AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
passages from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. His parents still hoped Huey would follow Melvin’s dogged pursuit of higher education and a steady job. At their urging, Melvin was one of the rare black students at Oakland Tech to take college preparatory classes. Melvin became the only one of Huey’s siblings to get a college degree. Only one other finished high school.
Growing up, Huey felt severely handicapped by his light complexion and medium build, with a Caucasian nose inherited from a white grandfather who had forced himself on Walter Newton’s mother. Newton’s handsome bi-racial features, coupled with a high-pitched voice and a funny name, were serious liabilities on the streets of Oakland. Kids on the block may not have heard of Louisiana’s demagogue Governor Huey P. Long, for whom he was named, but they teased Huey “Pee” Newton unmercifully.5
Black students were in the minority at his junior high school, where Huey quickly developed a thin skin. Despite the best efforts of his devout parents and brother Melvin, Huey became an indifferent high school student, often skipping school to spend hour upon hour in the pool halls. Melvin only realized later, when he read Huey’s book Revolutionary Suicide, that Huey wanted to get thrown out of class so he could avoid being exposed for “not learning what was supposed to be learned.” In high school, Melvin saw the dual track system for white and black students as a challenge to overcome; Huey took the teachers’ low expectations of black kids “as a battle while he was still in school, to the neglect of the academic program. So you have two boys from the same family, handling the impact of race and racism very differently.” Melvin later studied martial arts and realized that he and Huey illustrated how you “take the impact of something and you ride with it in another direction and then you’ll bring it back . . . I didn’t understand it academically like that, but that’s in fact what I was doing.” While Melvin tuned out those who discouraged him from pursuing his academic potential, “Huey was taking it on directly, and it was like a clash.”
The rougher elements of Oakland acted as a magnet to Huey, as they had with his oldest brother, Lee, who had already served a jail sentence. Huey also hung out with his brother Sonny Man, a Korean War veteran employed at the Naval Air Station, who spent much of his spare time at the race track. Sonny Man impressed Huey and his friends with his street smarts, teaching Huey how to aggressively defend himself against local hoodlums. Huey had admired professional boxers since the age of five when his father encouraged him to defend himself against bullies. Ever since, Huey had numerous fights with neighborhood toughs, establishing a formidable reputation on the street.
His childhood friend David Hilliard explains the contradictions people always noticed in Huey:
Growing up, Huey was greatly influenced by four strong male role models. He would eventually become an amalgam of all four: his father, a “strict disciplinarian” with “strict sense of moral character . . . deeply rooted in Old Testament values”; his “oldest brother Lee Edward . . . [who] taught Huey the meaning of standing up and holding his ground”; Walter, Jr. (Sonny Man), a ladies’ man who “represented the excitement of the street”; and “Melvin [who] would influence Huey on the importance of education.” . . . Throughout his life, Huey maintained a delicate balance of all four figureheads — [his father] Walter’s values, brother Lee’s strength, Sonny Man’s street smarts, and Melvin’s intellectual prowess.6
While Huey was a rebellious teen, Lee and Sonny Man influenced him the most. Constantly worrying his parents, Huey disguised his reading and learning disabilities by acting out. As an adult, doctors would diagnose him as bipolar. Misbehavior in class and truancy got him suspended from Oakland Tech in his sophomore year. In his junior year, his parents enrolled him in Berkeley High. Not long afterward, there was an incident that got Huey suspended from Berkeley High and referred to juvenile court. A gang of black kids attacked him; the next day Huey retaliated against one of them with a hammer he had brought from home. Placed on probation, Newton returned to Oakland Tech, where he managed to obtain a degree; he graduated in the bottom third of his class. Newton escaped the 1963 Vietnam War draft with a 1-Y psychiatric exemption; he attributed it to his outspoken criticism of racism in the military. Still, with a military exemption, a high school degree and family support, Huey was better off than many of his classmates. One-third of young black males in Oakland were unemployed high school drop-outs, six times the national average.
Much to his parents’ dismay and distress, Newton grew a scruffy beard and quit the family home to share a flat near the Oakland City College campus with William Brumfield, a.k.a. Richard Thorne, a cofounder of the Sexual Freedom League and later the cult of Om Lovers. Though Newton enjoyed sharing the favors of the young women Brumfield attracted, Newton had his own ambitions. In high school, Newton was told he was not “college material.” Under the tutelage of his brother Melvin, Huey began reading Plato’s Republic. For the first time in his life, he felt engaged by the written word. Perhaps to burnish his outlaw legend and self-made-man mythology, he would later claim that he was completely illiterate until then and had faked the ability to read and write in high school. As he pursued a social science degree at Oakland City College, Newton focused on the study of philosophy and militant politics, particularly the recent Cuban revolution and guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Newton had liked alcohol since he was a young teen; in a show of solidarity, he made “Cuba Libre” his drink of choice.
By age twenty, in 1962, Newton had become a well-known figure on the Oakland City College campus. He joined the Afro-American Association, an informal group that met regularly at the home of a brilliant local lawyer and scholar named Donald Warden, who later changed his name to Khalid Abdullah Tariq al Mansour. At the time, Warden also hosted a radio program called the Afro-American Association. Among the study group’s members were Ron Dellums, future congressman and Oakland mayor, and Thelton Henderson, who became the first African-American to head the federal court in the Northern District of California. Henderson remembers Newton well: “A very bright young man. A very respectful young man . . . He came to learn and he was a quick learner. He contributed a lot, and I’ve always imagined that many of the ideas he got for the Panthers’ philosophy and some of the interest areas that they had, came from those meetings at the Afro-American Association.”
Warden had been a class ahead of Henderson at the U.C. Berkeley law school, known then as Boalt Hall. In the fall of 1963, Warden invited Henderson to do some legal contract work, making occasional local court appearances that helped Henderson pay his rent. Henderson had just returned to the Bay Area after getting sacked from his first job, a plum assignment in the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert Kennedy investigating civil rights abuses in Alabama. Henderson was sent to Birmingham after the church bombing that killed four girls in Sunday school in September 1963. He stayed at the only hotel in Birmingham that offered lodging to blacks, which was where Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., also stayed. One night, out of concern for King’s safety, Henderson loaned King’s driver his car because King’s had a faulty tire. Henderson did not realize that state agents working for the FBI were tailing King everywhere he went. Henderson’s unapproved favor made headlines, and the Justice Department fired him for misuse of government property.
Believing that his career was in tatters, Henderson returned to Berkeley. Later he would be proud of his generous impulse — if King’s car had been disabled by the roadside after dark, his life could have been at grave risk that night. Several months after Henderson went back to California, three Civil Rights workers — James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman — disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi. National outrage prompted a massive FBI search over the summer of 1964 which ultimately turned up their bodies. Years later, investigators identified the KKK culprits, including a sheriff’s deputy, who tailed the civil rights workers’ car and kidnapped and killed them.
In rebuilding his life after being fired for loaning Dr. King his car, Henderson welcomed the chance to join Donald Warden’s study group:
We’d learn about our heritage. The premise of the Afro-American Association was that blacks should not accept the white historical version of a Negro . . . [The name] Afro-American was very consciously decided to reflect our African heritage, rather than whatever a Negro had come to mean. So we started studying our heritage and read a bunch of very, very interesting [books] that I had never read . . . Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Dubois,