The Huey P Newton Reader Related Entry. Newton. Above photo: Huey P. Newton, from Counterpunch. Newton : The Genius of Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide 'Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Huey Newton was a true revolutionary and visionary and it was displayed in this book.' ~ Aeryk Williams, artist.To those of us who were alive–and sentient, the name Huey P. Newton evokes an era of mass resistance, of Black popular protest and of the rise of revolutionary organizations across the land. To those of subsequent eras, youth in their 2. The Black Panther Party. To those of us now known as . Newton.***Huey Percy Newton was born in Louisiana in 1. LA Governor, Huey Pierce Long (1. The Kingfish”. Like many Blacks in California, Huey would carry the rhythms of the South in his speech, and when nervous, it would rise to a disconcerting twang. Perhaps this accounted for his self- consciousness, his wariness of speaking in public. His family, like tens of thousands of others, formed the last legs of the Great Migration, of Black flight from the Apartheid South to the North and the West. He would enter the streets of Oakland, a slender, short, beautiful boy, and the prospect terrified him. For while his father thought the name Huey was a respectful tribute to a gifted politician, to the hard, urban streets of Oakland, it was an invitation to an ass- whipping. A scared boy does what’s been done since the dawn of human time. He tells an older brother. Walter schooled him to attack the biggest guy in the pack, and how to prevail. Keyed by his fear, Huey would follow these directions explicitly. He would throw his fear of the biggest guy in the bunch, in the form of his fists, for big brother Walter taught him that the biggest guy often had the biggest fear–bigger that his own. He also learned that the best defense was often a stiff offense. The English poet, William Wordsworth (1. The child is father of the man.” Lessons learned in beardless youth became the matrix of the man he became. In describing his thinking at the time, Elaine Brown, his lover and political comrade, quoted him as saying: Every blood on that street was a potential threat, unless I knew he was a friend. After my first fights though, I recognized that they bled like me . How could this not mold the man?***He was also a petty thief who took, to say the least, an unusual path to perfect his craft. To succeed as a thief, Newton studied the California crimes code! He would later write: I first studied law to become a better burglar. Figuring I might get busted at any time and wanting to be ready when it happened, I bought some books on criminal law and burglary and felony and looked up as much as possible. I tried to find out what kind of evidence they needed, what things were actually considered violations of the law, what the loopholes were, and what you could do to avoid being charged at all. They had a law for everything. I studied the California Penal Code and books like California Criminal Evidence and California criminal Law by Frick and Alarcon, concentrating on those areas that were somewhat vague (Newton 2. Newton sought such vague laws because they could more easily be overturned as void for vagueness. Such street and legal study experiences would prove valuable in the years to come, for this was the early to middle . King were names known in Black communities nationwide. Black students kicked off 1. South that evoked ugly white violence. Before the year was out, over 7. By 1. 96. 1, “Freedom Rides” rolled through Southern states in protest to racial segregation, resulting in vicious violence by white racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. By 1. 96. 3, four Black girls were bombed in a Baptist church, in Birmingham (called . Soon, white and black civil rights workers would be murdered in Mississippi. As these events happened, a new invention called television carried these images into millions of Black homes across America. It especially rankled Blacks in the North, for most could remember Southern childhoods, and they knew–knew, in their bones, that, but for a chance bus ride North, or West, it could be them, their baby sister, their brothers or fathers who would’ve been brutalized, bombed or shot by the racists. The Watts Riots tore across the Southern California area on a hot night in August 1. Black drivers. For 5 nights, the ghetto burned. The petty crimes of Newton seemed petty indeed against such a backdrop of violence and terror, and the little guy who once looked at “bloods” on the street as threats, began focusing on new threats–armed men–armed white men, clad in blue. Cops, white cops, sneering cops. Cops hired from the American South. They rode through Oakland like gangsters in blue, harassing Blacks at will. These forces converged to energize and radicalize Black youth throughout the community, among the two Black students at a junior college in town. Two alumni of Merritt Jr College, having read the speeches of Malcolm X and the essays of Frantz Fanon (in The Wretched of the Earth), met to build a new, radical–indeed revolutionary–organization. Huey P. Seale would found the Black Panther Party for Self- Defense. From October 1st to the 1. Newton was 2. 