Huey P. Newton

I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism.

Huey Percy Newton (17 February 1942 – 22 August 1989) was co-founder and leader of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, an African-American organization that began in October 1966 in Oakland, California.

Quotes

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.

You can kill my body, but you can't kill my soul. My soul will live forever!

Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic—by whatever means—has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society's inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence.

• An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment.
  • "In Defense of Self-Defense" (20 June 1967)

• To die for the racists is lighter than a feather, but to die for the people is heavier than any mountain and deeper than any sea.
  • To Die for the People (1972), paraphrasing Mao Zedong's "Serve the People"

• My foes have called me bum, hoodlum, criminal. Some have even called me nigger. I imagine now they'll at least have to call me Dr. Nigger.
  • Press conference (July 1980), quoted in Hugh Pearsons (1994) The Shadow of the Panther p. 288

• When you deal with a man, deal with his most valuable possession, his life. There's play and there's the deep flow. I like to take things to the deep flow of play, because everything is a game, serious and nonserious at the same time. So play life like it's a game.
  • quoted in David Hilliard (2006) Huey: Spirit of the Panther, p. 46

• You can kill my body, but you can't kill my soul. My soul will live forever!
  • Last words, quoted in Hugh Pearsons (1994) The Shadow of the Panther, p. 315

• To us power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner.
  • Black Capitalism Re-analyzed I: June 5, 1971 in The Huey P. Newton Reader, p. 277

Revolutionary Suicide (1973)

• I do not think life will change for the better without an assault on the establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.
  • p. 3

• Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death.
  • p. 3

• The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.
  • p. 3

• I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism.
  • p. 4

• The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact.
  • p. 4

• Some see our struggle as a symbol of the trend toward suicide among Blacks. Scholars and academics, in particular, have been quick to make this accusation. They fail to perceive differences. Jumping off a bridge is not the same as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of an oppressive army. When scholars call our actions suicidal, they should be logically consistent and describe all historical revolutionary movements in the same way. Thus the American colonialists, the French of the late eighteenth century, the Russians of 1917, the Jews of Warsaw, the Cubans, the NLF, the North Vietnamese—any people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force—are suicidal.
  • p. 5

• My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.
  • p. 190

• I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.
  • p. 196

To Die For The People

• Men were not created in order to obey laws. Laws are created to obey men. They are established by men and should serve men. The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society. There is no disagreements about this function of law in any circle-the disagreement arises from the question of which men laws are to serve. Such lawmakers ignore the fact that it is the duty of the poor and unrepresented to construct rules and laws that serve their interest better. Rewriting unjust laws is a basic human right and fundamental obligation.
  • "In Defense of Self-defense" I (June 20, 1967)

• The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people.
  • "In Defense of Self-defense" I (June 20, 1967)

• When a mechanic wants to fix a broken-down car engine, he must have the necessary tools to do the job. When the people move for liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun.
  • "In Defense of Self-defense" I (June 20, 1967)

• The blood, sweat, tears, and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be the perpetual peace for all mankind.
  • "In Defense of Self-defense" I (June 20, 1967)

• Many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover something he does not have.
  • The Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements (April 15, 1970)

• We realized at a very early point in our development that revolution is a process. It is not a particular action, nor is it a conclusion. It is a process.
  • On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community

• In their quest for freedom and in their attempts to prevent the oppressor from striping them of all the things they need to exist, the people see things as moving from A to B to C; they do not see things as moving from A to Z.
  • On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community

• We must ally ourselves with the oppressed communities of the world. We cannot make our stand as nationalists, we cannot even make our stand as internationalists. We must place our future hopes upon the philosophy of intercommunalism, a philosophy which holds that the rise of imperialism in America transforms all other nations into oppressed communities. In revolutionary love we must make common cause with these oppressed communities.
  • Resolutions and Declarations (1970)

War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (June 1980)

Doctoral dissertation submitted to the Faculty of University of California Santa Cruz, June 1, 1980 Full text online

• Always, the rulers of an order, consistent with their own interests and solely of their own design, have employed what to them seemed to be the most optimal and efficient means of maintaining unquestioned social and economic advantage. Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic—by whatever means—has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society's inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence.

