![]() He was also a petty thief who took, to say the least, an unusual path to perfect his craft. Thus, from his earliest youth, until adulthood, Newton was in a war footing. One can almost hear this Greek chorus, whispered with a mix of fear and fascination: ‘Who that boy?’ “Who you talkin’ bout?”, “That pretty boy, right there!” “Oh – don’t mess with him - that’s Crazy Huey.” (Brown 252)Īs a direct consequence of these street battles, the young Newton boy earns a rather unflattering nickname: “Crazy Huey”. After my first fights though, I recognized that they bled like me….by the time I became a teenager, I was challenging the first fool that looked at me wrong, and walking around with an ice pick in a paper bag. ![]() In describing his thinking at the time, Elaine Brown, his lover and political comrade, quoted him as saying:Įvery blood on that street was a potential threat, unless I knew he was a friend. Lessons learned in beardless youth became the matrix of the man he became. The English poet, William Wordsworth (1770- 1850) wrote, “The child is father of the man”. He also learned that the best defense was often a stiff offense. He would throw his fear of the biggest guy in the bunch, in the form of his fists, for big brother Walter taught him that the biggest guy often had the biggest fear -bigger that his own. Keyed by his fear, Huey would follow these directions explicitly. Walter schooled him to attack the biggest guy in the pack, and how to prevail. For while his father thought the name Huey was a respectful tribute to a gifted politician, to the hard, urban streets of Oakland, it was an invitation to an ass-whipping.Ī scared boy does what’s been done since the dawn of human time. He would enter the streets of Oakland, a slender, short, beautiful boy, and the prospect terrified him. His family, like tens of thousands of others, formed the last legs of the Great Migration, of Black flight from the Apartheid South to the North and the West. Perhaps this accounted for his self-consciousness, his wariness of speaking in public. Like many Blacks in California, Huey would carry the rhythms of the South in hi speech, and when nervous, it would rise to a disconcerting twang. Huey Percy Newton was born in Louisiana in 1942, named for the populist LA Governor, Huey Pierce Long (1893-1935) know in the state as “The Kingfish”. It is in that spirit that we examine the life of Huey P. It is up to the oppressed, of every generation, to plumb the depths of history, and to excavate the ore of understanding, to teach us, not what happened yesterday, but to teach us why today is like it is, so that we may learn ideas to change it.įor history belongs not so much to those who have lived it, but more so to those who have inherited it. ![]() History, it seems, is many things, but kind to the oppressed, it is not. To those of us now known as ‘old heads’ and elders, such a transition from then to now seems almost unimaginable, but alas, looking out into the present is proof positive that the old saying, “History is written by the victors”, has more than a grain of truth to it. To those of subsequent eras, youth in their 20s, the name is largely unknown, as is the name of its greatest creation: The Black Panther Party. Newton evokes an era of mass resistance, of Black popular protest and of the rise of revolutionary organizations across the land. To those of us who were alive – and sentient, the name Huey P. ![]()
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