4 years old, Seal was 3. Young men and women would join, and perhaps for the first time in their lives, study–not for a grade–but to learn about revolutionary ideas from struggles around the word: China, Cuba, Algeria, South Africa, Vietnam–and beyond. The BPP (it would later drop the . Where there were Black communities, there were Black militants, most moved by the masterful oratory and martyrdom of Malcolm X. These young brothers and sisters, mostly teenagers, formed the bulk of Black Panther membership. All of these brothers and sisters, thousands, across the nation, joined, in some degree, because of their admiration, respect, and for some, veneration of the Minister of Defense. Most, too, did not know him. They read of him, and fell in love; some with him; some with his amazing vision: a Black Panther Party. Because Newton was complex, so was his creation; it changed, constantly, as he changed and developed. From a Malcolmite, nationalist organization, to a revolutionary nationalist, to a revolutionary internationalist, to socialist, to Maoist, to what Newton termed an Inter- communalist. This was Newton’s theoretical construct; that, nations were but illusions, assemblies of flags, for in the presence of a global imperial power (such as the U. S); nations were, at best, communities. He believed that U. S economic power shattered sovereignties, for those who controlled foreign economies, actually controlled those states; the rest is subterfuge (Newton 1. In 1. 97. 2, Newton, using intercommunalist theory, predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. While traditional Marxists ridiculed Newton’s ideas, the Soviet Union shuttered its doors on Dec. Newton’s ignoble death on a street corner by a crack dealer. Complex, brilliant, self- taught, a Ph. D., fearless, full of fear, crazy, drug fiend, beautiful, mad–perhaps all of these epithets could, at times, describe the founder of the Black Panther Party. If Panthers could’ve worshiped him less, and loved him more, perhaps he could’ve survived; perhaps the Party would’ve survived. Perhaps.***A memory, if you will. The place? 1. 99. Your speaker is in discussion with acclaimed womanist writer, Alice Walker. We are lamenting the passing of Huey. They’d do anything to run him out!”“Run him out? I’d think he’d be the most popular professor on campus? Why do you think they’d run him out?”“You ain’t seen nothin’ til you’ve seen the politics in academia!”***Perhaps. But this was not to be. Yet, who could deny Newton’s brilliance, which is all the more remarkable because up until he entered 1. Huey tells an arresting tale of how his secret was uncovered. Like younger brothers, he looked up to his older brother, Melvin. And like most illiterates, he developed an extraordinary memory. When Melvin came home one day, he saw Huey reciting from one of his books. At first impressed, he turned and stunned the youth by declaring him illiterate. How had he known? The book held in Huey’s hands was upside- down. Huey, shamed, essentially taught himself to read using the power of his will. He therefore read slowly, but deeply, draining each word of its significance (Abu- Jamal 3- 5). Oddly enough, this may have proven an advantage of Newton’s over- traditional readers, who learn their basics in kindergarten or first, second grades. How so? Illiterates, as we’ve suggested, devote a significant amount of mental energy to memorize important data, especially to avoid the shame of discovery. One must by sheer necessity, develop a way of knowing that is based on hearing and retaining data that early writers and readers never actualize. Moreover, illiterates must develop original ways of seeing and interpreting and categorizing the world. For unlike your literate colleagues, you are unable to relay and store data on a page; you must store data on your internal mental template–and then develop the machinery for retrieval. Such a person seems, in a sense, a freer thinker, able to question, make sense of, and define the world in one’s own way. And all of this must be done under the constant psychological stress and presence of discovery, which evokes shame. This may account for Huey’s intensity, and his constant inability to speak before large audiences, which must have seemed unbearable. By the same token, once it was discovered that Huey was illiterate, he used considerable mental energy to learn, to essentially teach himself that hidden art. Such a process must have released enormous forces that could now be devoted to belated learning, cognition and retention. Co- founder Bobby Seale wrote that Newton read the book, The Wretched of the Earth by revolutionary psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, some 6 times (Seale 2. This text, translated from Fanon’s native French, is a difficult work for any reader. One thinks it deeply informed Newton on concepts of decolonization, anti- imperialism, Arab independence movements, torture and its resultant traumas, both upon the tortured and the torturer. It also was a primer on revolutionary violence–how the oppressed must confront the oppressor. Newton. To those of us who were alive–and sentient, the name Huey P. Newton evokes an era of mass resistance, of Black popular protest and of the rise of revolutionary organizations across the land. To those of subsequent eras, youth in their 2. The Black Panther Party. To those of us now known as . Newton.***Huey Percy Newton was born in Louisiana in 1. LA Governor, Huey Pierce Long (1. The Kingfish”. Like many Blacks in California, Huey would carry the rhythms of the South in his speech, and when nervous, it would rise to a disconcerting twang. Perhaps this accounted for his self- consciousness, his wariness of speaking in public. His family, like tens of thousands of others, formed the last legs of the Great Migration, of Black flight from the Apartheid South to the North and the West. He would enter the streets of Oakland, a slender, short, beautiful boy, and the prospect terrified him. For while his father thought the name Huey was a respectful tribute to a gifted politician, to the hard, urban streets of Oakland, it was an invitation to an ass- whipping. A scared boy does what’s been done since the dawn of human time. He tells an older brother. Walter schooled him to attack the biggest guy in the pack, and how to prevail. Keyed by his fear, Huey would follow these directions explicitly. He would throw his fear of the biggest guy in the bunch, in the form of his fists, for big brother Walter taught him that the biggest guy often had the biggest fear–bigger that his own. He also learned that the best defense was often a stiff offense. The English poet, William Wordsworth (1. The child is father of the man.” Lessons learned in beardless youth became the matrix of the man he became. In describing his thinking at the time, Elaine Brown, his lover and political comrade, quoted him as saying: Every blood on that street was a potential threat, unless I knew he was a friend. After my first fights though, I recognized that they bled like me . As a direct consequence of these street battles, the young Newton boy earns a rather unflattering nickname: “Crazy Huey.” One can almost hear this Greek chorus, whispered with a mix of fear and fascination: . How could this not mold the man?***He was also a petty thief who took, to say the least, an unusual path to perfect his craft. To succeed as a thief, Newton studied the California crimes code! He would later write: I first studied law to become a better burglar. Figuring I might get busted at any time and wanting to be ready when it happened, I bought some books on criminal law and burglary and felony and looked up as much as possible. I tried to find out what kind of evidence they needed, what things were actually considered violations of the law, what the loopholes were, and what you could do to avoid being charged at all. They had a law for everything. I studied the California Penal Code and books like California Criminal Evidence and California criminal Law by Frick and Alarcon, concentrating on those areas that were somewhat vague. Newton sought such vague laws because they could more easily be overturned as void for vagueness. Such street and legal study experiences would prove valuable in the years to come, for this was the early to middle . King were names known in Black communities nationwide. Black students kicked off 1. South that evoked ugly white violence. Before the year was out, over 7. By 1. 96. 1, “Freedom Rides” rolled through Southern states in protest to racial segregation, resulting in vicious violence by white racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. By 1. 96. 3, four Black girls were bombed in a Baptist church, in Birmingham (called . Soon, white and black civil rights workers would be murdered in Mississippi. As these events happened, a new invention called television carried these images into millions of Black homes across America. It especially rankled Blacks in the North, for most could remember Southern childhoods, and they knew–knew, in their bones, that, but for a chance bus ride North, or West, it could be them, their baby sister, their brothers or fathers who would’ve been brutalized, bombed or shot by the racists. The Watts Riots tore across the Southern California area on a hot night in August 1. Black drivers. For 5 nights, the ghetto burned. The petty crimes of Newton seemed petty indeed against such a backdrop of violence and terror, and the little guy who once looked at “bloods” on the street as threats, began focusing on new threats–armed men–armed white men, clad in blue. Cops, white cops, sneering cops. Cops hired from the American South. They rode through Oakland like gangsters in blue, harassing Blacks at will. These forces converged to energize and radicalize Black youth throughout the community, among the two Black students at a junior college in town. Two alumni of Merritt Jr College, having read the speeches of Malcolm X and the essays of Frantz Fanon (in The Wretched of the Earth), met to build a new, radical–indeed revolutionary–organization. Huey P. Seale would found the Black Panther Party for Self- Defense. From October 1st to the 1. Newton was 2. 