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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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Revolutionary
Suicide, Huey Speaks
David
Walker & Nathaniel Turner
Speak
of Will Francis & Lucy Barrow
Conversations with Joyce, Miriam & Wilson
* * * *
* I Am We, Or Revolutionary
Suicide By Huey P. Newton "the spirit of the generations . . . touched
God's heart" There is an old
African saying, "I am we." If you met an African in
ancient times and asked him who he was, he would reply, "I
am we. This is revolutionary suicide: I, we, all of us are the
one and the multitude.
So many of my comrades are gone now. Some
tight partners, crime partners, and brothers off the block are
begging on the street. Others are in asylum, penitentiary, or
grave. They are all suicides of one kind of another who had the
sensitivity and tragic imagination to see the oppression. Some
overcame; they are the revolutionary suicides. Others were
reactionary suicides who either overestimated or underestimated
the enemy, but in any case were powerless to change their
conception of the oppressor.
The differences lies in hope and desire. By
hoping and desiring, the revolutionary suicide chooses life; he
is, in the words of Nietzsche, "an arrow of longing for
another shore." Both suicides despise tyranny, but the
revolutionary is both a great despiser and a great adorer who
longs for another shore.
The reactionary suicide must learn, as his
brother the revolutionary has learned, that the desert is not a
circle. It is a spiral. When we have passed through the desert,
nothing will be the same.
You cannot bare your throat to the murderer.
As George Jackson said, you must defend yourself and take the
dragon position as in karate and make the front kick and the
back kick when you are surrounded. You do not beg because your
enemy comes with the butcher knife and the hatchet in the other.
"He will not become a Buddhist over night."
The Preacher said that the wise man and the
fool have the same end: they go to the grave as a dog. Who sends
us to the grave? The unknowable, the force that dictates to all
classes, all territories, all ideologies; he is death, the Big
Boss. An ambitious man seeks to dethrone the Big Boss, to free
himself, to control when and how he will go to the grave.
There is another illuminating story of the
wise man and the fool, found in Mao's Little Red Book. A
foolish old man went to the North Mountain and began to dig; a
wise old man passed by and said, "Why do you dig; foolish
old man? Do you not know that you cannot move the mountain with
a little shovel?" But the foolish old man answered
resolutely, "While the mountain cannot get any higher, it
will get lower with each shovelful. When I pass on, my sons and
his sons and his son's sons will go on making the mountain
lower. Why can't we move the mountain?"
And the foolish old man kept digging, and the
generations that followed after him, and the wise old man looked
on in disgust. But the resoluteness and the spirit of the
generations that followed the foolish old man touched God's
heart, and God sent two angels who put the mountain on their
backs and moved the mountain.
This is the story Mao told. When he spoke of
God he meant the six hundred million who had helped him to move
imperialism and bourgeois thinking, the two great mountains.
The reactionary suicide is "wise,"
and the revolutionary suicide is a "fool," a fool for
the revolution in the way Paul meant when he spoke of being
"a fool for Christ." That foolishness can move the
mountains of oppression; it is our great leap and our commitment
to the dead and the unborn.
We will touch God's heart; we will touch the
people's heart, and together we will move the mountain.
* * * *
*
A Conversation on
Post-Katrina Events
Wilson: Rudy, I know you will not despair.
Your job is to educate. You have been manfully
discharging your duty throughout the month of September.
Your efforts will not go unrecognized or unrecorded. You
have no more power than Socrates or Jeremiah. You
have only the power of David Walker. In the long
run, we must ask ourselves whether David Walker or Nathaniel
Turner had the greater effect. Your destiny is to be
a David Walker, not a Nat Turner. So, I send my words of
support. You are doing a great deal, more than
sitting in the dust and bemoaning our fate. You are
trying to make people think. And to feel. That is a
worth a great deal. A few people in every generation
will always listen.
