biography huey p newton

Huey P. Newton

Activist Huey P. Newton founded the militant Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale in 1966.

We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back.

Who Was Huey P. Newton?

Quick facts, early life and education, creation of black panthers, arrest and conviction, later years and death, movies and more about huey p. newton.

In 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the left-wing Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. The organization was central to the Black Power movement, making headlines with its controversial rhetoric and militaristic style. Newton faced a number of criminal charges over the years and, at one point, fled to Cuba before returning to the United States and earning his doctorate. Struggling with drug and alcohol addiction in his later years, he was shot to death in August 1989 at age 47.

FULL NAME: Huey Percy Newton BORN: February 17, 1942 DIED: August 22, 1989 BIRTHPLACE: Monroe, Louisiana ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Huey Percy Newton was born on February 17, 1942, in Monroe, Louisiana. The youngest of seven siblings, he and his family moved to Oakland, California, when Huey was a toddler. Although later stating he was close to his family, the youngster had a difficult time early in life, which was reflected in highly erratic behavior at school and on the streets.

As a teenager, Huey faced multiple suspensions and run-ins with the law. But he began to take his education seriously after his older brother Melvin earned a master’s degree in social work. Although Huey graduated high school in 1959, he was considered barely literate. He nonetheless became his own teacher, learning to read by himself.

In the mid-1960s, Huey decided to pursue his education at Merritt College, during which time he received a months-long prison term for a knife assault, and later attended the University of San Francisco School of Law.

Merritt College was where Newton met Bobby Seale . The two were briefly involved with political groups at the school before they set out to create one of their own.

Founded in 1966, they called their group the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Unlike many of the other social and political organizers of the time, they took a more militant stance to the plight of Black communities in America. A famous photograph shows Newton, the group’s minister of defense, holding a gun in one hand and a spear in the other.

The group set forth its political goals in a document entitled the Ten-Point Program , which called for better housing, jobs, and education for Black Americans. It also called for an end to economic exploitation of Black communities, along with military exemption.

The organization wasn’t afraid to punctuate its message with dramatic appearances. For example, to protest a gun bill in 1967, members of the Panthers entered the California Legislature armed. (Newton wasn’t actually present at the demonstration.) The action was a shocking one that made news across the country, and Newton emerged as a leading figure in the Black militant movement.

The Black Panthers wanted to improve life in Black communities and took a stance against police brutality in urban neighborhoods by mostly white cops. Members of the group would go to arrests in progress and watch for abuse. Panthers ultimately clashed with police several times. The party’s treasurer, Bobby Hutton, was killed while still a teenager during one of these conflicts in 1968.

Newton himself was arrested the previous year for allegedly killing an Oakland police officer during a traffic stop. He was later convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to two to 15 years in prison. But public pressure—“Free Huey” became a popular slogan of the day—helped Newton’s cause. He was freed in 1970 after an appeals process deemed that incorrect deliberation procedures had been implemented during the trial.

In the 1970s, Newton aimed to take the Panthers in a new direction that emphasized democratic socialism, community interconnectedness, and services for the poor, including free lunch programs and urban clinics. But the Panthers began to fall apart due to factionalism, with later allegations surfacing that the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover , was clandestinely involved in the organization’s unraveling. Key members left while Newton and Eldridge Cleaver , the party’s minister of information, split ways.

By mid-decade, Newton faced more criminal charges when he was accused of murdering a 17-year-old sex worker and assaulting a tailor. To avoid prosecution, he fled to Cuba in 1974 but returned to the United States three years later. The murder case was eventually dismissed after two trials ended with deadlocked juries. The tailor’s refusal to testify in court brought an end to the assault charges.

Even with his legal troubles, Newton returned to school, earning his doctorate in social philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1980. In his final years, however, he suffered from major drug and alcohol problems and faced more prison time for weapons possession, financial misappropriations, and parole violations.

The once popular revolutionary died on August 22, 1989, in Oakland, California, after being shot on the street. Newton was 47 years old at his death.

Newton had published a memoir/manifesto Revolutionary Suicide in 1973, with Hugh Pearson later writing the 1994 biography The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America .

Newton’s story was later depicted in the 1996 one-man play Huey P. Newton , starring Roger Guenveur Smith. A 2002 filmed presentation of the project was created by Spike Lee , and documentarian Stanley Nelson looked at the history of the Panthers in the 2015 movie The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution .

Most recently, Apple TV+ backed a limited series about Newton’s escape to Cuba in 1974 called The Big Cigar . It depicts the fake movie production, backed by real-life producer Bert Schneider, that provided the activist’s cover to leave the United States.

• The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
• Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.
• I do not expect the white media to create positive Black male images.
• We’ve never advocated violence, violence is inflicted upon us. But we do believe in self-defense for ourselves and for black people.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Civil Rights Activists

Ethel Kennedy

MLK Almost Didn’t Say “I Have a Dream”

Martin Luther King Jr. Didn’t Criticize Malcolm X

5 Crowning Achievements of Maya Angelou

30 Civil Rights Leaders of the Past and Present

Benjamin Banneker

Marcus Garvey

Madam C.J. Walker

Maya Angelou

Martin Luther King Jr.

African American Heritage

Huey P. Newton (February 17, 1942- August 22, 1989)

Photo of Huey P. Newton seated in a rattan chair by Blair Stapp ( Library of Congress )

Huey Percy Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana. His parents moved to Oakland, California during Newton’s childhood. He graduated from high school without having acquired literacy, but he later taught himself to read. He attended a variety of schools including Merritt College before eventually earning a Bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz. During his tenure at Merritt College, Newton joined the Afro-American Association and helped get the first African American History course adopted into the college’s curriculum. Soon after, in October 1966, he and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP). They decided that Seale would be the Chairman and Newton would be the Minister of Defense. Many of the Party’s principles were inspired by Malcolm X and his views. The Party believed that in the Black struggle for justice, violence (or the potential of violence) may be necessary.

The Black Panther Party, under the leadership of Newton, gained international support. This was most demonstrated when Newton was invited to visit China in 1970. He was welcomed enthusiastically by large crowds holding up copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung as well as signs supporting the BPP and criticizing U.S. imperialism.

After returning to the United States, Newton was tried for a variety of violent offenses such as assault and multiple murders. These charges resulted in him fleeing to Havana, Cuba to escape prosecution for three years. Upon his return, he stood trials for one more assault and murder and was acquitted of both charges. Compounding these challenges was the split that developed between Newton and Eldridge Cleaver in early 1971 over the primary function of the Party. Newton wanted the party to focus on serving African American communities while Cleaver thought the focus should be on building relationships with international revolutionary movements. This rift resulted in violence between the factions and the deaths of several BPP members.

In 1989, Newton was fatally shot in West Oakland by a member of the Black Guerilla Family and drug dealer named Tyrone Robinson. Relations between the Black Panther Party and the Black Guerilla Family had been strained for nearly twenty years prior to this incident. The murder occurred after Newton left a drug den in a neighborhood where Newton had once organized social programs. Newton’s last words were, “You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!” Robinson then shot Newton twice in the face. Newton is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland. Robinson was convicted of murder in 1991 and was sentenced to 32 years to life in prison.

