Huey P. Newton | Biography

Huey P. Newton changed the face of African-American political activism in the late 1960s. Departing from the tactics of the nonviolent civil rights movement, Newton created a bold confrontational style for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers, as they were commonly known, fought for social justice, opposed police brutality and racism, yet also waged gun battles with local and federal law enforcement. During their height between 1967-1972, the Panthers had chapters in major U.S. cities and a membership estimated between two and five thousand. They frequently captured headlines, with Newton, as co-founder, often the focal point. His ideas, swagger, and eloquence brought him acclaim even as his ongoing legal problems brought notoriety. Repeated arrests, murder trials, and even flight abroad from the law took their toll, as did a secret federal effort to destroy his organization.

Huey Percy Newton was born on February 17, 1942, in Monroe, Louisiana, the seventh son of a sharecropper who once narrowly escaped being lynched. Moving to Oakland as a boy and growing up in poverty, Newton was functionally illiterate until he taught himself to read as a teenager. He attended Merritt College in Oakland and the San Francisco School of Law. In 1966, he met Bobby Seale, who also wanted to combat social problems facing African Americans. Pragmatically minded, they formed the Panthers to seek solutions through politics, law, and economic self-reliance. One problem they tried to fight immediately was the prevalence of white police brutality in predominantly black Oakland neighborhoods: they raced to arrest scenes and read suspects their rights from law books.

As the party grew, notoriety followed. Panther members toted loaded shotguns to arrest scenes and even into the California state legislature to protest gun control. Carrying weapons in public was legal at that time under state law. But as clashes with police arose, gunfire was exchanged. In 1967, following the death of a police officer, Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sent to prison. His imprisonment became a rallying point for African American and white youth under the popular slogan, "Free Huey!" His organization became famous in radical politics, winning support from white celebrities like Jane Fonda and Leonard Bernstein. At the same time, according to a U.S. Senate subcommittee report issued in 1976, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) spent millions of dollars infiltrating, destabilizing, and nearly destroying the Panthers at the loss of life to several members.

When his conviction was overturned in 1972, Newton pledged to remake the Panthers as a nonviolent organization. He led the Panthers in distributing food and social services to impoverished African Americans, but the organization disintegrated over the next decade. Charged with murder again in 1974, he fled to Cuba, and after returning in 1977 two trials ended in hung juries. In 1980, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz. But in early 1989 he pleaded no contest to misappropriating public funds and, on August 22, 1989, was shot to death on an Oakland street.