Early life and education[edit]

Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana. He was the youngest of seven children of Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, a sharecropper and Baptist lay preacher. His parents named him after former Governor of Louisiana Huey Long. In 1945, the family migrated to Oakland, California, as part of the second wave of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South to the Northeast, Midwest and West.^[3] The Newton family was close-knit, but quite poor, and often relocated throughout the San Francisco Bay Area during Newton’s childhood. Despite this, Newton said he never went without food and shelter as a child. As a teenager, he was arrested several times for criminal offenses, including gun possession and vandalism at age 14.^[4] Growing up in Oakland, Newton stated that he was “made to feel ashamed of being black.”^[3] In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, he wrote,

During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.

Newton graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1959 without being able to read, although he later taught himself; The Republic by Plato was the first book he read.^[5] Newton also attended Merritt College, where he earned an Associate of Arts degree in 1966. He then attended San Francisco Law School, and the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and, in 1980, a Ph.D.^[6] After Newton taught himself to read, he started questioning everything. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, he states: “Most of all, I questioned what was happening in my own family and in the community around me.”^[7] This was the start of his involvement in the civil rights movement.

Founding of the Black Panther Party[edit]

As a student at Merritt College in Oakland, Newton became involved in politics in the Bay Area. He joined the Afro-American Association (AAA), became a prominent member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, Beta Tau chapter; and played a role in getting the first African-American history course adopted as part of the college’s curriculum. He read the works of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, Émile Durkheim, and Che Guevara. During his time at Merritt College, he met Bobby Seale, and the two organized the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in October 1966.^[3] Based on a casual conversation, Seale became Chairman and Newton became Minister of Defense.^[8] Newton learned about black history from Donald Warden (who later would change his name to Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al-Mansour), the leader of the party, but later decided that he offered solutions that didn’t work. In his autobiography, Newton says, “The mass media, the oppressors, give him public exposure for only one reason: he will lead the people away from the truth of their situation.”^[9]

The Black Panther Party was an African-American left-wing organization working for the right of self-defense for African Americans in the United States. Many of the Black Panther Party’s beliefs were greatly influenced by Malcolm X: “Therefore, the words on this page cannot convey the effect that Malcolm has had on the Black Panther Party, although, as far as I am concerned, the testament to his life work.”^[10] The Party achieved national and international renown through their deep involvement in the Black Power movement and the politics of the 1960s and 1970s.^[11] The Party’s political goals, including better housing, jobs, and education for African Americans, were documented in their Ten-Point Program, a set of guidelines to the Black Panther Party’s ideals and ways of operation. The group believed that violence—or the threat of it—might be needed to bring about social change. They sometimes made news with a show of force, as they did when they entered the California Legislature fully armed in order to protest a gun bill.^[12]

Newton adopted what he termed “revolutionary humanism“.^[13] Although he had earlier visited Nation of Islam mosques, he wrote that “I have had enough of religion and could not bring myself to adopt another one. I needed a more concrete understanding of social conditions. References to God or Allah did not satisfy my stubborn thirst for answers.”^[14] Later, however, he stated that “As far as I am concerned, when all of the questions are not answered, when the extraordinary is not explained, when the unknown is not known, then there is room for God because the unexplained and the unknown is God.”^[15] Newton later decided to join the Church^{[clarification needed]} after the party disbanded during his marriage to Fredrika.^[16]

Newton would frequent pool halls, campuses, bars and other locations deep in the black community where people gathered in order to organize and recruit for the Panthers. While recruiting, Newton sought to educate those around him about the legality of self-defense. One of the reasons, he argued, why black people continued to be persecuted was their lack of knowledge of the social institutions that could be made to work in their favor. In Newton’s autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, he writes, “Before I took Criminal Evidence in school, I had no idea what my rights were.” Newton also wrote in his autobiography, “I tried to transform many of the so-called criminal activities going on in the street into something political, although this had to be done gradually.” He attempted to channel these “daily activities for survival” into significant community actions. Eventually, the illicit activities of a few members would be superimposed on the social program work performed by the Panthers, and this mischaracterization would lose them support in both the white and black communities.^[17][18]

Newton and the Panthers started a number of social programs in Oakland, including founding the Oakland Community School, which provided high-level education to 150 children from impoverished urban neighborhoods. Other Panther programs included the Free Breakfast for Children Program and others that offered dances for teenagers and training in martial arts. According to Oakland County Supervisor John George: “Huey could take street-gang types and give them a social consciousness.”^[19]