Social Networks and Archival Context - Huey Newton

Selected Records Relating to Huey Newton

RG 60: Records of the Department of Justice

Subject Files of the Attorney General, 1974 - 1993

[Bell, Griffin B.] Huey P. Newton

RG 65: Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Classification 44 (Civil Rights) Headquarters Case Files, 1924 - 1978                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957 - 1978 [Los Angeles, California Field Division]

Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957 - 1978 [Sacramento, California Field Division]                                                                         

Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957 - 1978 [New Haven, Connecticut Field Division]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957 - 1978 [Washington, DC Field Office]                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957 - 1978 [Atlanta, Georgia Field Division]                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957 - 1978 [Savannah, Georgia Field Division]

Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957 - 1978 [Honolulu, Hawaii Field Division]

Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957 - 1978 [Detroit, Michigan Field Division]

Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957 - 1978 [Las Vegas, Nevada Field Division]

44-40024, California (1968-1969) BPP, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Hutton

44-39665, Section 1 Serial 1, California (1968) Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Huey Newton, BPP, Emory Douglas

157-5552-v.1-3 -- Huey Newton                                                                                                                          

157-777-v.1-3 - Mrs Mary B Leckie - Mary Heed Leckie - Mrs H W Leckie- Huey Percy Newton - Edith Smiley - Norman H Smiley

157-1079-v.1 -- Black Panther Party Hartford

157-1079-v.2 -- Black Panther Party Hartford

157-1079-v.3 -- Black Panther Party Hartford

157-1079-v.4 -- Black Panther Party Hartford

157-1079-v.5 -- Black Panther Party Hartford

157-1031-v.1-3 - Huey Percy Newton

157-2908-v.1  -- Huey Percy Newton -- Black Panther Party

157-2908-v.2 Huey Percy Newton -- "The Servant" -- Black Panther Party

157-4120 -- Huey P. Newton Defense Fund

157-5204 -- Huey Percy Newton -- Huey Newton -- Huey P. Newton

157-1581 -- Huey P. Newton -- Black Panther Party (BPP)

157-173 -- Huey P Newton                                                                                                                              

157-4104-v.1-2  -- Huey Newton                                                                                                                        

157-780 [Newspaper Clippings] -- Huey Newton

157-841 -- Counterintelligence Program Black Nationalist Hate Groups

RG 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Audio Recordings of Monitored Broadcasts from Havana and Port-Au-Prince, 1968 - 1973

Havana International Service in English. Interview with Black Panther Huey Newton, Part I and II

History | August 22, 2023

The Misunderstood Visionary Behind the Black Panther Party

Huey P. Newton has been mythologized and maligned since his murder 34 years ago. His family and friends offer an intimate look inside his life and mind

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz

Senior Editor

The first time Fredrika Newton saw her future husband was the day he got out of prison. When he came down the steps of the Alameda County Courthouse in California that afternoon of August 5, 1970, a sea of elated supporters surged around him. He made his way through the crowd and climbed up onto a car to make a speech, pulling off his shirt and standing bare-chested in the sun. “Jesus Christ,” Fredrika recalls. “He was gorgeous.”

Huey P. Newton , at 28 years old, was the leader of the Black Panther Party , one of the most influential social movements of the 1960s. When he’d been arrested in 1967, charged with killing a police officer, the group had only a few dozen members. His fellow Panthers eagerly took up his cause, insisting that Huey had been wrongly accused. The slogan “ Free Huey ” became a rallying cry, emblazoned on posters and buttons . Before long, Black Panther Party offices popped up all over the United States, and Huey became a revolutionary icon like Malcolm X and Che Guevara.

When Huey was released on appeal, some of Fredrika’s activist neighbors convinced her to come along to the courthouse. But she had no interest in joining the movement. She was 18, about to leave for college, and whenever she passed the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in Berkeley, she’d gotten into the habit of crossing to the other side of the street. “I thought they were going to try and recruit me,” she says. “I didn’t feel Black enough. I wasn’t political, and I was shy.”

It was Fredrika’s mother, Arlene Slaughter, who brought her closer to the Black Panther leader. Arlene was a Jewish real estate agent who’d married a Black musician in the early 1940s, when interracial marriage was against California law . The Slaughters had eloped to Mexico, and once they returned to the U.S., they’d struggled to find anyone who would rent or sell them a home. Arlene became a lifelong advocate for fair housing, often posing as the buyer to help people secure loans. The Black Panthers were clients of hers, and she invited Huey over for brunch a few months after his release.

He arrived with an entourage of fellow Panthers and white college students who tried to outdo each other with clever questions. Fredrika, who was home for Christmas, found the whole scene off-putting at first. But she slipped in a question of her own: What was it like in prison? Huey paused for a long time before answering. It was very lonely, he eventually replied. His thoughtfulness impressed Fredrika. “He really took a long time to sort out his feelings,” she says. “He gave such consideration to this simple question.”

That evening, Fredrika was washing dishes when a Black Panther called with a message: Huey wanted to see her, and he was sending over a car. Arlene knew where Huey lived—she’d helped the Black Panthers secure his high-rise apartment on Oakland’s Lakeshore Drive. “It’s a beautiful place,” Arlene told her daughter as Fredrika headed out the door in purple tie-dyed pants. “Let me know how you like it.”

It was after 10 p.m. when Fredrika arrived at Huey’s door. She remembers the Isaac Hayes song “I Stand Accused” playing on the stereo and the awkward way Huey went in for a first kiss. She had to sneak back into her mother’s house the next morning.

During the 14 years that followed, Fredrika and Huey came together and fell apart over and over again. Huey struggled to lead the Black Panthers through times of violence and identity crisis. At one point, he fled the country. But he came back, and in 1984, he and Fredrika finally decided to get married.

Then, on August 22, 1989, Huey was killed on the streets of Oakland, and Fredrika was left on her own, grieving and wondering what to do with her husband’s complicated legacy.

The Black Panther Party’s co-founder, Bobby Seale , once said that the group “came right out of Huey Newton’s head.” The two men met in 1961 as students at Merritt College in Oakland. Huey was eccentric, sometimes walking into class barefoot and soaked with rain. On the street with his drinking buddies, he’d deliver lectures on Plato’s cave allegory—the prisoners staring at shadows on the wall, afraid to go out into the sunlight. “The allegory seemed very appropriate to our own situation in society,” Huey later wrote in his 1973 autobiography . But no one around him knew quite what to make of it. “The dudes on the block still thought I was ‘out of sight’ and sometimes just plain crazy.”

For Huey, Plato’s writings were personal as well as political . In high school, he’d realized he was functionally illiterate, a struggle he traced back to white teachers who’d insulted his intelligence in front of the entire class. His older brother Melvin was a good student, and Huey borrowed his copy of The Republic . “I went through the book about eight or nine times before I felt I had mastered the material,” he later recalled. Whenever he came across a word he didn’t know, he looked up its meaning.

By the time Huey got to college, he was a voracious reader. He identified with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the poverty in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables , and the loss of faith in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . He and Seale joined the local Afro-American Association , where they read books by Black authors like W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. The readings helped them make sense of the growing unrest in their own community.

At the time, most of the Black families in California were fairly recent migrants from the South. (Huey was born in Louisiana in 1942 and Seale in Texas in 1936.) Between 1940 and 1960, the Black population of Oakland grew tenfold , from 8,462 to 83,618. In California, migrants found better jobs and freedom from Jim Crow laws. But neighborhoods remained segregated, because white property owners and landlords wouldn’t sell or rent homes to Black residents. The state’s Fair Housing Act , passed in 1963, was designed to outlaw that kind of discrimination, but California voters overturned it the following year. Thousands of Black Californians were stuck in poor, crowded neighborhoods. There was little they could do to protest their conditions. Unlike in the Deep South, there were no lunch counters to desegregate, no bus seats to claim. All the people could do was explode.

On August 11, 1965, a 21-year-old driver in the Black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts failed a sobriety test. As crowds gathered , a white policeman struck the Black driver across the face with a baton. Enraged neighbors responded by hurling rocks and chunks of concrete. Over the course of six days, the residents of Watts burned buildings and smashed cars, destroying their own community.

