Newton’s political formation came amid the new nationalist militancy of the early 1960s, but the primary period examined here is a very brief historical window, a mere six years, from the establishment of the party in 1966 to Newton’s pronouncement in 1972 that the party was “putting down the gun” and finding ways to work within the American system. His rhetoric and political courage inspired thousands to stand against war, racism, and imperialism, and yet at other moments he succumbed to personal acts of brutality and self-destruction. The combined weight of heightened police repression and his own paranoia fueled Newton’s addiction and reprehensible behavior. The international campaign to win his freedom had made Newton a powerful symbol of the organization, but in many ways the party had outgrown his command, and others vied for influence beyond the Bay Area. Following his release, Newton struggled to integrate back into party life. Like the broader movement he gave birth to, Newton’s life was at various turns inspirational and tragic. The early propaganda photo of Newton seated on a wicker throne with a carbine rifle in one hand and a spear in the other captured the spirit of the age and continues to haunt popular memory and lore of the 1960s, decades after he was gunned down at only forty-seven years of age during a drug dispute in 1989. Edgar Hoover, the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” If the Black Panther Party was the most iconic organization of the Black Power era, Newton was easily its most popular, recognizable figure. In a few short years the Black Panther Party had grown from a local organization created to confront police brutality on the streets of Oakland and Richmond, California, to, as Students for a Democratic Society put it, the “vanguard of the black revolution” and, in the eyes of Federal Bureau of Investigation director and arch-anticommunist J. Newton’s withering critique of Wilkins’s ideological capitulation and hypocrisy came at the height of the Panthers’ popularity. While we feed and clothe the poor at home we must meet and attack the oppressor wherever he may be found.” “We are internationalists because our struggle must proceed on many fronts. “Black People in America have long been affected in a negative way by America’s war of imperialism,” Newton wrote. Newton charged that Wilkins’s criticisms reflected his “obvious class interests and identification with the ruling circle” and belied his commitment to a reactionary internationalism, namely his support for Israel.
Huey p. newton more people free#
In his response to Wilkins’s accusation of misplaced priorities, Newton defended the party’s domestic survival programs: free breakfast for schoolchildren, free health clinics and sickle-cell anemia screenings, free clothing and shoes, loans to welfare mothers, and bus trips for the families of prison inmates. And yet, in contrast to the popular image of the fiery Black Power orator, Newton was charming but soft-spoken, and his public speeches were delivered in a nasal, breathless tone and a more deliberative manner than the soaring rhetoric of his contemporaries like Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael. Young and defiant, he was the physical embodiment of the new militancy that contrasted sharply with Wilkins’s graying demeanor and bourgeois comportment. Wanting to bask in his newfound freedom, Newton took off his shirt, revealing a taut frame, the reward of a punishing jailhouse regimen of push-ups. When he emerged from prison a month earlier, Newton addressed his supporters from atop the hood of a car. But Huey, for all his talents, is also a revolutionary. It was the resentment over this treatment that led, at least in part, to the founding of the Black Panthers. Of course, Huey knows about this suffering. “The Viet Cong may be hurting,” Wilkins wrote, “but nothing like the hurting of John Q. Wilkins saw Black Power militancy as cynical and misguided. Newton cofounded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense with Bobby Seale in 1966 and had recently been released on a technicality after spending thirty-three months in prison for the killing of Oakland police officer John Frey.
Newton for urging the formation of an all-black fighting unit to assist the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. In August 1970, Roy Wilkins, the sexagenarian leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), used his syndicated column to criticize Huey P. Newton (Wikimedia Commons/Richard Aoki Collection) Huey Newton’s shifting political analysis illuminates both the limits and the ongoing relevance of the radicalism of the Black Panther era.
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