Revisiting the Panthers' Legacy
The Associated Press | Published October 22 & 31, 2021
Debut of Huey Newton bust spotlights an influential figure
It was the first time in decades that she’d seen his glow.
At the California foundry that fired a bust of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Percy Newton, his widow supervised as a bronze caster put finishing touches on what is to become the first permanent public art piece honoring the party in the city of its founding.
“It just glowed, like he did,” Fredrika Newton said. “His skin just glistened.”
The unveiling is scheduled for Sunday at Dr. Huey P. Newton Way and Mandela Parkway, near the spot where Newton was murdered in 1989. It comes as Panther alumni, descendants and others gathered to mark the 55th anniversary of a party that has long been both celebrated and vilified.
Newton remains a divisive figure. Many people still dismiss him as the leader of a band of beret-wearing, gun-toting hustlers -- and no doubt would deplore the prospect of an American city memorializing him with a statue. Others say his failings were a drag on the Black Power movement.
Still, many love him to this day, venerating him as a man who, with Bobby Seale, sought to unite all Black, impoverished and oppressed people against what they considered America’s racist, capitalistic and unjust interests. His influence on the Black Lives Matter movement is undeniable.
“Huey was maybe the only man I’ve ever known that was a truly free man,” said his older brother, Melvin Newton. “He was universal. He felt that no one could be on his back, if he stood up. And he always stood ram-rod straight.”
The youngest of seven children, Newton was born on Feb. 17, 1942, in Monroe, Louisiana.
His parents, Walter and Armelia Newton, moved the family to Oakland during a wave of the Great Migration, when the promise of work and less overt racial oppression lured thousands of African American families out of the Jim Crow South.
Newton struggled with his education, unable to read or write in high school even as he was arrested for petty crimes. It was only after graduation from high school that his real education began; a self-taught reader, he studied the works of W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin.
By his late 30s, he had a doctorate in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and he was well on his way to global fame and notoriety.
After meeting at a community college in Oakland, Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in October 1966.
Newton, the minister for defense, and Seale, the chairman, were frustrated with the largely Southern civil rights movement spearheaded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which they felt had failed to address the problems of Black people in the North and West.
Historian Robert W. Widell, Jr., who as a graduate student helped catalog Newton’s writings at Stanford University, said Newton was not a natural front man.
“My sense is that he sort of pushed himself out there to be this public, confrontational figure on the streets,” said Widell, now the history department chair at the University of Rhode Island.
“But I don’t know that that was his natural inclination, personality-wise. He was more of a theoretician. And I think he was pretty surprised at how rapidly (the Panthers) grew in exposure, whether it was fame or infamy.”
Newton and Seale wrote the party’s Ten Point Program, which laid out the party’s beliefs and its demands. The party’s Survival Programs were beloved in nearly 70 communities the U.S. and abroad where it had chapters. The Panthers were known, among other things, for free breakfast programs for schoolchildren and a pioneering sickle cell disease testing program.
Panthers’ antagonistic relationship with law enforcement has long cast a shadow over its legacy. In 1967, Newton was jailed for the shooting death of an Oakland police officer who had pulled him over. Although Newton was himself shot during the encounter and denied being responsible for the officer’s death, he was tried and convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 1968.
While imprisoned, the “Free Huey” campaign helped make him a symbol of racial injustice in the American criminal legal system.
His conviction was overturned in 1970, and he emerged from prison to discover the party had grown well beyond Oakland. Its image largely centered on armed self-defense, including violent and lethal encounters between Panthers and police, both in Oakland and around the country.
“I think we also need to recognize the very real ways in which a lot of the violence that surrounded the Panthers was instigated and provoked by law enforcement themselves,” Widell said.
Newton sought to rehabilitate the Panthers’ image, urging members to focus on the popular Survival Programs. He advocated for the rights of the Black community to defend itself from police, but changed his view that party members should openly carry guns as a check on police brutality.
Peter Coyote, the American actor and founder of the Diggers, a San Francisco improv troupe that worked with Panthers early on, grew close to Newton. The actor said the two communicated by phone almost weekly while Newton was incarcerated.
“He was funny,” Coyote said, “and he was also deadly serious. He knew he was putting his life at risk and he was playing for keeps. And when you meet people like that, you don’t forget them.”
Although it had been in decline for several years, the Black Panther Party didn’t fold until 1982. That was after years of police surveillance, as well as dwindling national membership, infighting, allegations of embezzlement and scandals in which Newton was implicated and criminally charged.
Newton’s addictions to alcohol and drugs overtook him. On Aug. 22, 1989, he was murdered in Oakland, California, by a drug dealer. He was 47.
Newton’s bust, Fredrika Newton said, is meant to celebrate someone whose life and contributions to American history mean much more than his decline and demise.
“I would like for people to see him as a total human being,” said Newton, co-founder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. “That he wasn’t just an iconic figure in a wicker chair. This was a man with vulnerabilities, with feelings, with insecurities, with frailties, just like anybody.”
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Decades later, a new look at Black Panthers and their legacy
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — It once would have been unthinkable for a city to erect a monument to Huey P. Newton.
The Black Panther Party co-founder was feared and hated by many Americans, and party members were dismissed as racist, gun-toting militants — Black avengers who believed violence was as American as cherry pie.
But the unthinkable has happened — in Oakland, the city of the party’s founding 55 years ago. In an unrelenting deluge on an October Sunday, Newton’s widow Fredrika and sculptor Dana King unveiled a bronze bust of Newton.