Huey and Seale spent hours unpacking what had happened and discussing how no existing movement seemed to have the solution. They admired Malcolm X, but he’d been killed in February 1965 without leaving any clear plan of action. As for the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., he’d come to Watts and tried to talk to the people, but the encounter left him grappling with the limits of his own nonviolent philosophy. “Urban riots are a special form of violence,” King explained at a 1967 conference of the American Psychological Association. “They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. … Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking.”

In October 1966, Seale received a pamphlet in the mail from a voting rights campaign in Lowndes County, Alabama, that featured a drawing of a black panther. Huey liked the symbolism. “The panther is a fierce animal,” the burgeoning activist explained in his autobiography, “but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner; then he will strike out.”

Huey and Seale decided to start their own group: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. They quickly drafted a ten-point program , making demands for fair housing, employment and education. Other points were more radical, like a call to release all Black prisoners and exempt Black men from military service. The tenth point quoted the first portion of the Declaration of Independence word for word.

With their agenda in place, the two college friends hit the streets. “The Panthers were about doing,” says Stephen Shames , a white photojournalist who took thousands of photos of the group between 1967 and 1973. “A lot of the lefty white groups were always about talking. I’d go to meetings, and people would have arguments about who should run the tractor factory after the revolution. The Panthers were like, ‘Why are you talking about after the revolution? We need to do something now!’”

Huey and Seale started following the police and supervising their arrests. At the time, Huey was taking classes at the San Francisco Law School, and though he never graduated, Shames says “he knew the law backward and forward.” When the police ordered the Black Panthers to leave, Huey would read the legal code that protected a citizen’s right to watch an arrest, quoting the exact distance away a citizen was allowed to stand. When an officer asked if his gun was loaded, Huey asserted his legal right to carry a loaded weapon.

On May 2, 1967, a group of 30 armed Black men and women marched up to the California State Capitol to protest a new gun control bill sponsored by Don Mulford , the state assemblyman who represented Oakland. Huey was on probation at the time; he’d served six months in prison in 1964 for stabbing another man with a steak knife. So he stayed behind in Oakland while Seale led the group into the California statehouse and onto the floor where the lawmakers were gathered. Security ordered the Panthers and attending reporters back outside, where Seale gave a short speech and everyone gathered on the steps for a photo opportunity .

“The Panthers were incredibly media-conscious,” says Shames, who recently published two photo books about the group. He notes that their leather jackets projected toughness but also hipness. Their berets were inspired by the French resistance during World War II. Above all, the Panthers’ style conveyed power. At the time, white flower children were running away from their parents’ conventions and expectations, dressing in rags and wandering the streets of San Francisco. But the Black Panthers were responding to the chaos and helplessness that plagued their own community. They wanted to create a new Black stereotype that projected confidence and discipline.

As for the guns, the Black Panthers used them as “symbols of citizenship, symbols of equality,” says Adam Winkler , author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America . He points out that it’s common nowadays to hear gun enthusiasts talk about “government tyranny.” But Winkler, who teaches law at the University of California, Los Angeles, says this meant something different to the Black Panthers. “For Huey Newton and Bobby Seale,” says Winkler, “government tyranny came in the form of government officers wearing police uniforms, coming into their neighborhoods and abusing them, arresting them, harassing them, shooting them in the back, and ultimately denying their liberties.”

On the day of the Panthers’ demonstration, California Governor Ronald Reagan complained to the camera crews. “There is absolutely no reason why, out on the street, today, a civilian should be carrying a loaded weapon,” he declared . On July 28, 1967, Reagan signed the new gun control bill into law.

Since then, the debate around firearms has shifted so much that most Black activists now fight for gun control rather than against it. In April, after a mass shooter killed six people at a Nashville elementary school, two Black Tennessean lawmakers in their late 20s, Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson , walked to the front of the state House of Representatives chamber while holding a megaphone and a sign that said , “Protect kids, not guns.” Viral videos circulated of the two young men raising their arms in clenched fists and chanting the Black Panther Party slogan: “Power to the people!”

Together in a resounding voice the People will be heard in the People’s House! The time is NOW for gun reform! #TenneseeThree pic.twitter.com/HOu9xLHGaI — Justin J. Pearson (@Justinjpearson) April 6, 2023

Shames notes that this kind of social media platform would have given the Black Panthers a weapon far more powerful than any rifle they ever had: “Bobby even said to me, ‘If I were organizing the Panthers now, we wouldn’t have carried guns. We would’ve just followed the police with our cellphones.’”

Huey’s probation for the steak knife incident had just ended when two Oakland police officers pulled him over in the early morning hours of October 28, 1967. The only facts everyone agreed on later were that Huey had been shot in the stomach and that Officer John Frey had been shot dead. Huey insisted he wasn’t armed at the time, and all the bullets found at the scene were later proved to be police bullets. But law enforcement immediately took Huey into custody.

Ericka Huggins , now 75, remembers seeing an article in the radical Ramparts magazine with a photo of Huey wounded and handcuffed to a gurney. “Here he is with a bullet wound in his belly, police officers standing guard,” she says. “How could he have killed someone if he was wounded in the belly? That’s the core of your being. It was just wrong. And I knew it was wrong.” She and her soon-to-be-husband, John Huggins, dropped out of college in Pennsylvania and drove to Los Angeles to join the Panthers in 1968.

Though Huey was in prison, his ideas were still guiding the party. He saw community service as a kind of secular religious calling. “Our complete faith in the people is based on our assumptions about what they require and deserve,” he wrote in his autobiography. “In the metaphysical sense, we based the expression ‘All Power to the People’ on the idea of man as God. I have no other God but man, and I firmly believe that man is the highest or chief good.”

The party’s members set to work creating what Huey called survival programs . “We did a lot of listening,” Huggins says. “We were young, and we just said, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’” The Panthers eventually provided urban Black communities with everything from legal aid to shoes and clothing. They escorted seniors to the grocery store, helped with employment and housing, and even provided building maintenance. “One of the ambulance programs started out with a hearse,” says Huggins. “The thinking was, ‘Well, a body can fit in it—why not?’ We were really practical.”

The Panthers’ most visible effort was the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren program, which served free hot breakfasts to as many as 20,000 students in 1969. The program caught the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who complained in a memo. “The resulting publicity tends to portray the BPP in a favorable light,” Hoover wrote , using the bureau’s typical shorthand for the group’s name, “and clouds the violent nature of the group and its ultimate aim of insurrection.”

The bureau was watching the party as part of its counterintelligence program, Cointelpro . “The extremist BPP of Oakland, California, is rapidly expanding,” the FBI declared in a memo dated September 27, 1968. “It is the most violence-prone organization of all the extremist groups now operating in the United States.” The memo went on to call for ideas that would “neutralize all organizational efforts of the BPP as well as create suspicion amongst the leaders.”

The field offices sent back a flood of proposals. After Yale University’s medical school invited the Panthers to speak about their local free medical clinic, the local FBI office drafted a letter from a fictional alumnus. The letter expressed alarm that the Panthers were trying to “cajole Yale into providing financial assistance to a clinic which in the event of armed revolution would provide secret medical care for wounded members of the Black Panther Party.”

The missive didn’t stop the Panthers from opening more medical clinics. They pioneered new ways of screening for sickle cell anemia, a disease that affects 1 out of every 365 African Americans. Mary T. Bassett, who went on to serve as New York State health commissioner , spent a summer in college helping the Black Panther Party test residents in public housing buildings. “The sickle cell screening program was a lesson in community health that has never left me,” Basset wrote in a 2016 article for the American Journal of Public Health . “It was more than just a service—it was an organizing tool.”

It's true that the Black Panthers saw their social programs as preparations for a revolution, but it was never entirely clear what form that revolution would take. “We must gain the support of the people through serving their needs,” Huey wrote . “Then when the police or any other agency of repression tries to destroy the program, the people will move to a higher level of consciousness and action.”