4 years old, Seal was 3. Young men and women would join, and perhaps for the first time in their lives, study–not for a grade–but to learn about revolutionary ideas from struggles around the word: China, Cuba, Algeria, South Africa, Vietnam–and beyond. The BPP (it would later drop the . Where there were Black communities, there were Black militants, most moved by the masterful oratory and martyrdom of Malcolm X. These young brothers and sisters, mostly teenagers, formed the bulk of Black Panther membership. All of these brothers and sisters, thousands, across the nation, joined, in some degree, because of their admiration, respect, and for some, veneration of the Minister of Defense. Most, too, did not know him. They read of him, and fell in love; some with him; some with his amazing vision: a Black Panther Party. Because Newton was complex, so was his creation; it changed, constantly, as he changed and developed. From a Malcolmite, nationalist organization, to a revolutionary nationalist, to a revolutionary internationalist, to socialist, to Maoist, to what Newton termed an Inter- communalist. This was Newton’s theoretical construct; that, nations were but illusions, assemblies of flags, for in the presence of a global imperial power (such as the U. S); nations were, at best, communities. He believed that U. S economic power shattered sovereignties, for those who controlled foreign economies, actually controlled those states; the rest is subterfuge. In 1. 97. 2, Newton, using inter- communalist theory, predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. While traditional Marxists ridiculed Newton’s ideas, the Soviet Union shuttered its doors on Dec. Newton’s ignoble death on a street corner by a crack dealer. Complex, brilliant, self- taught, a Ph. D., fearless, full of fear, crazy, drug fiend, beautiful, mad–perhaps all of these epithets could, at times, describe the founder of the Black Panther Party. If Panthers could’ve worshiped him less, and loved him more, perhaps he could’ve survived; perhaps the Party would’ve survived. Perhaps.***A memory, if you will. The place? 1. 99. Your speaker is in discussion with acclaimed womanist writer, Alice Walker. We are lamenting the passing of Huey. They’d do anything to run him out!”“Run him out? I’d think he’d be the most popular professor on campus? Why do you think they’d run him out?”“You ain’t seen nothin’ til you’ve seen the politics in academia!”***Perhaps. But this was not to be. Yet, who could deny Newton’s brilliance, which is all the more remarkable because up until he entered 1. Huey tells an arresting tale of how his secret was uncovered. Like younger brothers, he looked up to his older brother, Melvin. And like most illiterates, he developed an extraordinary memory. When Melvin came home one day, he saw Huey reciting from one of his books. At first impressed, he turned and stunned the youth by declaring him illiterate. How had he known? The book held in Huey’s hands was upside- down. Huey, shamed, essentially taught himself to read using the power of his will. He therefore read slowly, but deeply, draining each word of its significance. Oddly enough, this may have proven an advantage of Newton’s over- traditional readers, who learn their basics in kindergarten or first, second grades. How so? Illiterates, as we’ve suggested, devote a significant amount of mental energy to memorize important data, especially to avoid the shame of discovery. One must by sheer necessity, develop a way of knowing that is based on hearing and retaining data that early writers and readers never actualize. Moreover, illiterates must develop original ways of seeing and interpreting and categorizing the world. For unlike your literate colleagues, you are unable to relay and store data on a page; you must store data on your internal mental template–and then develop the machinery for retrieval. Such a person seems, in a sense, a freer thinker, able to question, make sense of, and define the world in one’s own way. And all of this must be done under the constant psychological stress and presence of discovery, which evokes shame. This may account for Huey’s intensity, and his constant inability to speak before large audiences, which must have seemed unbearable. By the same token, once it was discovered that Huey was illiterate, he used considerable mental energy