Huey Newton

His father Walter was a sharecropper and a Baptist preacher in Monroe, Louisiana, and he named his youngest son after Huey Long. The family left Ouachita Parish for Oakland in the second wave of the Great Migration, moved often around the Bay Area, and were poor without ever going hungry. Newton was arrested several times as a teenager, at 14 for gun possession and vandalism. He graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1959 functionally illiterate, and wrote later that not one teacher in those years had told him anything that connected to his own life. His older brother Melvin read him poetry. He learned to read by grinding through Plato's Republic, and told a jury years afterward that this was how it happened.

In October 1966 he and Bobby Seale started the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, on a casual split: Seale chairman, Newton minister of defense. Under him the party ran more than 60 community programs, from breakfasts and clinics to sickle cell screening and an ambulance service, and a newspaper among the most widely circulated Black papers in America. He was tried three times over an Oakland officer's death and the charges were finally dropped. BriefHistory has the party, the program, and what the government did to break it. This page is about the man it could not hold.

By the 1970s he was using cocaine heavily and the accusations mounted. In August 1974 a 17-year-old Oakland woman, Kathleen Smith, was shot and died three months later. The prosecutor believed Newton shot her after she called him Baby, a childhood name he hated. The same year he was arrested for pistol-whipping his tailor over the price of a suit. He posted bond and fled to Havana, leaving Elaine Brown to run the party. In 1977 three Panthers went to kill the main witness against him, attacked the wrong house, and one of the men involved was later found paralyzed in a shallow grave outside Las Vegas. Newton denied knowing anything and blamed overzealous members. Two juries hung on the Smith case and it was dropped. In 2007 Ericka Huggins said he had repeatedly raped her and threatened her children.

He took a doctorate in social philosophy at Santa Cruz in 1980, on the federal campaign against his own party. In 1982 he was accused of embezzling 600,000 dollars of state money from the Oakland Community School, dissolved the Panthers, and in March 1989 pleaded no contest to cashing one 15,000-dollar check. On August 22, 1989, Tyrone Robinson shot him dead on 9th Street in West Oakland. Robinson drew 32 years to life and said he did it to move up in the Black Guerrilla Family and get a crack franchise. Thirteen hundred people filled Allen Temple Baptist Church. Oakland put a bust of him near the corner in 2021 and renamed the block Dr. Huey P. Newton Way.

Huey Newton's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Ten-Point Program other
  Written with Bobby Seale. The party's statement of what it wanted and why. 1966
• The Black Panther other
  The party newspaper he co-founded, among the most widely circulated Black papers in the country 1967
• Free Breakfast for Children Program other
  The best known of more than 60 party survival programs 1969
• Oakland Community School company
  Schooling for 150 children from the poorest parts of the city 1973
• Revolutionary Suicide book
  His autobiography 1973
• War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America book
  His doctoral dissertation at UC Santa Cruz 1980

• 1959 aged ~17 Graduates from Oakland Technical High School unable to read He taught himself afterward, working through Plato's Republic.
• 1966 aged ~24 Earns an associate degree at Merritt College He helped get the college's first African-American history course adopted.
• October 1966 aged 24 Founds the Black Panther Party for Self Defense with Bobby Seale
• October 28, 1967 aged 25 A pre-dawn traffic stop ends with officer John Frey dead and Newton wounded Convicted of manslaughter in 1968, reversed in 1970, dropped after two hung juries.
• August 6, 1974 aged 32 Kathleen Smith is shot in Oakland She died three months later. Newton was tried twice and never convicted.
• 1974 aged ~32 Flees to Havana with Gwen Fontaine Elaine Brown ran the party until his return in 1977.
• 1980 aged ~38 Completes a PhD at UC Santa Cruz The dissertation studied the federal campaign against the Panthers.
• March 1989 aged 47 Pleads no contest to cashing a 15,000-dollar state check Six months in jail and 18 months of probation. The larger embezzlement charges were dropped.
• August 22, 1989 aged 47 Shot dead in West Oakland at 47 Tyrone Robinson was convicted of first-degree murder in 1991.

• Huey Long 1893–1935
  Louisiana governor and senator whose Share Our Wealth program pressured New Deal policy before his assassination. namesake
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. directed the campaign against the party
• Jim Jones 1931–1978
  Peoples Temple founder whose 1978 Jonestown murder-suicide killed over nine hundred followers. supported by phone at Jonestown
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. governor of California during the party's rise
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. earlier author of the argument he inherited