At the same time, Black Panther leaders were forming friendships with left-wing revolutionaries like Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Algeria’s Houari Boumédiène. But Huey refused to endorse violent overthrows of the government, calling them coups. On a 1973 episode of “ Firing Line ,” a television show hosted by conservative William F. Buckley Jr., Huey launched into an earnest, long-winded discourse on peaceful revolution and the will of the people that led Buckley to complain, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I think you don’t, either.” (Fredrika says Huey got that kind of reaction a lot: “His thought process was unlike most people’s, so it was hard to grasp his concepts.”)

On the other hand, Eldridge Cleaver , the Panthers’ minister of information, liked to make direct, incendiary statements. In 1967, a few months before Huey went to prison, Cleaver persuaded Huey to pose in a throne-like rattan chair, holding a spear in one hand and a rifle in the other. “Huey didn’t want that photo taken,” Fredrika says. Cleaver circulated the image with a strongly worded caption: “The racist dog policemen must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder and brutality and torture of Black people, or face the wrath of the armed people.”

Cleaver unleashed his own wrath after white supremacist James Earl Ray assassinated King on April 4, 1968. Cleaver would later admit to a reporter that he’d deliberately ambushed the police two days later, launching a shootout that killed the party’s first recruit and youngest member, 17-year-old Robert James Hutton (also known as Lil’ Bobby ). After the gunfight, Cleaver fled the country , first to Cuba and then to Algeria.

The FBI escalated its plans to “ thwart and disrupt ” the Black Panthers. The bureau’s Los Angeles office suggested sending anonymous letters to Black Panther Party leaders and members of a Black nationalist group called US Organization (or the Organization Us) in the hopes of provoking violence. “Your suggestion to capitalize on BPP differences with [redacted] are appealing and could result in an ‘US’ and BPP vendetta,” Hoover wrote on October 31, 1968.

Huggins was home with her 3-week-old daughter on January 17, 1969, when her husband, John, and their close friend Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter got into an argument with members of the US Organization. The two groups were on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, attending a meeting about the school’s new Afro-American Center. During the dispute, another man burst into the room and killed the two Black Panther Party members. An FBI memo from January 20 noted the deadly incident with satisfaction: “It would appear that the above activity will even further split the factions of the US group and the BPP.”

A few months later, Huggins herself was charged with murder. Newly widowed at 21, she’d moved to New Haven to run a Black Panther center and be closer to John’s family. In May 1969, a party member named George Sams Jr. arrived at Huggins’ center, where he led the torture and murder of another Panther, Alex Rackley . In court, Sams implicated Huggins and claimed that Seale had instructed him to kill Rackley for being a government informant. (Party members later came to believe that Sams himself had been working for the government.) Huggins and Seale spent two years in jail before a judge finally dismissed their charges .

“I was breastfeeding when I was incarcerated,” Huggins says. “My daughter became a fatherless child—and then a motherless child. I could only see her for one hour every Saturday. It was a kind of despair that made me want to give up. But I knew I couldn’t because I was her mother. I also knew that our bond was going to be broken.”

Huggins and Seale were still behind bars when Huey was finally released on appeal in August 1970. Huey immediately went out to do radio interviews and give speeches, presenting himself as energetic and ready to build new alliances. “We should try to form a working coalition with the gay liberation and women’s liberation groups,” he declared during a speech in New York City just ten days after his release.

Privately, Huey was anxious and overwhelmed. The group had ballooned into a massive national organization with some 2,000 members . Fear and suspicion were intensifying, and Black Panther centers around the country were facing police raids. In December 1969, a promising young Black Panther leader, 21-year-old Fred Hampton , was murdered by the Chicago police. ( William O’Neal , the FBI informant who orchestrated the murder, later spoke publicly about the bureau’s strategy and his own role in it.) It was up to Huey to reassure and unify everyone.

Fredrika says Huey would call her in a panic, threatening to jump off his balcony. “He went into prison and there were, what, 40-something members of the party,” Fredrika says. “And he comes out and it’s this international movement. They made him into a symbol. It separated him from the community that he loved.”

On the morning of March 6, 1971, Huey appeared on a local Bay Area TV show, hoping to project an image of unity with Cleaver. The two Panthers had never entirely agreed on the party’s agenda, but they’d lately grown even further apart. While Huey was in prison, Cleaver had written an open letter to Black soldiers serving in Vietnam: “You need to start killing the racist pigs who are over there with you giving you orders. Kill General [Creighton Abrams] and his staff, all his officers. … If it is necessary to destroy the United States of America, then let us destroy it with a smile on our faces.”

That kind of talk wasn’t Huey’s style. “Huey’s father was a minister,” Fredrika says. “He knew better than to go into churches and curse, but that was Eldridge’s way. Black folks became afraid of the party, and Huey realized what he had to do to change that image—the image of the gun and the leather jackets, as well as the vocabulary.”

The FBI had done its part to set the stage for a conflagration by sending a series of letters to Cleaver in Algeria. One, supposedly from Huey’s personal secretary, complained that Huey—the “ supreme commander ”—was failing in his leadership and added, “If only you were here to inject some strength into the movement, or to give some advice.” Another, from a made-up white radical named “Algonquin J. Fuller,” flattered Cleaver in a similar way: “Brother Newton has failed you and the party. … They need the leadership which only you can supply.”

Cleaver was no doubt emboldened by this flattery when Huey invited him to call into the television show that morning in March 1971. Instead of reassuring listeners, Cleaver criticized Huey’s management. “The party is falling apart at the seams,” he declared on the air.

After the show, Huey called Cleaver and continued the heated conversation. “I’m not a coward like you, brother, because you run off to get Lil’ Bobby Hutton killed,” Huey yelled into the receiver. “But I stay here to face the gas, you see? You’re a coward because you attacked me this morning.” He informed Cleaver that he was being expelled from the party.

On April 17, 1971, the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service published a special supplement titled “On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver From the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party From the Black Community.” Under Cleaver’s influence, Huey wrote, the Panthers had become “a revolutionary cult group. But this is a basic contradiction, because revolution is a process, and if the acts you commit do not fall within the scope of the process, then they are non-revolutionary.”

The FBI also spied on Paul Coates, who opened the Black Book after working w the Baltimore Black Panthers. Coates opened Black Classic Press in 1978, still operating today. Among his literary legacies are his son Ta-Nehisi Coates. Great interview here: https://t.co/esyXjjTsR3 /19 pic.twitter.com/wMMVOlD99m — Joshua Clark Davis (@JoshClarkDavis) April 28, 2019

Paul Coates , the father of writer Ta-Nehisi Coates , remembers the fallout from the split. He was a Black Panther Party leader in Baltimore, and at the time of Cleaver’s expulsion, he happened to be hosting fellow Panther Sam Napier, who ran the party’s newspaper distribution center in Queens, New York. “We got called early Monday morning and told that there was going to be a meeting,” Coates says. “So Sam and I went up to Harlem.”

Most of the Panthers from New York and New Jersey announced that they’d be going with Cleaver. “I was asked, what am I going to do?” Coates recalls. “And I said, ‘Baltimore is going to stay with Huey.’ Someone knocked me upside the head.” Napier also declared his allegiance to Huey. “But the same brother who’d called us jumped in and said, ‘Don’t move on them. They were our comrades. Let them walk.’”

Coates says a Panther named Robert Webb warned him and Napier to leave and never show their faces in Harlem again—adding, “because if you do, you’re dead.” Not long afterward, Webb was killed , and then someone killed Napier in retaliation. Coates ended up leaving the party in 1972 after receiving death threats himself. By that time, everyone was so wary of FBI involvement that they blamed every threat or act of violence on the authorities. But Coates says he doesn’t think the bureau “would’ve had to send an outside hitman in to kill Robert Webb. There was enough animosity and enough thuggery in the party at that point.”