to learn, to essentially teach himself that hidden art. Such a process must have released enormous forces that could now be devoted to belated learning, cognition and retention. Co- founder Bobby Seale wrote that Newton read the book, The Wretched of the Earth by revolutionary psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, some 6 times (Seale 2. This text, translated from Fanon’s native French, is a difficult work for any reader. One thinks it deeply informed Newton on concepts of decolonization, anti- imperialism, Arab independence movements, torture and its resultant traumas, both upon the tortured and the torturer. Newton – Carib Flame. Photo: Counterpunch. The Genius of Huey P. Newton. To those of us who were alive. Newton evokes an era of mass resistance, of Black popular protest and of the rise of revolutionary organizations across the land. To those of subsequent eras, youth in their 2. The Black Panther Party. To those of us now known as . Newton. Huey Percy Newton was born in Louisiana in 1. LA Governor, Huey Pierce Long (1. Perhaps this accounted for his self- consciousness, his wariness of speaking in public. His family, like tens of thousands of others, formed the last legs of the Great Migration, of Black flight from the Apartheid South to the North and the West. He would enter the streets of Oakland, a slender, short, beautiful boy, and the prospect terrified him. For while his father thought the name Huey was a respectful tribute to a gifted politician, to the hard, urban streets of Oakland, it was an invitation to an ass- whipping. A scared boy does what. He tells an older brother. Walter schooled him to attack the biggest guy in the pack, and how to prevail. Keyed by his fear, Huey would follow these directions explicitly. He would throw his fear of the biggest guy in the bunch, in the form of his fists, for big brother Walter taught him that the biggest guy often had the biggest fear. He also learned that the best defense was often a stiff offense. The English poet, William Wordsworth (1. After my first fights though, I recognized that they bled like me . How could this not mold the man? He was also a petty thief who took, to say the least, an unusual path to perfect his craft. To succeed as a thief, Newton studied the California crimes code! He would later write: I first studied law to become a better burglar. Figuring I might get busted at any time and wanting to be ready when it happened, I bought some books on criminal law and burglary and felony and looked up as much as possible. I tried to find out what kind of evidence they needed, what things were actually considered violations of the law, what the loopholes were, and what you could do to avoid being charged at all. They had a law for everything. I studied the California Penal Code and books like California Criminal Evidence and California criminal Law by Frick and Alarcon, concentrating on those areas that were somewhat vague (Newton 2. Newton sought such vague laws because they could more easily be overturned as void for vagueness. Such street and legal study experiences would prove valuable in the years to come, for this was the early to middle . King were names known in Black communities nationwide. Black students kicked off 1. South that evoked ugly white violence. Before the year was out, over 7. Soon, white and black civil rights workers would be murdered in Mississippi. As these events happened, a new invention called television carried these images into millions of Black homes across America. It especially rankled Blacks in the North, for most could remember Southern childhoods, and they knew. For 5 nights, the ghetto burned. The petty crimes of Newton seemed petty indeed against such a backdrop of violence and terror, and the little guy who once looked at . Cops hired from the American South. They rode through Oakland like gangsters in blue, harassing Blacks at will. These forces converged to energize and radicalize Black youth throughout the community, among the two Black students at a junior college in town. Two alumni of Merritt Jr College, having read the speeches of Malcolm X and the essays of Frantz Fanon (in The Wretched of the Earth), met to build a new, radical. Seale would found the Black Panther Party for Self- Defense. From October 1st to the 1. Newton was 2. 4 years old, Seal was 3. Young men and women would join, and perhaps for the first time in their lives, study. Where there were Black communities, there were Black militants, most moved by the masterful oratory and martyrdom of Malcolm X. These young brothers and sisters, mostly teenagers, formed the bulk of Black Panther membership. All of these brothers and sisters, thousands, across the nation, joined, in some degree, because of their admiration, respect, and for some, veneration of the Minister of Defense. Most, too, did not know him. They read of him, and fell in love; some with him; some with his amazing vision: a Black Panther Party. Because Newton was complex, so was his creation; it changed, constantly, as he changed and developed. From a Malcolmite, nationalist organization, to a revolutionary nationalist, to a revolutionary internationalist, to socialist, to Maoist, to what Newton termed an Inter- communalist. This was Newton. 