Huey Newton left high school unable to read and later earned a PhD
Huey P. Newton graduated from an Oakland high school in 1959 functionally illiterate. He taught himself to read with his brother's poetry and Plato's Republic, co-founded the Black Panther Party at 24, and in 1980 completed a doctorate in social philosophy. His parents had named him after Louisiana's Huey Long.
Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1942, the youngest child of a sharecropper and Baptist preacher. The family joined the second wave of the Great Migration to Oakland, California, where they were poor and moved often, though he said he never lacked food or shelter. He later wrote that no teacher ever sparked his curiosity. Reading the Republic, he said, set him questioning everything around him. At Merritt College he helped get the first African American history course onto the curriculum and read Marx, Fanon, Malcolm X and Mao.
There he met Bobby Seale, and in October 1966 they founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense; after a casual conversation Seale became chairman and Newton minister of defense. Their Ten-Point Program demanded better housing, jobs and education for Black Americans, and the party argued that force, or its threat, might be needed for change. Members once walked armed into the California Legislature to protest a bill aimed at disarming them. Seale recalled that they funded early weapons by selling copies of Mao's little red book at Berkeley.
The party's community work reached further than its guns. Under Newton it ran more than 60 programmes, including food banks, clinics, sickle cell testing, buses for prisoners' families and an ambulance service. Its Free Breakfast for Children fed thousands of children a day in the early 1970s, and its Oakland Community School taught 150 children from poor neighbourhoods. In prison in 1978 he befriended the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, and the two later co-wrote an analysis of crew self-deception in the 1982 Air Florida crash.
His record was also violent and contested. In 1968 he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter over the 1967 shooting death of Oakland police officer John Frey; the verdict was reversed in 1970 and, after two hung juries, charges were dropped. He was tried but not convicted in another killing, and was jailed at different times for weapons and embezzlement offences, including a 1989 no-contest plea over a $15,000 state check. He was murdered in 1989.
Source: Huey P. Newton