The Black Panther Party soon closed its national field offices and shifted its focus back to Oakland. Seale launched a campaign for mayor , and Elaine Brown , a party member who’d helped set up the first Breakfast for Schoolchildren program in Los Angeles, made a bid for the Oakland City Council. By then, there were more women in the Black Panthers than men, and in 1974, Brown took over as the party’s leader.

Angela Tate , a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture , is struck by the way gun-toting men still dominate the Black Panther Party’s image, even though the women ran most of the programs . “That’s significant in the sense that Black women are always brought in to fix the problems,” Tate says with a wry laugh. “The women of the Black Panther Party usually get marginalized to just photos of them in Afros, and that’s about it.”

Earlier this year, Tate hosted an event at the Washington, D.C. museum with Huggins and photographer Shames, who had just collaborated on a book called Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party . Huggins spent most of the 1970s directing the Oakland Community School , one of the Black Panthers’ most successful long-term projects. Huggins remembers the day Maya Angelou brought James Baldwin to visit. “He left in tears,” she says. “I saw him as he was leaving.” Baldwin told her, “Ericka, every child deserves a school like this.”

Huey wasn’t around for much of the Oakland Community School’s existence, but it was modeled on the Intercommunal Youth Institute that he had created a few years earlier for the children of party members. “The school was his idea,” Huggins says. “He created the concept. He was a visionary.”

Fredrika spent some time working for the Black Panther Party, but she found it grueling. “You’re up at the crack of dawn cooking breakfast, and you’re working until late at night,” she says. “There wasn’t much balance. We didn’t do anything for recreation.”

In 1973, Fredrika left the party—and Huey—and went back to school at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. While she was there, Huey was accused of murdering a 17-year-old prostitute. He and his then-girlfriend, Gwen Fontaine, fled the country and eventually arrived in a capsized Zodiac boat on the shores of Cuba, where they were welcomed as revolutionary comrades. After a while, the novelty wore off. Huey and Gwen got married, and Huey ended up working ten hours a day in a cement factory. “I know it was hard on him,” Fredrika says with a chuckle. “They lived in a very tiny place, and Huey had never done manual labor.”

In 1977, Huey came back to the U.S., where he stood trial, and the charges were dismissed . He enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he earned a PhD in a subject called the History of Consciousness . Fredrika was back in the Bay Area by then, too. She’d had a son, born in 1975, and she was working as a model. After she ran into Huey at a Santana concert, she started seeing him again, with Gwen’s knowledge.

Huey wasn’t in good shape. He’d always been a drinker, but he was now also heavily using cocaine. On Fredrika’s 28th birthday, he failed to show up for a date, sending his bodyguard with flowers and apologies instead. Fredrika ended up dating the bodyguard for the next five years.

Huey and Gwen ultimately divorced, and in September 1984, he called Fredrika and abruptly asked her to marry him. Fredrika was reeling from the death of her mother , Arlene, who had been murdered by an ex-boyfriend the year before. She wanted to believe that Huey could finally offer her a stable, happy life, but she now acknowledges that this was wishful thinking. “It probably wasn’t a good time, but I didn’t think from my head,” Fredrika says. “I just loved him. Everybody knew that.” She and Huey wed a week later in Reno, Nevada.

Fredrika’s son, Kieron Slaughter, was 9 when his mother married Huey. “From my perspective, it was kind of out of nowhere,” he says. But after being raised by a single mother, having a stepfather opened up a new kind of family experience. The three of them went to theme parks and wore silly hats, and Huey let Kieron sit on his lap while he was driving. “Huey was super nice, super jokey,” says Kieron. “It seemed like being around kids allowed him to explore the childlike part of himself.”

Kieron knew nothing about the Black Panther Party, which had disbanded after the Oakland Community School closed its doors in 1982. But he was impressed by all the books in Huey’s large house in the Oakland hills. He noticed the way Huey could shift “like flipping a switch” from being playful and childlike to having intense intellectual conversations with visiting friends. “And then he could flip and adapt and go out on the streets in the hood,” Kieron adds, “talking it up with the hardest cats out there.”

Kieron didn’t notice any signs of his stepfather’s drug addiction, but he has indelible memories of the time he opened the front door and saw a SWAT team standing there. “They busted in, and Huey was mad because I’d opened the door,” he recalls. “I felt a lot of guilt around that, a lot of blame, because he went to jail after that.”

In 1987, Huey served nine months in San Quentin for gun charges; in March 1989, he was sentenced to six months in prison for misappropriating $15,000 from the Oakland school. Fredrika says her son didn’t want to come with her on Sundays when she went to visit Huey in prison. “Kieron couldn’t take it. He just would sob.”

Fredrika now suspects that Huey had undiagnosed bipolar disorder. “I mean, he could have been raised with a white picket fence and still had those issues,” she says. But his struggles with law enforcement and members of his own organization certainly didn’t help. “It was relentless. It never ended.” FBI memos show the bureau actively sought to undermine Huey’s mental stability over the years. One memo dated January 25, 1971, noted with satisfaction that “the egotistical Newton” had started reacting almost hysterically to any criticism, adding, “some of this criticism undoubtedly is result of our counterintelligence projects now in operation.”

Throughout Fredrika and Huey’s marriage, he would disappear for stretches of time or be overtaken by florid delusions. Once, he was so out of it that he held a knife to Fredrika’s throat while she was in the bathtub. No matter how bad it got, there was no hope of sending Huey to rehab. As Fredrika wrote in the introduction to the most recent edition of Huey’s memoir, Revolutionary Suicide , “He never wanted a life without drugs more than he wanted the drug.”

On August 21, 1989, Huey found out that a film project about his life was falling through. He’d been counting on the income from the film, and he was despondent when he left the house to pick up Kieron from day camp. Huey never showed up at the camp, and Fredrika never saw her husband again. Early the next morning, she learned that Huey had been shot dead in West Oakland. Tyrone Robinson, a 25-year-old member of the narcotics-dealing gang the Black Guerilla Family, confessed to the crime.

Fredrika had no money for a funeral, but well-wishers sent in checks and cash in denominations as small as $5. “In the end,” she wrote in a 2006 essay, “the people buried Huey.”

Huey’s death was a very different one than he’d imagined for himself. When he wrote his autobiography in 1973, he assumed he’d spend his life working for his ideals and eventually get killed for them like so many of his heroes. “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite,” Huey explained . “We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.”

Instead, Huey died from what he called “ reactionary suicide ”—succumbing to confusion and despair. “Huey had not fallen victim to the many police guns and bullets, nor the prison death houses we both had faced,” Seale said in Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers , a book he co-wrote with Shames in 2016. “Newton was killed by a young drug dealer. I am troubled that Huey P. Newton, who struggled against all odds in the 1960s and 1970s, could get caught up in the vicious cycle of violence and community self-destruction.”

These days, when Fredrika feels an urge to talk to Huey, she often goes to the spot where he died. There’s a monument to him nearby, a bronze bust of his head and shoulders that Fredrika commissioned from local sculptor Dana King and unveiled in 2021. He’s shirtless, gazing into the distance as though looking at a future no one else can see. The street alongside the monument has also been renamed in her late husband’s honor: Dr. Huey P. Newton Way.

Immediately after Huey died, some people urged Fredrika to follow the lead of Coretta Scott King by glorifying her late husband’s life and carrying on his work. But Fredrika was exhausted. “All I wanted to do was raise my kid,” she says.

Huey also hadn’t lived or died the same way as King, although the older civil rights leader exhibited his own character flaws . “People are complicated,” says Tate, the Smithsonian historian and curator. “So many people reflect on these big figures and just focus on a period when they were young and idealistic. That’s one of the reasons some of these figures like the idea of dying young—because then they don’t have to deal with the complexities of what it means to be older and how you change over time.”

