Today marks the 82nd birthday of Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party. The youngest of seven children, Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana. The family later fled to Oakland, California, because of the South’s history of violence against Africans.
Newton co-founded the party in 1966 with classmate Bobby Seale, becoming its leading theorist and political strategist, and introducing internationalism among the party’s ranks. Though they originally sought to challenge police brutality, they also created over 60 social programmes—renamed Survival Programmes—in 1971. The most famous was Free Breakfast for Children, which fed youths in US cities where BPP had chapters. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s director at the time, worked against the party because of its considerable support among Blacks and liberal Whites. Federal agents had arrested or killed some party members.
Many years later, a member of the Black Guerilla Family gang shot and killed Newton on 22 August 22 1989 in Oakland. In 2021, a commemorative plaque that read, ‘Dr. Huey P. Newton Way,’ was applied to a three-block section of the city’s 9th Street at the corner he was murdered.