His conviction was overturned in 1970, and he emerged from prison to discover the party had grown well beyond Oakland. While imprisoned, the “Free Huey” campaign helped make him a symbol of racial injustice in the American criminal legal system. Although Newton was himself shot during the encounter and denied being responsible for the officer’s death, he was tried and convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 1968. In 1967, Newton was jailed for the shooting death of an Oakland police officer who had pulled him over. Panthers’ antagonistic relationship with law enforcement has long cast a shadow over its legacy.
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The Panthers were known, among other things, for free breakfast programs for school children and a pioneering sickle cell disease testing program. The party’s Survival Programs were beloved in nearly 70 communities the U.S. Newton and Seale wrote the party’s Ten Point Program, which laid out the party’s beliefs and its demands. And I think he was pretty surprised at how rapidly (the Panthers) grew in exposure, whether it was fame or infamy.” “But I don’t know that that was his natural inclination, personality-wise. “My sense is that he sort of pushed himself out there to be this public, confrontational figure on the streets,” said Widell, now the history department chair at the University of Rhode Island.
Widell, Jr., who as a graduate student helped catalog Newton’s writings at Stanford University, said Newton was not a natural front man. Martin Luther King Jr., which they felt had failed to address the problems of Black people in the North and West. Newton, the minister for defense, and Seale, the chairman, were frustrated with the largely Southern civil rights movement spearheaded by the Rev. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin.īy his late 30s, he had a doctorate in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and he was well on his way to global fame and notoriety.Īfter meeting at a community college in Oakland, Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in October 1966. It was only after graduation from high school that his real education began a self-taught reader, he studied the works of W.E.B. Newton struggled with his education, unable to read or write in high school even as he was arrested for petty crimes. His parents, Walter and Armelia Newton, moved the family to Oakland during a wave of the Great Migration, when the promise of work and less overt racial oppression lured thousands of African American families out of the Jim Crow south. The youngest of seven children, Newton was born on Feb. He felt that no one could be on his back, if he stood up. “Huey was maybe the only man I’ve ever known that was a truly free man,” said his older brother, Melvin Newton. His influence on the Black Lives Matter movement is undeniable. Still, many love him to this day, venerating him as a man who, with Bobby Seale, sought to unite all Black, impoverished and oppressed people against what they considered America’s racist, capitalistic and unjust interests. Others say his failings were a drag on the Black Power movement.
Many people still dismiss him as the leader of a band of beret-wearing, gun-toting hustlers - and no doubt would deplore the prospect of an American city memorializing him with a statue. It comes as Panther alumni, descendants and others gathered to mark the 55th anniversary of a party that has long been both celebrated and vilified. Newton Way and Mandela Parkway, near the spot where Newton was murdered in 1989. The unveiling is scheduled for Sunday at Dr. “It just glowed, like he did,” Fredrika Newton said. It was the first time in decades that she’d seen his glow.Īt the California foundry that fired a bust of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Percy Newton, his widow supervised as a bronze caster put finishing touches on what is to become the first permanent public art piece honoring the party in the city of its founding.
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