• Direct and unconcealed brute force and violence—although clearly persisting in many quarters of society—are today less acceptable to an increasingly sophisticated public, a public significantly remote from the methods of social and economic control common to early America. This is not a statement, however, that there is such increased civility that Americans can no longer tolerate social control of the country's under classes by force of violence; rather, it is an observation that Americans today appear to be more inclined to issue endorsement to agents and agencies of control which carry out the task, while permitting the benefactors of such control to retain a semidignified, clean-hands image of themselves.

• It is a fundamental assertion of this study that the majority society, in its fear-provoked zeal to maintain and assure its inequitable position in American society, flirted with and came dangerously close to total abandonment of the particular freedom upon which all others are ultimately dependent, the right to disagree. Moreover, it is an ancillary claim of this study that the danger has not yet passed.

• The FBI was most disturbed by the Panthers' survival programs providing community service. The popular free breakfast program, in which the party provided free hot breakfasts to children in Black communities throughout the United States, was, as already noted, a particular thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover. Finding little to criticize about the program objectively, the Bureau decided to destroy it.

Quotes about Newton

I doubt he knew my name, but I loved him. Huey - self-taught, brilliant, taciturn, strong-willed - molded in righteous indignation and rage of an oppressed people into a national, militant, revolutionary nationalist organization. ~ Mumia Abu-Jamal

He admitted killing Officer John Frey. He said that before he killed Frey, the police and the power structure could just come down to the black community and do anything they wanted. But after he shot Frey, much of that changed. ~ Hugh Pearson

• Huey P. Newton is the baddest motherfucker ever to set foot inside of history. Huey has a very special meaning to black people, because for four hundred years black people have been wanting to do exactly what Huey Newton did, that is, to stand up in front of the most deadly tentacle of the white racist power structure, and to defy that deadly tentacle, and to tell that tentacle that he will not accept the aggression and the brutality, and that if he is moved against, he will retaliate in kind.
  • Eldridge Cleaver (1969) Post-Prison Writings

• I doubt he knew my name, but I loved him. Huey - self-taught, brilliant, taciturn, strong-willed - molded in righteous indignation and rage of an oppressed people into a national, militant, revolutionary nationalist organization.
  • Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live From Death Row, "Blues for Huey"

• He admitted killing Officer John Frey. He said that before he killed Frey, the police and the power structure could just come down to the black community and do anything they wanted. But after he shot Frey, much of that changed.
  • Hugh Pearson (1994) The Shadow of the Panther p. 7, describing a statement to Willie Payne on the night of his death

• To say that I loved Huey, however, even at that moment would be to say too little I loved being loved by him. I loved the protection he offereed with his powerful arms and fearless dreams. I loved how beautiful he was, sinewy, and sultry at once. I loved his genius and his bold uses of it. I loved that he was the vicarious dream of a man that white men hid from themselves, except when he confronted them, their rules, their world. I loved his narrow buttocks and his broad shoulders and his clean skin. I loved being the queen of his world, for he had fashioned a new world for those who dared. Yet I had come to hate life with him. His madness had become as full-blown as his genius. The numerous swaggering "dicks" who had challenged the hero to prove his manhood had finally taken their toll. Now had had outdone them all, including himself.
  • Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power

• In January 1968, after an attack on seven hundred antiwar activists picketing Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s speech in San Francisco, one of the jailed victims, a Berkeley student, said of the attacking police, “They wanted to kill and would have if they could have gotten away with it. I know now that they were out to put Huey away, except Huey had the good sense to defend himself.” The reference was to Huey Newton, who founded the Black Panthers in California in 1966 and became the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from the Berkeley-Oakland district in 1968 while in prison awaiting trial in connection with the death of one and wounding of another Oakland policeman in a 1966 shoot-out. The first trial, in the summer of 1968, ended in a mistrial, as did two subsequent ones. Almost all of the major trials of Black Panthers ended in mistrials, acquittals, or convictions overturned on appeal, further fueling the suspicion that they were being persecuted by the police. In the course of the trials, plausible evidence of police brutality turned up, including in one case, allegedly murdering two suspects in their beds. The Black Panthers were increasingly being seen as victims of violence, martyrs who courageously stood up to the police.
  • Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (2004), p. 112 ISBN 0-345-45581-9

See also

• Black Panther Party
• A Huey P. Newton Story