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. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, he wrote,ĭuring those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Growing up in Oakland, Newton stated that he was "made to feel ashamed of being black." As a teenager, he was arrested several times for criminal offenses, including gun possession and vandalism at age 14. Despite this, Newton said he never went without food and shelter as a child. They moved often within the San Francisco Bay Area during Newton's childhood. The Newton family was close-knit, but quite poor. Īs a response to the violence, the Newton family migrated to Oakland, California, participating in the second wave of the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South. This was the fifth-highest total of lynchings of any county in the South. Most murders had taken place around the turn of the 20th century. According to a 2015 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, from 1877 to 1950, a total of 37 black people were documented as lynched in that parish. Monroe is located in Louisiana's Ouachita Parish, which has a history of violence against blacks since Reconstruction. His parents named him after Huey Long, former Governor of Louisiana. Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1942 during World War II, the youngest child of Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, a sharecropper and Baptist lay preacher. Huey Newton's senior year yearbook photo, 1959 Newton was known for being an advocate of self-defense and used his position as a leader within the Black Panther Party to welcome women and LGBT people into the party, holding the belief that homosexuals "might be the most oppressed people". In 1989, he was murdered in Oakland, California, by Tyrone Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family. Newton expanded his literacy by reading Plato's Republic and earned a PhD in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program in 1980. Later in life, he was also accused of murdering Kathleen Smith and Betty Patter, although he was never convicted for either death. In May 1970, the conviction was reversed and after two subsequent trials ended in hung juries, the charges were dropped. In 1968, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for Frey's death and sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. In 1967, he was involved in a shootout which led to the death of police officer John Frey and injuries to himself and another police officer. Newton also co-founded the Black Panther newspaper service, which became one of America's most widely distributed African-American newspapers. The most famous of these programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program which fed thousands of impoverished children daily during the early 1970s. Under Newton's leadership, the Black Panther Party founded over 60 community support programs (renamed survival programs in 1971) including food banks, medical clinics, sickle cell anemia tests, prison busing for families of inmates, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing cooperatives, and their own ambulance service. Newton crafted the Party's ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale in 1966. Huey Percy Newton (Febru– August 22, 1989) was an African-American revolutionary, notable as founder of the Black Panther Party.
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