It is true that aside from Oakland, where the Panthers were born and Newton was murdered, there are few places where such a bust would be welcome; there is probably no other place in the world that could place his statue at an intersection of Dr. Huey P. Newton Way and Mandela Parkway, named for the late South African revolutionary Nelson Mandela.
And it would be wrong to suggest that the Panthers are enjoying a resurgence, or even a moment; the party disbanded almost 40 years ago.
But it is also true that in 2021, some activists and historians are taking another look at the legacy of the Panthers through a less-freighted lens. The Panthers, they say, were a harbinger of today’s identity politics, helped shape progressivism, and have served as grandfathers and grandmothers to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“You have the detractors who only see (the Panthers) as a militia, and then you have the folks who are actually happy for that because the times required it,” said Robyn Spencer, an associate professor of history at Lehman College in New York City.
She said the Panthers and many of their contemporaries set out an agenda with a clarity that is rare even today.
“We have to have a critical perspective on what these organizations did,” she said. “It’s not that we have to defend them because they were attacked so viciously by the state. This moment that we’re in now requires us to be clear politically, to try and cut through the weeds, and to not be nostalgic.”
Much of the party’s story has often been overshadowed by its association with violence. The Black Panther Party has been seen as an organization that sought war with police, a group doomed by infighting, infiltration and corruption among its leaders.
Yet over its 15 years of operation, the party and its politics were a training ground and an inspiration for a generation of Black, Latino, Asian, Native American and white people who hold public office or public platforms today. Some of the party’s biggest accomplishments, like its community service programs, helped transform public education and health care.
Fredrika Newton, who co-founded the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation in Oakland, is among those who want to retell the Panthers story for a new generation. She said the bronze bust is just a start of a larger effort to see the Black Power movement take its place in history with other, less confrontational actors of the civil rights movement. Among her goals: recognition of Panther sites by the U.S. National Park Service.
“You’re hearing more about the Black Panther Party, and Huey’s contributions to (Black) liberation as a thought leader, than you’ve ever heard before,” she said. “There’s a hunger for it. We’re just on the precipice.”
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After meeting at a community college in Oakland, Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in October 1966. Newton was the party’s minister for defense and Seale was the party chairman.
Together, they wrote the party’s Ten Point Program, laying out the party’s beliefs. Among their demands: Freedom to determine the destiny of the Black community, economic empowerment through full employment and wealth redistribution, an educational system inclusive of the Black experience, and an end to brutality and fatal encounters between Black people and police.
The party became famous in its early years for its uniform: men and women in matching black berets and black leather jackets, sometimes accessorized by long-barrel shotguns. And there were the Panther formations, marches and patrols, meant as a show of discipline and strength.
Police departments took Panthers’ anti-police rhetoric and name calling as more than just bravado. As recently as 2016, when pop icon Beyoncé and her backup dancers performed in the Super Bowl halftime show near San Francisco dressed in black leather get-ups and berets as a clear tribute to the Panthers, some law enforcement groups took offense.
A lesser-known fact was that a majority of the party’s membership, as well as its leadership outside of the central organizing committee in Oakland, were Black women. The party struggled with sexism and misogyny, although less so as it grew across the country. Some of its most famous alumni include Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis and Erika Huggins. Perhaps not coincidentally, women are the most prominent leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement.
In interviews, former Panther members acknowledged that the party’s very name drove perceptions that it only operated by force and intimidation. The party eventually dropped “for Self Defense” from its name. But those words also meant nutrition, health care and political education for the Black community, said Huggins, who was the first woman to lead a chapter of the Panther Party.
“There was a conversation about the posture, that we didn’t have to be paramilitary to let people know we were in defense of our community,” Huggins said. She ran the party-sponsored Oakland Community School for children from 1973 to 1981.
“We stopped wearing what you call the iconic uniform after about three years,” she said. “People said to us, ‘Why are you making yourself separate from us? You’re just like us.’”
Largely due to its “Survival Programs,” the party was embraced in nearly 70 communities across the U.S. and abroad where it had chapters, opened offices, provided free health care clinics to residents and free breakfast programs for schoolchildren, and published Black Panther newspapers. Also among its 65 programs were pioneering sickle cell disease testing research, free food and clothing distribution, transportation service for families visiting incarcerated loved ones, and the escorts for seniors who needed assistance getting to a supermarket or a pharmacy.
Katherine Campbell, who first volunteered with the Panther newspaper and the free breakfast program in San Francisco as a teenager, said the party’s activities didn’t merit its targeting by law enforcement.
“We were supposed to have been a threat to the government,” said Campbell, who eventually became a party member. “Can you imagine that feeding some children is a threat to the government? But it took off. Little did we know, we were going to make history.”
She and others said press and other media organizations played a role in demonizing the party, at times unquestioningly accepting police narratives or the FBI’s opinion that the party presented “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.”
Panthers were aggressively surveilled by the FBI, and the agency’s infamous and illegal COINTELPRO effort included infiltration and intimidation of Panthers groups across the country. It sowed paranoia, distrust and violence within the party. Whenever the FBI shared intel with police departments, members say, it preceded the assault, torture, arrest, imprisonment and deaths of Panthers across the country.
“Because the Panthers sought to be the antidote to (police) violence, they were often challenged to violence,” said former Black Panther Party attorney Fred Hiestand.
The narrative continues in places like the Officer Down Memorial Page, a website dedicated to honoring law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.
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