AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
bloody attacks across the country by whites against blacks that history books recorded as the infamous “Red Summer of 1919.” It would remain the worst year of domestic violence in the 20th century until the late 1960s. Thelma Seale lived to see Jasper become infamous once again in 1998 when three white racists dragged 49-year-old hitchhiker James Byrd to his death behind their pickup truck. The notorious incident instigated passage of the Texas hate crime law and also led to enactment of the federal Matthew Shepherd/James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act signed into law by President Obama in 2009.
Once settled in Berkeley, George Seale opened a cabinet store in Oakland. Thelma Seale worked in San Francisco as a sandwich-maker and later found employment as a domestic worker. The family was always short of funds. As a young teen, Bobby made a little pocket change carrying groceries and mowing lawns. He tried out for two sports teams at Berkeley High. Both teams snubbed him; Seale blamed the slight on racist coaches. In the early 1950s, the high school’s student body remained overwhelmingly white. The largest minority were Asians; there were very few blacks and Latinos. In his mid-teens Bobby joined one street gang and then another.
Seale’s first awareness of injustice came around age sixteen when he learned of widespread and repeated mistreatment of American Indians that never made it into approved history books. He felt this injustice personally because he had Indian ancestry; Seale would not seek a better understanding of African-American history for several years. Seale quit high school and joined the Air Force, where he began studying history in earnest through books available at the library and an encyclopedia he purchased. While in the Air Force he learned to be a sheet metal mechanic. In his spare time, he started playing drums in a jazz band and splurged for a $600 set of drums on time payments, but got behind. A collection agency tracked Seale down at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. By coincidence, his commanding officer was a relative of the bill collector and took it upon himself to hound Seale for payment of the arrears or go to jail. Seale had a melt down, ripped a phone out of the wall, cursed at his commander and prepared to go AWOL. Instead, he was court-martialed and ended his three years of service with a bad conduct discharge.
By the 1950s, after living in subsidized housing for many years, Mrs. Seale purchased a home on 57th Street in the North Oakland flatlands. After his discharge from the service Bobby came home and obtained a high school degree. His mother’s motto was: “Whatever job you hold, be the best at it.”2 He got job after job as a sheet metal mechanic at different aircraft companies, only to be fired by all but the last one as soon as his bad conduct discharge caught up with him. At Kaiser Aerospace his boss kept him on a missile project despite learning of his ouster from the Air Force because Seale had developed expertise that was hard to replace.
In 1960, while still working for Kaiser Aerospace, Seale started taking classes in his spare time at Oakland City College (later renamed Merritt College). This was when Seale first focused on his African heritage. He grew his hair into an Afro and now wore a moustache. As Seale became more politically aware, he quit his job because he did not want to be helping the war effort. A natural extrovert, tall and broad-shouldered, Seale had occasional success as a stand-up comic getting people to laugh about things that oppressed them. He sometimes worked as a mechanical draftsman; he was good at reading blueprints. Though his original ambition in attending Oakland City College was to become an engineer, Seale had abandoned that goal by the time he met Huey Newton in September 1962. By then Seale was getting frequent gigs doing dark-humored stand-up comedy, and he hoped to make a career of it. He had also joined as one of its first members a new West Coast chapter of the Revolutionary Action Movement (“RAM”), a secretive East Coast organization that advocated guerrilla warfare. The underground group was not sanctioned by campus officials.
RAM took as its inspiration a new book, Negroes with Guns, whose author, black activist Robert Williams, was a strong proponent of armed self-defense. The former NAACP leader had fled to Cuba in 1961. Since then, with Fidel Castro’s blessing, Williams regularly broadcasted his militant views to blacks in the South via “Radio Free Dixie.” When Seale started to dedicate himself to taking action, he once again took his mother’s advice to heart — if revolution was his goal, he would do the best job he could. His new young friend Huey Newton matched his zeal.
Like the Seale family, the Newtons were hopeful World War II transplants from the violent and unfriendly rural South. Huey’s father Walter Newton was born in Alabama and worked for several years in Arkansas before he and his wife Armelia Johnson Newton moved to her home state of Louisiana. Walter held a variety of factory and farm jobs to support his seven children. Huey Percy Newton, born February 17, 1942, was the youngest. Walter Newton also preached every Sunday at a local Baptist church. One day in 1944, he could no longer stomach verbal abuse from the white overseer of the farm where he worked as a sharecropper. By talking back, Walter earned the label “crazy nigger.”3
Every black in Monroe, Louisiana — like everywhere else at the time in the Deep South — knew you put your life at risk if you did not accept Jim Crow as the law of the land. For his own safety, Walter Newton took off for Northern California where war-time jobs were advertised. He found work in the new Alameda Naval Air Station. The rest of the family joined him the following year, when Huey was three. The family of Belva Davis — who became the first African-American woman TV journalist on the West Coast — fled at about the same time from the same Monroe, Louisiana, community that the Newton family left behind. They escaped for a similar reason: her uncle had the audacity to sue a meat plant after he was seriously injured on the job; a white lawyer won a judgment for him, but none of it got paid. Instead, her uncle and his family were targeted for tar and feathering for being too uppity.4
By the time the Newton family moved to West Oakland their oldest children were adults. The new environment was like a foreign country where blacks occupied a segregated city within a city — one with its own culture, schools and entertainment. Melvin Newton was seven when they arrived and recalls its isolation: “It was like a traditional Jewish ghetto, only it was a black people’s ghetto because that’s where we had to live . . . in order to protect the white people being contaminated by the rabble that had migrated here from the South.”
After the war, Walter Newton left his first job as a longshoreman and worked as a handyman and truck driver. He also volunteered again as an assistant minister at a local Baptist church. The Newtons moved several times to different parts of the Oakland community and ultimately settled in a racially mixed, working-class neighborhood in North Oakland. At Walter’s insistence, Armelia Newton never looked for work outside the home as a domestic or otherwise. The couple doted on Huey. His older sisters — Myrtle, Leola and Doris — also favored him. Melvin was the next youngest boy, four years older than Huey, whose responsibility was to look after and protect his baby brother. Melvin knew that Huey was “kind of the darling of the family.”
A very bright but shy child, Huey did not take to academics like Melvin did. While Melvin would enjoy spending weekend days in the nearest library, Huey favored the streets like his older brothers Leander “Lee” Edward and Walter, Jr., nicknamed “Sonny Man.” But Huey later confounded anyone trying to pigeonhole him. He was a quick study with a phenomenal memory and obvious potential. He pleased his mother by his willingness to clean the oven out for her whenever she asked, yet at school most teachers found him uncooperative. Melvin Newton recalls the exception after they moved to the house Walter Newton bought in North Oakland: “[Huey] wound up having a teacher called Ms. McLaren. . . . It was the only time we had the same teacher. . . . When he entered her class, she told him that she knew me and she remembered me as his brother and what a fine student I was, and she expected the same out of him. That was the only teacher that didn’t have any problems out of Huey.”
Huey never got involved in sports. Nor did he learn to dance or carry a tune, but he did display talent for playing the piano. His parents then arranged for three years of classical training, and he became a lifelong fan. His cultivated taste in music would later impress his opera-singing fiancée LaVerne Williams and his lawyer Fay Stender, an accomplished concert pianist, to whom he described fond memories of playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” and selections from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.