One question facing Fredrika was whether she could be honest about her husband’s complexities while honoring his memory and preserving his ideals. She ultimately decided that she could. In 1995, at the urging of Huey’s lifelong friend and Black Panther Party associate David Hilliard , Fredrika founded the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation . She and Hilliard started out small, releasing volumes of Huey’s unpublished and out-of-print writings along with a book on the Black Panthers’ service programs . Fredrika and the foundation also worked hard to secure approval for the memorial statue. Until its unveiling, no public memorial to the Black Panther Party stood in the city where the group began.

“In my generation, there’s still a lot of pride for the work that went on back then,” says Kieron. He’s now 48 years old and has spent his entire career in public service: first in Richmond, California, and now in Berkeley, where he’s the city’s chief strategist for economic development. In practice, he says, his job is about “supporting small businesses, women-owned businesses, minority-owned businesses, trying to help them overcome the kind of bureaucracy that was set up in the past to discourage and discriminate against these folks.”

Kieron also spent two years as an urban fellow with the National Park Service, and he’s been working to establish a Black Panther Party National Park unit that would include historic sites all over Oakland and, eventually, the United States.

Though Kieron has chosen a career his stepfather would have commended, he says that children of Black Panthers—known within the group as “cubs”—sometimes feel the weight of their family history. “There’s a struggle with how much responsibility should fall on us to continue this,” he says. “I have a friend who grew up in the party, and now he runs a coffee shop. That’s not necessarily revolutionary or continuing the legacy, but he’s just living his life.”

One of the best-known Black Panther offspring is Paul Coates’ son Ta-Nehisi , whose writings about race in America have earned him a National Book Award and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. In 2015, Marvel Comics asked Ta-Nehisi to write a new series about the superhero Black Panther . Though the character first appeared in 1966 and slightly predated the political organization of the same name, Marvel writers later ended up paying tribute to many of the party’s themes. The mythical substance that fuels the Kingdom of Wakanda, vibranium, has the property of self-defense: It can absorb energy from a bullet and send it back at the shooter. The 2018 Black Panther film begins and ends in Oakland, with strong messages about community service.

“The fact that Ta-Nehisi is involved in this is kind of weird,” Paul says. “He’s interrogating America, but really interrogating the whole notion of the oppressed and what leadership is all about.”

Fredrika wishes Huey had lived long enough to watch the Black Panther Party take its place in history. The very location of his memorial statue is poignant: It’s at the intersection of Dr. Huey P. Newton Way and Mandela Parkway . Both streets were named after legendary activists, but Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison and came out to finish his life as a white-haired elder statesman. In contrast, Huey spent most of his own much shorter life trapped in the prison of his own mind. The young idealist who once gave street lectures about Plato’s cave allegory never quite made it out into the sunlight.

Fredrika spends a lot of time thinking about the world she’s leaving behind for her 13-year-old twin grandchildren, Kieron’s son and daughter. “At 71, I see that I only have so much time left,” she says. But it’s a different feeling than she had in her youth, when she was dating a young revolutionary and wondering how long either of them would live. “I was reckless in my 20s, so it didn’t matter,” she says. “Now, all of it matters.”

Get the latest History stories in your inbox?

Click to visit our Privacy Statement .

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz | READ MORE

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine. She was previously a senior editor at the Atlantic .

BlackPast is dedicated to providing a global audience with reliable and accurate information on the history of African America and of people of African ancestry around the world. We aim to promote greater understanding through this knowledge to generate constructive change in our society.

Huey p. newton (1942-1989).

Born in Monroe, Louisiana on February 17, 1942, Huey P. Newton was named after the populist governor Huey Long. His parents moved to Oakland, California during World War II seeking economic opportunities.  Newton attended Merritt College, where he joined Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity and met Bobby Seale . At Merritt, Newton fought to diversify the curriculum and hire more black instructors.  He also was exposed to a rising tide of Black Nationalism and briefly joined the Afro-American Association.  Within this group and on his own, he studied a broad range of thinkers, including Frantz Fanon , Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, E. Franklin Frazier , and James Baldwin .

Newton eventually developed a Marxist/Leninist perspective, where he viewed the black community as an internal colony controlled by external forces such as white businessmen, the police, and city hall.  He believed the black working class needed to seize the control of the institutions that most affected their community and formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense with Bobby Seale in October 1966 to pursue that goal.

Newton became the Minister of Defense and main leader of the Party.  Writing in the Ten-Point Program, the founding document of the Party, Newton demanded that blacks need the “power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.”  That power would allow blacks to gain “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.”

Taking advantage of a California law that allowed people to carry non-concealed weapons, the Panthers instituted armed patrols that monitored police activity in the black community.  These patrols led to increasingly tense relations with the police, and in October 1967 Newton was arrested following a Panther-police shootout that resulted in the death of an Oakland police officer.  Considered a political prisoner by many on the left, the Panthers orchestrated a Free Huey campaign led by the Party’s Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver .  Charles R. Geary, a well-known attorney, headed Newton’s legal defense, and in July 1968 Newton was convicted of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.  That conviction was overturned on appeal, and in 1970 Newton was freed from prison.

Newton’s leadership of the Black Panther Party in the early 1970s helped contribute to its demise.  He led a number of purges of Party members, most famously in 1971 when he expelled Eldridge Cleaver in what was called the Newton-Cleaver split. In 1974, Newton was accused of assaulting a prostitute who later died.  Instead of standing trial, he fled to Cuba.  He returned to the U.S. in 1976, stood trial, but was acquitted.  In 1978, he enrolled in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he earned his doctorate in 1980.  His dissertation, “War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America,” was later published as a book.

Huey Newton was murdered in Oakland, California on August 22, 1989; he was 47 years old. He was survived by his wife Fredricka. Newton’s autobiography entitled Revolutionary Suicide was first published in 1973 and republished in 1995.

Do you find this information helpful? A small donation would help us keep this available to all. Forego a bottle of soda and donate its cost to us for the information you just learned, and feel good about helping to make it available to everyone.

BlackPast.org is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and our EIN is 26-1625373. Your donation is fully tax-deductible.

Cite this entry in APA format:

Source of the author's information:.

Huey P. Newton, To Die For The People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York, Random House, 1972); Newton, War against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996); and Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2006).

OLD PAGINATION BELOW

FAMOUS AFRICAN AMERICANS

• Huey P. Newton

Huey Percy Newton was an African American leader and co-founder of the Black Panther Party. He was the youngest of seven children born to Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton on February 17, 1942 in Monroe, Louisiana and named after the former Governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. His family was not very well off, and often moved from place to place. Although he graduated from Oakland Technical High School, he could hardly even read by the time he finished. Newton recalls the sense of shame he was made to feel by his teachers for being African American, and said that never once had he been taught anything useful. Deciding to take matters in his own hands, Newton began to learn how to read and write on his own.

He had a troubled childhood, and was arrested several times as a teenager for gun possession and vandalism. After high school, he enrolled at Merritt College in Oakland where he continued to be involved in criminal activities such as burglary and similar petty crimes. Ironically enough, he studied law at college, which he initially intended to use to become a better criminal. He soon became involved in local political activities and used his influence to establish a course in African American history at the college. In October 1966, Newton and his associate Bobby Seale , founded the “Black Panther Party for Self Defense” which worked exclusively for the benefits and rights of African Americans. Influenced by the works of Marx, Lenin, Malcolm X and Che Guevara, Newton and Seale established a “Ten Point Program” as the party’s agenda, including education, housing and jobs as its priorities.

