an extension of the
war by other means, he launched the Panthers on their
campaign for Bobby Seale, but with a deeper reason as
well: to acquaint the grass-roots black community with a
new image of the Panthers, and to create a viable
network which could be used for other community efforts.
His ultimate political goal in Oakland, he said, is not
to take over, but “to get effective representation of
our poor and black community in every governmental
institution that’s supposed to be serving us.”
Huey predicted that the Panther
programs around the country will become more regionally
directed and will be designed to meet local community
needs instead of relating to Third World international
interests. He explained: “I’m not really very interested
in running a worldwide organization. My first interest
is to establish justice in this community. This is why
we got started—to protect black and poor people in
Oakland.”
Huey reiterated that it was
Eldridge Cleaver, under the influence of white radicals,
who turned the Panthers into a feared revolutionary
vanguard. Also, according to Huey, he had to resist
Stokely Carmichael’s insistence that the Panthers have
nothing more to do with white groups. “We had never been
a racist organization,” he insisted. “The reason we
don’t have visible white allies today is that the white
radical movement is dead.”
But the original Panther image is
not dead, especially outside the United States. Angry
young oppressed people everywhere still identify with
that image of strident militancy. Young Filipino
activists paint “power to the people” on walls in
Manila. Not long ago in Australia, young aborigine
“panthers,” with white student support, staged a sit-in
against the government at Canberra and reaped a violent
confrontation with the police. “Black Panthers” in
Israel are agitating for better treat of the Western
Jews. And I recall very vividly the group handsome young
New Zealand “Panthers”—Malay and Fiji Islanders, proudly
sporting huge “Afros who, after I had spent an evening
with them, told me the “black power” handshake and sped
more my way with raised fists and shouts of “Power to
the people!”
I could not help wondering, as Huey
continued to puncture myths about the Panthers, how
their image change would affect all those groups who
life styles are patterned on the angry rhetoric of
fearless posturing of the original Huey. Will they
understand and accept the explanation of his original
purpose as symbolized by the shield? Will they
understand the old African saying that Huey had become
found of quoting at his basic motivation I am we”? Now
that Huey Newton has been demythologized, will they
continue to believe? If they do, perhaps, like the
older and wiser Huey, they too will come of age.
Source: The Christian
Century • August 15–22, 1973
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* The Caged Panther the
Prison Years of Huey P. Newton—J. Herman Blake—We also had
some very rich exchanges in discussing the ideas of
Emile
Durkheim—a French sociologist considered one of the founders
of the discipline Sociology. His works are cited at the
beginning of any introduction to sociology course. I was
interested in Durkheim’s ideas about “collective consciousness”
and group behavior. Newton had also read Durkheim and was much
more interested in his development of the social causes of
suicide. Newton had read an article in EBONY Magazine that a
fellow inmate had shared, discussing
Herbert Hendin’s study of the rising incidence of suicide
among African Americans—particularly males. This was a new and
surprising trend and apparently a subject of intense discussion
during the mealtimes he shared with other inmates. Newton and I
talked about Durkheim’s articulation of the major types of
suicide: Anomic, Altruistic, Egoistic, and Fatalistic.
First of all, Newton was
troubled by the increasing suicide rate among Black males. He
was dissatisfied with the way the trend was discussed in the
article for he felt the writer accepted the pattern as
understandable even if not acceptable. In talking about the
social forces used to explain suicide, Newton began to use
Durkheim’s paradigm to analyze these forces and develop an
expanded version of the theory. In Newton’s view, fatalistic
suicide as explained by Durkheim resulted from situations where
individuals felt oppressed and reacted by killing themselves as
an escape from their oppression. Newton theorized that when
faced with overwhelming social forces to kill oneself was
“reactionary suicide.” However, if the individual had a strong
desire to fulfill their life, they would move against their
oppressors and seek to liberate themselves and their people.
Even if the oppressors had much greater forces leading to the
individual’s death, the revolutionary act of moving against
oppression rather than self-destruction would result in
“revolutionary suicide” a form of liberation.