1. While traditional Marxists ridiculed Newton. Newton. Perhaps. A memory, if you will. The place? 1. 99. Your speaker is in discussion with acclaimed womanist writer, Alice Walker. We are lamenting the passing of Huey. Why do you think they. But this was not to be. Yet, who could deny Newton. Like younger brothers, he looked up to his older brother, Melvin. And like most illiterates, he developed an extraordinary memory. When Melvin came home one day, he saw Huey reciting from one of his books. At first impressed, he turned and stunned the youth by declaring him illiterate. How had he known? The book held in Huey. He therefore read slowly, but deeply, draining each word of its significance (Abu- Jamal 3- 5). Oddly enough, this may have proven an advantage of Newton? One must by sheer necessity, develop a way of knowing that is based on hearing and retaining data that early writers and readers never actualize. Moreover, illiterates must develop original ways of seeing and interpreting and categorizing the world. For unlike your literate colleagues, you are unable to relay and store data on a page; you must store data on your internal mental template. Such a process must have released enormous forces that could now be devoted to belated learning, cognition and retention. Co- founder Bobby Seale wrote that Newton read the book, The Wretched of the Earth by revolutionary psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, some 6 times (Seale 2. This text, translated from Fanon. One thinks it deeply informed Newton on concepts of decolonization, anti- imperialism, Arab independence movements, torture and its resultant traumas, both upon the tortured and the torturer. It also was a primer on revolutionary violence? The concept of Black America as a colony and White America as the Mother Country can be explained by Fanon. As it was written by a Black man actively engaged in a North African revolutionary endeavor, it took on an added sheen and influence. Indeed, Fanon. He found the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1. The Will to Power and Beyond Good and Evil, especially influential. While not citing him explicitly, as early as 1. Party. But it is incorrect to seek power over people. We have been subjected to the dehumanizing power of exploitation and racism for hundreds of years; and the Black community has its will to power also. What we seek, however, is not power over people, but the power of control of our own destiny. Indeed, he was more Nietzschean than Marxist, for he often criticized Marxism as dogmatic. Marxism was a way; Nietzscheism was objective underlying the way: power. Yet Nietzsche, unlike Fanon or Chairman Mao, was not required reading. Elaine Brown writes that, at Huey. I saw the questions as the local leadership cadres came trooping to Oakland from as far away as Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago for bi- monthly, two- day learning sessions led by Huey. Where was the stuff about the pigs, they seemed to ask, as we studied with not only Mao and Marx but Aristotle and Plato. Where was the stuff about urban guerrilla warfare? Their expressions conveyed, as Huey led us in discussions of the philosophies of Rousseau and Kant, . I saw their faces when we examined and questioned the theories of capitalism and socialism and communism. Huey asking whether our systematic use of the tests of dialectical materialism meant anything. If, under a dialectical materialist analysis, nothing ? Newton was, by necessity, a man of action, but he was always also a man of ideas. He was so as an illiterate; he became more so when he began to read and added exponentially to his storehouse of ideas. As a dialectical materialist, he knew that everything was in a state of flux; that change was the only constant. As a Nietzschean, he knew that only power could influence that change, and direct it along its desired course. One needed the will to power. Huey had no shortage of that quality. When he went to prison, he knew every Panther in California, for he or Bobby had recruited him (or her). When he was freed on appeal in 1. There were Panthers in Boston, Harlem, Philadelphia and Detroit. He didn. She loves, she caresses, and she moves on, creating new days, new possibilities, and new realities. Dr. Newton dared to struggle; and inspired millions to also fight against a twisted, broken, racist system. He built an organization that rattled the cages of oppressed and oppressor alike. Then, like the true Nietzschean he was, he shattered it into a thousand pieces. He lived. He died. But most of all, he rebelled.
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