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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 PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P xY? (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WCxR oRL, England Penguin Ireland, x$ St Stephen's Green, Dublin x, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), xjo Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 31x4, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 1 to 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 063X, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, X4 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg xt96, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WCxR oRL, England 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 Printed in the United States of America Set in Sabon Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic edi­ tions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. 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

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