Huey P. Newton

Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) was an American political activist who co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in October 1966 with Bobby Seale. Born in Monroe, Louisiana, the youngest of seven children, he moved with his family to Oakland as a child and graduated from high school despite being functionally illiterate, later teaching himself to read in part through Plato's Republic.

He studied at Merritt College in Oakland, where he met Seale, and at the San Francisco Law School. The party they founded combined armed citizen patrols of police, a Ten-Point Program demanding housing, employment, and an end to police brutality, and community programmes including free breakfasts for children and free health clinics.

In October 1967 he was involved in a shooting in which Oakland police officer John Frey was killed and Newton was wounded. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 1968, but the conviction was overturned on appeal in 1970 and two retrials ended in hung juries. Released from prison, he became the public face of the party as it spread to cities across the United States and abroad.

He earned a doctorate in social philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1980 with a dissertation on the FBI's war against the Panthers. His later years were marked by drug addiction and run-ins with the law, and he was shot dead in West Oakland in August 1989.

The given name Huey is an English form of Hugh, from the Germanic Hugo, meaning mind or spirit. Used for boys, it carried him through a short, contested life at the centre of American radical politics.