Huey Percy Newton (17 February 1942 – 22 August 1989) was an African-American black nationalist leader and the co-founder of the Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale. He was murdered by the Black Guerrilla Family in 1989.
Biography
Huey Percy Newton was born in Monroe, Ouachita Parish, Louisiana on 17 February 1942, the son of a Baptist preacher who named him after Huey Long. As a result of severe anti-Black violence in Ouachita, the family relocated to Oakland, California during the Great Migration, and Newton was arrested for gun possession and vandalism at the age of 14 and graduated from high school in 1959 without being able to read. He later taught himself to read by reading Plato's The Republic, and he graduated from Merritt College in 1966. Newton became a Marxist in college, and, in October 1966, he and Bobby Seale co-founded the Black Panther Party, with Seale becoming Chairman and Newton becoming Minister of Defense. The two men outlined a "Ten-Point Program" which included better housing, jobs, and education for African-Americans, and he attempted to gradually transform street criminals into revolutionaries and engaged in community service. Under Newton, the BPP operated food banks, medical clinics, sickle cell anemia tests, prison busing, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing cooperates, an ambulance service, and a Free Breakfast for Children program. In 1968, after killing policeman John Frey a year earlier, Newton was sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison, and he was released in May 1970. Newton later disavowed armed struggle because of its alienation of African-American civilians from the BPP, and Eldridge Cleaver and other fanatical BPP revolutionaries left to form the Black Liberation Army as a result. He and Elaine Brown later oversaw the murder of BPP bookkeeper Betty Van Patter on 13 December 1974 after she threatened to reveal that the BPP doctored its books and had major tax problems, although he was never convicted of her murder. He fled to Cuba in 1974 after murdering a 17-year-old Oakland prostitute who had innocently called him "baby", a child nickname he hated, and he returned to the United States in 1977 to stand trial. In October 1977, three Black Panthers attempted to kill prosecution witness Crystal Gray ahead of Newton's trial, but, after they failed, Newton attempted to have one of them, Nelson Malloy, killed to tie up loose ends; Malloy was ultimately paralyzed. Nevertheless, Gray was intimidated into not testifying against Newton. In 1977, he returned to prison after illegally possessing a gun, and he was found guilty of the same charge in 1979 and sentenced in 1981. Newton would go on to earn his PhD in philosophy at UC Santa Cruz in 1980, and he advocated for Black self-defense, Palestinian statehood, and world communism. On 22 August 1989, Newton was shot three times in the head by a member of the Black Guerrilla Family gang in a crack and violence-plagued West Oakland neighborhood; the gunman, Tyrone Robinson, claimed that he had killed Newton in self-defense, and that he had been seeking to advance in the BGF in order to get a crack franchise.