In other words,
“revolutionary suicide” resulted from such an overwhelming
desire to live free that one would take action against an
oppressor in spite of the odds. As he developed the idea of
“revolutionary suicide” in his reflections on the writings of
Herbert Hendin and the theories of
Emile Durkheim, Huey Newton seemed to become liberated
himself. Newton ruminated at length about Durkheim’s formulation
of how social forces—either tightly woven or very loose—might
lead a person to kill oneself. However, he argued further that
if social forces were overwhelmingly constraining, the
revolutionary act would be to move against the social forces and
their agents—even if that action led to one’s own death.
When he originally
articulated the concept of revolutionary suicide, Newton saw it
as another one of the abstract ideas we were developing to
stimulate his mind during his time in his jail cell. While
excited by his own analytical development of the concept, he did
not envision going further with the idea. It was one of many
ideas we discussed in relation to social conditions of poor
people around the world in general and Black people in America
in particular. Eventually it was to become the title of the
autobiography that emerged from our collaboration. Initially the
concept revolutionary suicide was ensconced in an intellectual
array of ideas to be discussed with other inmates in lieu of
brothers on the block. At that time, there was no indication
Newton wanted to pursue the idea further or promote the concept.
We talked about it and went on to other matters.—Springer
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* DVDs --
A Huey P. Newton Story 2001 /
What We Want, What We Believe The Black Panther Party Library
The Spook Who Sat By the Door /
Passin' It On; The Black Panthers' Search for Justice /
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Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22,
1989) was an American political and urban activist who,
along with
Bobby Seale, co-founded the
Black Panther Party for Self Defense. . . .
There are many
references to Huey Newton in popular music, including in
the songs "Changes"
by
Tupac Shakur, "Welcome To The Terrordome" by
Public Enemy, "Queens Get The Money" by
Nas, "Sunny Kim" by
Andre Nickatina, "Just A Celebrity" by
The Jacka, "Same Thing" by
Flobots, "Dreams" and "911 Is A Joke(Cop Killa)" by
The Game, "You Can't Murder Me" by
Papoose, "Police State" by
Dead Prez, "Propaganda" by
Dead Prez "We Want Freedom" by
Dead Prez, "Malcolm, Garvey, Huey" by
Dead Prez, "SLR" by
Lupe Fiasco, "Bill Gates Freestyle" by
Fabolous feat. Paul Cain, "Huey Newton" by
Wiz Khalifa &
Currensy,"Hiiipower" by
Kendrick Lamar, "My Favorite Mutiny" by
The Coup, and "Dream Team" by
Spearhead. In the comic strip and cartoon show
The Boondocks, the main character Huey Freeman, a
ten year-old African-American revolutionary, is named
after Newton; another reference comes when Freeman
starts an independent newspaper, dubbing it the Free
Huey World Report. In 1996,
A Huey P. Newton Story was performed on stage by
veteran actor
Roger Guenveur Smith. The one-man play later was
made into an award-winning 2001 film directed by
Spike Lee.—Wikipedia
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Revolutionary Suicide
By
Huey P. Newton, Ho Che Anderson
(Illustrator), Fredrika Newton (Introduction)
Eloquently tracing the birth of a
revolutionary, Huey P. Newton's famous and
oft-quoted autobiography is as much a
manifesto as a portrait of the inner circle
of America's Black Panther Party. From
Newton's impoverished childhood on the
streets of Oakland to his adolescence and
struggles with the system, from his role in
the Black Panthers to his solitary
confinement in the Alameda County Jail,
Revolutionary Suicide is smart, unrepentant,
and thought-provoking in its portrayal of
inspired radicalism.
Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) was an
activist and inspirational leader of the
Black Panther Party. Fredrika Newton
joined the Black Panther Party as a youth
member in 1969 and married Huey P. Newton in
1984. She established the Huey P. Newton
Foundation, a non-profit educational
organization, in 1993. Ho Che Anderson
was born in London in 1969 and named after
the Vietnamese and Cuban revolutionaries Ho
Chi Minh and Che Guevara. He is primarily
known for his comic books King, I
Want to Be Your Dog, Wise Son,
and Scream Queen. |
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 14 May 2006
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