Huey P. Newton

Huey P. Newton was born on February 17, 1942, in Monroe, Los Angeles. He was the youngest of 7 children. He moved with his family at a young age to Oakland, California. When he graduated from high school, he claims he was functionally illiterate and that he taught himself to read by reading Plato's Republic 6 times.

In 1966, he and Bobby Seale co-founded The Black Panther Party for Self-Defence. They initiated The Ten Point Plan that Huey drafted and scattered about through the Black community in Oakland and eventually throughout chapters founded all over the country. The Panthers were most notorious for walking the streets armed with guns. Huey was a legal scholar and he saw that folks were able to carry guns in the street as long as they were registered, not concealed and not pointed in a threatning manner. Soon after that the Californian state regislature called an emergency session and changed the law. The Panthers went to Sacramento with their guns to protest.

Then in 1967, Huey got into a confrontation with an Oakland police officer which left him wounded, another officer wounded and another officer dead. Charged with murder, he was on trial for three years and eventually acquitted. An international "Free Huey" movement developed during his incarceration. Released from prison -- triumphantly -- Huey was placed in a "high security lock-up", also known as the "Penthouse" apartment. He called it the "Stucko cell." From one prisoner to another. Although "the Penthouse" was right across Lake Meriden from the jail, Huey was held for the better part of his 33 months. For his 30th birthday he was given a telescope with a camera attached, and spent hours at his window looking and taking pictures of his old cell.

In 1974, he was charged with the murder of a prostitute and pistol-whipping his tailor. Both offenses were allegedly committed because both had the audacity to call Huey "Baby." He fled to Cuba thinking there were no way he was going to get a fair trial. There for three years, he came back in 1977. He was again acquitted of both charges. He then knuckled down and pursued his Ph.D. at the Universiy of Californnia at Santa Cruz.

Huey tragically, however, spent the majority of the 1980's dealing with some very serious personal vices, self-acknowledged. He was addicted to all forms of cocaine, finally to crack. In August of 1989, he was murdered in front of a crack house at age 47. Killed by a young drug dealer, Tyrone Robinson, who was a beneficiary of the Panther Free Children's Breakfast program when he was a child.