Revolutionary Suicide

355 Pages·54.313 MB·English

by  Huey P. Newton

HUEY
PREACHES.
PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION
REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE
huey p. newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, on February
17,1942, to Walter and Armelia Newton. He is the cofounder of
the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist organization the Black Pan­
ther Party, and was the Party’s ranking leader and chief ideologue
and strategist. In 1966, Newton enrolled in Merritt College in
Oakland, where he became a member of the Phi Beta Sigma fra­
ternity, led the effort to establish the first black history course,
and met Bobby Seale. In October 1966, Newton and Seale
founded what was then known as the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense. The Party urged members to challenge the status
quo with armed patrols of the impoverished streets of black Oak­
land, and to form coalitions with organizations representing other
oppressed groups. Internationally, Newton directed the Party to
form coalitions with the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cubans, as
with, among others, African national liberation organizations
like FRELIMO in Mozambique, ZANU in Zimbabwe, and the
ANC in South Africa.
Within one year of the Party’s founding, in October 1967,
Newton was wounded and arrested by Oakland police and
charged with the murder of a police officer, spawning the world­
wide protest that came to be known as the “Free Huey Move­
ment.” Convicted of manslaughter, Newton was released in July
1970 for a new trial. He would be tried on this charge several
times thereafter but never convicted. Upon his release, he led the
Party’s more than forty chapters to build up its community service
programs, called Survival Programs, operating under the slogan
“Survival Pending Revolution.”
From the outset, the Party was a target for elimination by the
U.S. government under the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO (coun­
terintelligence) program, which openly stated that its agenda was
to disrupt or destroy the Party. By 1981 the Party had been driven
into its demise. In the aftermath, Newton earned a Ph.D. from the
University of California, Santa Cruz, publishing his dissertation
War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in the United
States. Prior to that, Newton had authored Revolutionary Suicide
and To Die for the People, in addition to numerous other treatises
and articles, and was the coauthor with psychoanalyst Erik Erik­
son of the book In Search of Common Ground. On August 22,
1989, Newton was tragically shot to death on the blighted streets
of West Oakland, leaving behind his widow, Fredrika Newton.
fredrika newton was raised in Berkeley, California, by her
mother, Arlene Slaughter. She attended Wesleyan University,
where she earned her B.A. Prior to that, in 1969, as a young
teenager, Mrs. Newton joined the Black Panther Party, and in
1970 she met Huey P. Newton. In 1984, after the demise of the
Party, they married. In the wake of Huey P. Newton’s death in
1989, Fredrika Newton, along with former Black Panther leader
David Hilliard, established the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, a
nonprofit educational corporation. She continues to serve as the
foundation’s president, and oversees its archive, materials publica­
tions, and other activities, including a number of community-based
programs.
HUEY P. NEWTON
WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF
J. HERMAN BLAKE
Revolutionary Suicide
Introduction by fredrika newton
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1973
This edition with an introduction by Fredrika Newton published in Penguin Books 1009
13 15 17 19 xo 18 16 14
Copyright © Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 1973
Introduction copyright © Fredrika Newton, X009
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Newton, Huey P.
Revolutionary suicide / Huey P. Newton, with J. Herman Blake ; introduction by Fredrika Newton,
p. cm. — (Penguin classics deluxe edition)
Originally published: New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, J973.
ISBN 978-O-14-3IO53X-9
1. Newton, Huey P. x. Black Panther Party—Biography. 3. Black power—United States.
4. African Americans—Biography. I. Blake, J. Herman. IL Title.
E185.97.N48A3 X009
3xx.4’xo9X—dcxx
(B| XOO9OO30I7
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For my mother and father, who have given me strength
and made me unafraid of death and therefore unafraid of life
Contents
Introduction by FREDRIKA newton ix
REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE
A Manifesto
Revolutionary Suicide: The Way of Liberation i
PART ONE
1 Starting Out 9
2 Losing 17
3 Growing 21
4 Changing 28
5 Choosing 3 5
6 High School 45
PART TWO
7 Reading 53
8 Moving On 56
9 College and the Afro-American Association 60
10 Learning 67
11 The Brothers on the Block 74
12 Scoring 79
13 Loving 93
PART THREE
14 Freedom 103
15 Bobby Seale 109
16 The Founding of the Black Panther Party 115
viii CONTENTS
17 Patrolling 120
18 Eldridge Cleaver 136
19 Denzil Dowell 145
20 Sacramento and the “Panther Bill” 153
21 Growing Pains l6O
PART FOUR
22 Raising Consciousness 173
23 Crisis: October 2.8, 1967 l8l
24 Aftermath 188
25 Strategy 200
PART FIVE
26 Trial 2-15
27 The Penal Colony 266
PART SIX
28 Release 295
29 Rebuilding 317
30 Fallen Comrade 33i
31 Surviving 339
32 China 348
33 The Defection of Eldridge and Reactionary
Suicide 354
Epilogue: I Am We 359
Introduction
It has been twenty years since my late husband, Huey P. New­
ton, was shot and killed on the same streets of Oakland, Cali­
fornia, that had witnessed his dramatic ascent as leader of the
Black Panther Party two decades earlier. From 1966 when the
Party was founded to its demise around 1980, Huey stood at
the vanguard of the Black Liberation Movement. For most
people then and now this legendary role is best personified in a
photograph taken at the behest of Eldridge Cleaver, who sought
to make a militant public statement about the Party and its
leader. In the picture, Huey is seated in a tall wicker chair and
looking defiantly at the camera, a rifle held in his right hand
and a spear in his left. Eldridge’s intended message was a sym­
bolic bridging of the spear and the gun, or, put another way, the
transference of the cultural nationalism of the past to a revolu­
tionary culture in the future. This volatile image resonated
deeply in an era marked by scores of riots and rebellions in
black communities across the country. Later, when the photo­
graph appeared on the cover of Revolutionary Suicide, the im­
age of Huey as the intrepid African American freedom fighter
was further cemented in the public’s consciousness. As with all
controversial figures, however, there were complicated and un­
seen dimensions beneath the famous public persona, which his
autobiography makes abundantly clear.
When Revolutionary Suicide was first published in 1973,
readers were offered a rare glimpse into the private life of the
Party’s founder. Not that people hadn’t been reading and hear­
ing all about Huey for years. He started making local headlines
when he and Bobby Seale launched the Black Panther Party in