Huey P. Newton

Huey Percy Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, on the seventeenth of February 1942, the youngest of seven children. The family moved to Oakland, California, when he was three. He graduated high school nearly illiterate; he taught himself to read by studying Plato's Republic on his own.

He met Bobby Seale at Merritt College in 1962. In October 1966 the two co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland. The Panthers' founding ten-point platform — drafted by Newton — articulated a programmatic Black socialism that combined armed self-defense, community service (the breakfast programs, the free medical clinics, the legal-aid offices), and explicit alignment with global anti-imperialist movements.

Newton was Minister of Defense. He took a bullet to the stomach in a confrontation with two Oakland police officers in October 1967 that left one officer dead and the other wounded. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 1968, freed in 1970 after the conviction was overturned, and emerged from prison to find the party he had co-founded — now under FBI COINTELPRO assault — fractured between his West Coast leadership and Eldridge Cleaver's international faction. He spent the 1970s rebuilding the party as a community-service organization centered on Oakland.

He took a doctorate in social philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1980. His dissertation analyzed the FBI's war on the Panthers using newly released FOIA documents. He was, by his late thirties, the only American Black Power founder to hold an earned doctorate.

He was shot and killed on West Street in Oakland on the twenty-second of August 1989 by a drug dealer named Tyrone Robinson. He was forty-seven. The drug addiction that had taken hold of him in the late 1970s had returned in his last years.

He is honored here as the philosopher who founded the Black Panther Party and lived to write its history.