Huey P. Newton

Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American political and civil rights activist who, along with fellow Merritt College student Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party (1966–1982). Together with Seale, Newton created a ten-point program which laid out guidelines for how, in their words, the African-American community could achieve liberation.

In the 1960s, under Newton's leadership, the Black Panther Party founded over 60 community support programs (renamed survival programs in 1971) including food banks, medical clinics, sickle cell anemia tests, prison busing for families of inmates, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing cooperates, and their own ambulance service. The most famous of these programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program which fed thousands of impoverished children daily during the early 1970s. Newton also co-founded the Black Panther newspaper service which became one of America's most widely distributed African-American newspapers.

In 1967, he was involved in a shootout which led to the death of a police officer John Frey and injuries to himself and another police officer. In 1968, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for Frey's death and sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. In May 1970, the conviction was reversed and after two subsequent trials ended in hung juries, the charges were dropped. In 1974 he was accused of murdering 17 year-old Kathleen Smith. After two trials and two deadlocked juries, the prosecution decided not to retry Newton. He was also accused of involvement in the 1974 murder of Betty Van Patter.

Despite graduating from high school not knowing how to read, he taught himself literacy by reading Plato's Republic and earned a Ph.D. in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program in 1980. In 1989, he was murdered in Oakland, California by Tyrone Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.

Newton was known for being an advocate of self-defense, Palestinian statehood, and for his support of communist-led governments in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.

• Huey P. Newton - Wikipedia