Huey P. Newton

Huey Percy Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1942, the youngest child of Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, a sharecropper and Baptist preacher. The family left Louisiana for Oakland, California, part of the second wave of the Great Migration, to escape the violence of the South. They were close-knit and poor and moved often around the Bay Area. Newton later said he was made to feel ashamed of being Black, and he described Oakland's public schools as a place where no teacher taught him anything relevant to his own life. He wrote that the schools nearly killed his urge to inquire and left him with "despair and futility." He graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1959 while functionally illiterate. He gained real literacy afterward, with his brother Melvin reading him poetry and with repeated readings of Plato's Republic. Newton later told a court that the Republic taught him to read, and he recalled that afterward he started "questioning everything," above all what was happening in his own family and neighborhood. That recovery of his own mind runs through everything he later did. He treated education, information and theory as things that oppressed people must produce for themselves.

He studied at Merritt College, earning an associate degree in 1966, and attended San Francisco Law School. He read widely in philosophy, Marxism, Third World and Black radical theory, sociology, psychology and literature. In October 1966 he and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and Newton became its principal strategist and tactician. He helped write the Ten-Point Program and argued for collective self-defense, including the early armed patrols of the Oakland police that he conducted with a shotgun and a lawbook in hand. The combination mattered: the law and the party's reading of it were part of the method. Eldridge Cleaver's 1970 introduction to a volume of Newton's essays describes a leader who insisted on a party newspaper because a party needs a voice, who searched for the exact word until the language could be understood by ordinary people, and who wrote about problems he was struggling with in organizing. Cleaver is a partisan witness, so the portrait is useful as an account of method rather than neutral judgment. At its height the party had 68 chapters in the United States, and it built international ties from Algeria to China. Newton faced serious criminal charges, including a trial for the killing of a police officer, and he spent time in prison and solitary confinement during this period. He was not convicted of the homicides. He was later convicted of weapons and embezzlement offenses, and he was accused of rape, for which he was not convicted.

Newton's thought moved from national liberation toward a theory of a changed world. In a message sent from Los Padres in September 1969 to the Republic of New Africa, he said the party regarded Black people as colonized, more than any other group except perhaps Native Americans. He also said Americans in general were colonized by a small ruling class that owned the means of production, and that the ruling class used divide and conquer on the white working class, who were also unfree. In 1970, two months after leaving solitary confinement, and after a pledge of Panther troops to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam drew a backlash from much of the Black community, he developed intercommunalism. He introduced it on September 5, 1970, at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, then spoke to about 3,000 people at Boston College on November 18, 1970. In February 1971 he took part in a joint talk with the psychologist Erik Erikson at Yale and in Oakland, later published as In Search of Common Ground. His claim was that a new kind of imperialism had changed how the world was structured, so liberation could not stay inside national frames. The thesis ran from imperialism to "reactionary intercommunalism," then "revolutionary intercommunalism," and on to pure communism and anarchy, with each concept needing redefinition. Newton conceded that most listeners found it hard going. The theory is best read as an account of the world and an attempt at strategy for the decades ahead.

After 1971, when he met Premier Zhou Enlai in China, Newton turned to sustained study. He completed his bachelor's degree at UC Santa Cruz in 1974, the year he fled temporarily to Cuba and the year the text titled "Intercommunalism" was assembled. He earned his PhD in the History of Consciousness in 1980. From 1972 to about 1980 he worked on problems such as the global decentralization of production and the feasibility of revolutionary expropriations ("The Technology Question," "Technology vs. Land"). He also pursued anthropology, evolutionary biology and psychology for a book on deceit and self-deception that was never finished, and in 1982 he published a related article with the biologist Robert Trivers. His other late writings include "Utopia: Universal Life Energy," "The Mind is Flesh," and "Eve, the Mother of all Living." In the late 1970s he wrote a materialist reading of early Christian history, apparently for the party's Son of Man Temple. His autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, records his own account of his life. He was murdered by gunshot in Oakland in 1989, at age 47. A fair account holds together his intellectual range, his organizing achievements and the legal and ethical controversies of his leadership.