One of the main points of focus for the Black Panther Party was the right of self defense. Newton believed and preached that violence, or even the threat of it, is sometimes necessary to accomplish your goals. Black Panther Party members once stormed the California Legislature while fully armed in order to protest the outcome of a gun bill. He recruited new members at social gatherings such as bars and parties. He started a number of social reforms such as the Free Breakfast for Children Program, martial arts training for teenagers, and education programs for children from impoverished backgrounds.

One of Huey P. Newton’s causes was police brutality, but he himself was arrested on charges of killing a white policeman named John Frey. He was charged with voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 2-15 years in prison. However, due to immense public pressure, a retrial was held and Newton was acquitted. Another criminal case he was involved in was the murder of a 17 year old girl named Kathleen Smith. Newton fled to Cuba with his girlfriend and stayed there for 3 years. The key witness in the trial was Crystal Gray, and three Black Panther party members attempted to assassinate her before she gave her testimony. Newton returned from Cuba and stood trial, but denied any involvement in the matter. The jury was deadlocked, and Newton was eventually acquitted. In 1982, he was sentenced to 6 months in jail and 18 months of probation on charges of embezzling party funds.

Newton also pursued a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in History of Consciousness. His doctoral thesis was titled “War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America”. Several factions had broken away from the main party, and one of these was the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF). On August 22, 1989, Newton was assassinated by a member of the BGF named Tyrone Robinson. Huey P. Newton was 47 years old at the time of his death. In 1991, Robinson was convicted of Newton’s murder and sentenced to 32 years to life in prison.

Write About Huey P. Newton

Famous african americans.

• Jesse Jackson
• Jesse Jackson Jr.
• Jesse Owens
• Jessye Norman
• Jimi Hendrix
• Joe Frazier
• John Coltrane
• John Lee Hooker
• Johnnie Cochran
• Josephine Baker
• Josh Gibson
• Julian Bond
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
• Karl Malone
• Kimora Lee Simmons
• Kirby Puckett
• Kobe Bryant
• Langston Hughes
• Larry Holmes
• Latrell Sprewell
• Laurence Fishburne
• Lauryn Hill
• Lawrence Taylor
• LeBron James
• Leon Spinks
• Lester Young
• LeVar Burton
• Lorraine Hansberry
• Louis Armstrong
• Louis Farrakhan
• Luther Vandross
• Madame C.J. Walker
• Mae Jemison
• Mahalia Jackson
• Marcus Garvey
• Marian Anderson
• Marian Wright Edelman
• Marion Jones
• Martin Lawrence
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Marvelous Marvin Hagler
• Marvin Gaye
• Mary J. Blige
• Mary McLeod Bethune
• Maya Angelou
• Medgar Evers
• Michael Jackson
• Michael Jordan
• Michael Sam
• Michelle Obama
• Miles Davis
• Missy Elliott
• Morgan Freeman
• Moses Malone
• Muddy Waters
• Muhammad Ali
• Nat King Cole
• Natalie Cole
• Nina Simone
• O.J. Simpson
• Octavia Butler
• Octavia Spencer
• Oprah Winfrey
• Oscar Robertson
• Ossie Davis
• Otis Redding
• Ozzie Smith
• Patrick Ewing
• Paul Laurence Dunbar
• Paul Robeson
• Percy Julian
• Pernell Whitaker
• Queen Latifah
• Quincy Jones
• Quvenzhané Wallis
• Ralph Ellison
• Reggie Jackson
• Reggie White
• Richard Pryor
• Richard Wright
• Rickey Henderson
• Romare Bearden
• Roy Jones Jr.
• Ruby Bridges
• Sammy Davis Jr.
• Sarah Vaughan
• Satchel Paige
• Scatman Crothers
• Scott Joplin
• Scottie Pippen
• Serena Williams
• Shaquille O'Neal
• Sheryl Swoopes
• Sidney Poitier
• Smokey Robinson
• Sojourner Truth
• Sonny Liston
• Steve McNair
• Stevie Wonder
• Stokely Carmichael
• Sugar Ray Leonard
• Sugar Ray Robinson
• Tavis Smiley
• Teddy Pendergrass
• Terrence Howard
• Thandie Newton
• The Notorious B.I.G.
• Thelonious Monk
• Thomas Hearns
• Thurgood Marshall
• Thurman Thomas
• Tiger Woods
• Tina Turner
• Toni Morrison
• Tony Dorsett
• Tupac Shakur
• Tyler Perry
• Vanessa Williams
• Venus Williams
• Ving Rhames
• Viola Davis
• W. E. B. Du Bois
• Walt Frazier
• Walter Payton
• Warren Moon
• Wesley Snipes
• Whitney Houston
• Whoopi Goldberg
• Willie Mays
• Wilma Rudolph
• Wilt Chamberlain
• Wynton Marsalis
• Zora Neale Hurston
• A. Philip Randolph
• Aaron Neville
• Al Sharpton
• Alfre Woodard
• Alice Walker
• Althea Gibson
• Alvin Ailey
• Andre Braugher
• Andrew Young
• Angela Bassett
• Angela Davis
• Aretha Franklin
• Arthur Ashe
• Avery Brooks
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• Barack Obama
• Barbara Jordan
• Barry Bonds
• Barry Sanders
• Bayard Rustin
• Benjamin Banneker
• Berry Gordy
• Bessie Coleman
• Bessie Smith
• Betty Shabazz
• Bill Russell
• Billie Holiday
• Bobby Seale
• Booker T. Washington
• Brandy Norwood
• Busta Rhymes
• Cab Calloway
• Carl Weathers
• Carmelo Anthony
• Cassandra Wilson
• Cecil Fielder
• Chamillionaire
• Charles Rangel
• Charlie Ward
• Chris Tucker
• Chuck Berry
• Cicely Tyson
• Clarence Thomas
• Claudette Colvin
• Colin Powell
• Condoleezza Rice
• Coretta Scott King
• Cornel West
• Count Basie
• Cris Carter
• Crispus Attucks
• DaMarcus Beasley
• Damon Wayans
• Danny Glover
• Darius Rucker
• David Robinson
• Deacon Jones
• Debbie Allen
• Deion Sanders
• Denmark Vesey
• Dennis Rodman
• Denzel Washington
• Derek Jeter
• Derek Walcott
• Diahann Carroll
• Dinah Washington
• Dizzy Gillespie
• Dominique Dawes
• Dominique Wilkins
• Don Cheadle
• Dorothy Dandridge
• Duke Ellington
• Dwyane Wade
• Earl Campbell
• Eartha Kitt
• Eddie Murphy
• Elgin Baylor
• Elijah Muhammad
• Ella Fitzgerald
• Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
• Emmett Till
• Emmitt Smith
• Eric Dickerson
• Eric Holder
• Eriq La Salle
• Ernie Banks
• Ernie Davis
• Esther Rolle
• Evander Holyfield
• Flip Wilson
• Florence Griffith Joyner
• Floyd Patterson
• Forest Whitaker
• Franco Harris
• Frank Robinson
• Frank Thomas
• Fred Williamson
• Frederick Douglass
• Gabourey Sidibe
• Gale Sayers
• Gary Coleman
• George Clinton
• George Foreman
• George Gervin
• George Washington Carver
• Gloria Reuben
• Gordon Parks
• Gregory Hines
• Gwendolyn Brooks
• Hakeem Olajuwon
• Halle Berry
• Harriet Tubman
• Harry Belafonte
• Hattie McDaniel
• Henry Louis Gates
• Herbie Hancock
• Herman Cain
• Herschel Walker
• Howlin' Wolf
• Isaac Hayes
• Isiah Thomas
• Jackie Joyner-Kersee
• Jackie Robinson
• Jacob Lawrence
• Jada Pinkett-Smith
• James Baldwin
• James Brown
• James Earl Jones
• James Meredith
• James Weldon Johnson
• Jayson Williams
• Jean-Michel Basquiat
• Jennifer Hudson
• Museum Dedicated to African American History and Culture is Set to Open in 2016
• 6 Must-See Malcolm X Posters
• Scholarships for African Americans – Black Scholarships
• African-American Civil Rights Movement
• African Americans in WW2
• African American History
• Top 10 Most Famous Black Actors of All Time
• Top 10 Richest African Americans