Rudy: You
know, both were sought out and murdered, one privately, the
other by the State. Neither end entices me. I suppose they both
had hopes and desires. They were both arrows that long for the
distance shore. Maybe in a sense Turner bared his throat to his
murderers. Each felt, however, that his life could move
mountains. In that both of their lives gain respect, it is a
difficult choice by any method.
For Walker, nevertheless, his life was seized in the middle of
the night, while few eyes watched. Like one of my uncles, they
never found his body, did they? Turner hanged on a tree at the
nearby county courthouse (jail) at noon in Jerusalem. Though we have seemingly,
somewhere, Turner's skull, there remains something much more
fascinating in what Turner chose for his life.
It's true, we have no place to go for either to call up the name
of the dead, like at Malcolm's or King's grave. No matter. That
Nathaniel Turner made a conscious decision to deliver himself up
to the hangman remains appealing to me. For Walker what we have
mostly is his words. But for Turner, we have mind, words, and
deeds. Here is where we get in some teeth, some tread. It is one
thing to be caught on the road or dragged from one's room, and
given the shaft, or poisoned by surreptitious hands.
It is quite another for a man, who can save his life in the bush
(anonymously), to choose rather death within community, however
short it falls from perfection, but to choose community (civil
life) to assert his life's task (mind, words, and deeds) and
therein defend the ways of both God and man (Christian slaves).
Man, o, man, what a man!
It is said that he knew they would disassemble his body,
desecrate it. But not even this act which he knew would come
after he gave up his last breath did not deter him, this fear
did not sadden him, did not make him less anxious for the
hangman's noose. He had already won the day. Let them do their
worst. At that point, he was assured his story would be told, to
the world, and its publication would be from Baltimore.
Though we have the journalistic efforts of Walker available to
us, there is none that can be likened to the journalistic coup
orchestrated by Nathaniel Turner in the telling of his story, in
the justification of his deeds. And I feel with the greatest
certainty we have his story. And that story is known so
thoroughly, there has been so much ink spilt on getting it right.
So, no, unless you can tell me something I don't know about that
North Carolina boy I don't already know, I will stay with this
my spirit guide. The greatest of Negro freedom fighters, he who
sought the salvation of all, through the blood of Christ,
beckons to me to pick up my cross and follow. I will stay true
to this Virginia prophet who still walks the fields and bogs of
Southside, Virginia, whose voice still remains there in the
pines and the winds for those who have ears to hear and souls
that think.
Wilson: I think they found Walker's body in Brattle
Street, a few doors from his shop. As Benjamin Brawley put
it in 1938 "the belief is persistent that he met with foul
play." That is to say, many surmised that he had been
poisoned.
Joyce: Was this the plan all along?
The widely circulated formulaic stories of rape, murder and
descent into "savagery" have been recanted by the
Mayor of New Orleans and the Superintendent of Police, who
has RESIGNED.
But how will we ever address this post-modern
global criminalization and de-humanization of African
people--again (and again)?
Rudy:
The
thing is that we have not moved that far away from just plain
post reconstruction criminalization. And the two lynch pins in
this criminal drama this proliferation of "urban
myths" were a black mayor and a black police chief. Bush
was not the only one who had cronies working in highly crucial
and frontline jobs.
Our Mister Sams serve the interest only of
their masters the best way they know, defend first their
property, their order, and their power. However much
better, much more far off we would be at this moment if we had
had a mayor and a police chief who loved black people, and loved
even more poor black people? Where would we be today if we had
voices other then the political hot shots, the political mouths
that speak first and foremost in the interest of the
powerful?
What if we did not have political puppets who
sell out our lives to the highest bidder? To have such fellows
in place, yes, that has been the plan since the first slave ship
landed on the coast of West Africa, since the first caravan
crossed the Sahara. Oh, how oppression remains universal,
persisting over time, place, and resistance! The gain is so
attractive and oppression has become so abstract & unfeeling
in the camera's lens, that the art of being a political hack and
a racial disgrace is today a career sought after by the best of
us.
