Huey P. Newton (1942–1989)

Fascinating if you're interested in the Black Panthers, probably not so much otherwise. The first quarter is an extract from his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, which I really want to read now and would probably be a better bet if you're not interested in the more detailed parts of his ideology and how it developed - it's a pretty gripping read even with just the short extract. The end chapter is an extract from War Against The Panthers which was his doctoral thesis and talks about the ways the FBI tried to bring them down - they're the sort of things that are completely expected but still incredible to have confirmed and I think the book would make an important case study on the issue of police repression.

The biggest frustration here is that he never really explains deeply some of his positions - I'm thinking primarily here of his ideas about intercommunalism. I don't know if he just never wrote more articles answering questions on the topic or what but I didn't really get a good grip on what he's talking about, which is annoying because it seems to have been an important part of his later ideology. Overall the impression you get is of someone who is serious about working in the Marxist tradition (he rejects the term Marxist because of its connotations with dogmatic people who believe in re-runs of 1917) - he talks constantly about dialectics, he references Mao, Che, Marx, Lenin (both directly and through borrowed metaphors etc), he focuses on the economic dimension. He constantly criticises himself and previous party positions and comes across as highly honest and dedicated. I came away from the book impressed by a revolutionary hero.… (mais)

I didn’t know much about the Black Panther Party or Huey P. Newton before reading this book – only what I was “taught” in school. And I don’t think Huey P. Newton was mentioned at all. He was an amazing human being. He was functionally illiterate when he graduated from high school and taught himself to read using Plato’s Republic. Not Dick and Jane – Plato! After that, he read widely and formed a lot of the Black Panther’s philosophy from the books he read – Karl Marx, Mao Zedong and the like. He was very intelligent and a great strategist.

In many ways, Black people’s interactions with the police have actually gotten worse since that time. The Black Panthers openly carried firearms in public. Can you imagine if Black people tried to do that today? They also carried law books with them and would read from them to police officers when police officers were trying to wrongly arrest somebody something or otherwise violate a person’s rights. If a Black person tried to pull out a law book today during a police encounter, it would not go over well. The policeman would get mad and the situation would escalate. But back then, it actually worked sometimes.

Sometimes the Black Panthers would come across a policeman stopping a citizen and they would stand at a distance with their weapons to let the police know that they were being watched. Today, people do the same thing by pulling out their cell phones to record these situations. It’s sad that over forty years later, the police still need bystanders to hold them accountable for their behavior.

I learned a lot about Newton and the Black Panthers from reading this book. I still have more to learn and plan on seeking out more books about this topic and time in history. Highly recommended.… (mais)