• Humanities ›
• History & Culture ›
• African American History ›
• Major Figures and Events ›

Biography of Huey Newton, Co-Founder of the Black Panthers

Getty Images 

• Major Figures and Events
• The Black Freedom Struggle
• Important Figures
• Civil Rights
• The Institution of Slavery & Abolition
• Segregation and Jim Crow
• American History
• African History
• Ancient History and Culture
• Asian History
• European History
• Latin American History
• Medieval & Renaissance History
• Military History
• The 20th Century
• Women's History

Huey Newton was an African American political activist who co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. When Newton was convicted for the fatal shooting of a police officer, his imprisonment became a common cause among activists in the United States. The slogan "Free Huey" appeared on banners and buttons at protests across the country. He was later released after two re-trials resulted in hung juries.

Fast Facts: Huey Newton

• Known For : Co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense
• Born : February 17, 1942 in Monroe, Louisiana
• Died : August 23, 1989 in Oakland, California
• Education : Merritt College (A.A.), University of California at Santa Cruz (B.A., Ph.D.), Oakland City College (law classes, no degree), San Francisco Law School (law classes, no degree)
• Notable Quote : "Political power comes through the barrel of a gun."

Early Life and Education

Huey P. Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, on February 17, 1942. He was named after Huey P. Long , the former governor of Louisiana who became notorious as a radical populist in the early 1930s. In 1945, Newton's family moved to California, drawn by the job opportunities that arose in the Bay Area as a result of the wartime industrial boom. They struggled financially and moved around often throughout Newton's life.

He completed high school—which he later described as an experience that "nearly killed [his] urge to inquire"—without being able to read (he later taught himself). After high school, he earned an A.A. degree from Merritt College and took law school classes at Oakland City College.

Starting in his teen years and continuing through college, Newton was arrested for crimes like mostly petty crimes such as vandalism and burglary. In 1965, when he was 22 years old, Newton was arrested and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced to six months in jail. Most of his sentence was served in solitary confinement.

Founding the Black Panther Party

During his time at Oakland City College, Newton joined the Afro-American Association, which inspired him to become politically and socially conscious. He later said that his Oakland public education had made him feel "ashamed of being black," but that his shame began to transform into pride once he encountered Black activists. He also began reading radical activist literature, including works by Che Guevara and Malcolm X .

Newton soon realized that there were few organizations advocating for lower class African Americans in Oakland. In October 1966, he joined up with Bobby Seale to form a new group, which they called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense . The organization was focused on fighting police brutality in Oakland and San Francisco.

With Seale as chairman and Newton as "minister of defense," the Black Panthers quickly assembled a membership and began patrolling Oakland neighborhoods. When police were spotted interacting with Black citizens, the Panthers would approach and inform the civilians of their constitutional rights. Newton took part in such actions, sometimes while brandishing a law book.

The organization adopted a uniform of black leather jackets, black berets, and sunglasses. This distinct uniform, as well as their prominent display of guns and bandoliers of shotgun shells, made the Black Panthers highly noticeable. By the spring of 1967, stories about Newton and the Black Panthers began appearing in major publications.

Guns and Political Power

The Black Panthers encouraged Black citizens of Oakland to begin carrying firearms, citing their Constitutional right under the Second Amendment , and tensions between police and the Black Panthers continued to grow.

An article published in the New York Times on May 3, 1967 described an incident in which Newton, Seale, and about 30 other Black Panthers strode into the California capitol in Sacramento with their weapons prominently displayed. The story was headlined "Armed Negroes Protest Gun Bill." The Black Panthers had arrived in dramatic fashion to voice their opposition to a proposed law against carrying firearms. It seemed the law had been drafted specifically to curtail their activities.

Weeks later, in another article in the New York Times , Newton was described as being surrounded by armed followers in an apartment in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Newton was quoted as saying, "Political power comes through the barrel of a gun."

Arrest and Conviction

About a year after the Black Panthers first rose to prominence, Newton became entangled in a high-profile legal case. The case centered around the death of John Frey, who died after pulling over Huey Newton and a friend for a traffic stop. Newton was arrested at the scene. In September 1968, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and received a sentence of two to 15 years in prison.

Newton's incarceration became a major cause among young radicals and activists. "Free Huey" buttons and banners could be seen at protests and anti-war rallies nationwide, and rallies for Newton's release were held in numerous American cities. At the time, police actions against Black Panthers in other cities made headlines.

In May 1970, Newton was granted a new trial. After two trials were held and both resulted in hung juries, the case was dropped and Newton was released. The specific events, as well as Newton's potential culpability, surrounding John Frey's death remain uncertain.

Following his release from prison in 1970, Newton resumed leadership of the Black Panthers and began studying at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he earned a B.A. in 1974. After a period of relative quiet, Newton was charged with the murder of a teenage sex worker named Kathleen Smith. He was also arrested for assaulting his tailor. Newton fled to Cuba, where he lived in exile for three years.

In 1977, Newton returned to California, asserting that the political climate in the United States had changed enough that he could receive a fair trial. After juries were deadlocked, Newton was acquitted of the murder of Kathleen Smith. He returned to the Black Panther organization, and also returned to college. In 1980, he received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He wrote a thesis about the repression of the Black Panthers.

Death and Legacy

In the 1980s, Newton grappled with drug addiction and alcohol abuse. He remained involved with neighborhood programs pioneered by the Black Panthers. However, in 1985, he was arrested for embezzling funds. He was later arrested on a weapons charge, and was also suspected of being involved in the drug trade.

In the early hours of August 23, 1989, Newton was shot and killed on a street in Oakland, California. His killing was reported on the front page of the New York Times . Tyrone Robinson confessed to the murder, and it was concluded that the killing was connected to Newton's significant debt caused by his cocaine addiction.

Today, Newton's legacy is one of leadership within the Black Panther Party, as well as his controversial convictions and allegations of violence.

• Nagel, Rob. "Newton, Huey 1942–1989." Contemporary Black Biography, edited by Barbara Carlisle Bigelow, vol. 2, Gale, 1992, pp. 177-180. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
• "Huey P. Newton." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed., vol. 11, Gale, 2004, pp. 367-369. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
• Spencer, Robyn. "Newton, Huey P." Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, edited by Colin A. Palmer, 2nd ed., vol. 4, Macmillan Reference USA, 2006, pp. 1649-1651. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
• Associated Press. "Huey Newton Killed; Was a Co-Founder Of Black Panthers." New York Times, 23 August 1989, p. A1.
• Buursma, Bruce. "Newton Slain In Drug Dispute, Police Say." Chicago Tribune, 27 August 1989.
• Biography of Activist Bobby Seale
• Biography of Assata Shakur
• Black History Timeline: 1965–1969
• Biography of Fred Hampton, Black Panther Party Leader
• Biography of Amiri Baraka
• Biography of Stokely Carmichael, Civil Rights Activist
• 10 of the Most Important Black Women in U.S. History
• Black History Timeline: 1960–1964
• Black History Timeline: 1970–1979
• Black History Timeline: 1920–1929
• Black History Timeline: 1930–1939
• Black History Timeline: 1880–1889
• African American History Timeline: 1850 to 1859
• HBCU Timeline: 1837 to 1870
• African American History Timeline: 1840 to 1849
• Biography of Ma Rainey, Mother of the Blues