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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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* 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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posted 14 May 2006 |