Miriam: It just makes you want to
cry--the pervasiveness of racism--and, believe me, it's going to
get much much worse. Unfortunately, we have no one, at
least no one in power, to speak for us because you're right:
we have too many Black overseer/puppets and no David Walkers or
Nat Turners in sight.
Rudy: That is the story, Miriam, that
we have not learned from the life of Walker and Turner. Read the
1831
Confessions again. You
know, there were many millennialists who existed at that time,
and previously in American history. They all waited on Christ to
come down from the sky. They awaited the rapture.
They wait when they cannot do a simple matter
like read the writing on the wall, nor, for that matter, the
words of the Declaration of Independence, nor the Bill of
Rights. They were not able to read the Scriptures they
claimed to love with a simple heart. But here was this backwoods
Negro, in a backwoods Jerusalem, who knew more philosophy, more
about scripture, and revelations than those who study at
Princeton and Harvard combined. How extraordinary! He had no
Doctorate of Divinity, no Ph.D.
He had no Church he could call his own. He
knew the handle of a plow more than that of the gavel. More
about nature, and blood on the leaves, than our
environmentalists, today. He was a man who lived and sought
daily the righteous. Here was a judge for the Ages.
Here was a man who could read Luke, a man who took the
Scriptures to heart.
He understood the words of the prophet of
Nazareth. Each man had to take up the cross and to follow him
who was willing to sacrifice all when all was at hand. It was no
longer a time, Turner recognized, for Jesus to carry the
cross.
How many times does one man have to do that.
How many times must he be crucified. Life is living, not
crucifixion.
Our interpretation, our theology threw itself
off the mountain, willful self-murder. Christ thus put his
cross down. It had lost its spice. We had his blood; it
remained available—that of humanity. It was our choice to
decide what we will do with it. Should we endure and wait on the
Christ from the skies, on our weak-kneed leaders, or shall we
lived vitally as men and women in this world, at this moment?
We have faith to survive. That we have shown.
But do we have the faith each of us to live vitally in the now?
That is the challenge that Nathaniel Turner left us. Can the
simplest of men, make a difference? He was American in this
vision. That is the question Turner placed before us. Do we wait
to be delivered? Or do we act, now. That is, as Huey P. Newton
reminds us, "revolutionary suicide." Ours must be an
existential quest, Can any of us adopt that as the Negro way of
life, this service to the people.
Speak not to me of leaders. Speak to me not
of priests and ritual practitioners and mindless habits. Speak
to me only of those who will take up the cross.
Let us speak of Will Francis Killing
Fiends & Monsters.
Let us speak of
Lucy Barrow, Revolutionary.
When
we speak of these I will have sign sufficient our thinking is where
it needs to be for us to win, to move the mountain, however
long it stands.
Miriam: You said it all, and so eloquently. Speak
also of Maria Stewart and Henry Highland Garnet. Speak of
Charles and Sarah Remond. Speak too of Harriet Tubman and
Alexander Crummell. All those ancestors who plowed the
field that now lies fallow.
Rudy: I am at a loss, Miriam. I know
only a couple of names from that list. And I do not know that
they represent the virtues at all that I symbolize in Will
Francis and Lucy Barrow. Harriet Tubman, yes. Who cannot
recognize her individual effort, without any prompting, without
any leader to guide her, acted to save lives, to set an
example of service. Maybe that's true of Crummell, that
individual effort.
But for me Crummell carries too much weight
of the prejudices of leadership. Wilson Moses admires him
and has written well of him. And Du Bois sought out his
greatness. Such men as Crummell come all too infrequent. They
are too good to be true. No, our salvation does not reside in
the exceptional. It is from among the uncommon common man and
woman, we will find our examples. That is where our hope
resides.
The land lies not fallow. We just do not have
hands enough to make the harvest.
posted 28 September 2005
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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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*
updated 6 October 2007
/ updated 28 March 2008 |
