November 14, 2005
Though essentially a civil rights organization, the Black Panther Party continues to evoke images of gun-wielding black men clashing with law enforcement officials. In the first authorized biography written about the Party's founder, Huey Newton (1942–1989), the authors shatter those images by expounding on the ideals upon which the party was formed. Frustrated by the civil rights organizations mired in "intellectualizing and rhetoric," Newton formed the BPP in Oakland, Calif., in 1966. His manifesto called upon blacks to demand freedom, adequate housing and educational opportunities, and to "defend their own people with their lives." Those affiliated with the BPP soon became targets for police surveillance and harassment. According to Hilliard, when Newton realized that the BPP was becoming isolated from the black community, which viewed the organization as an ad hoc military group, he began creating various community "survival programs," among them a student-centered school that attracted international education officials. Newton's dichotomous nature is evident throughout the book, yet only in the last chapters is the extent of his inner turmoil addressed. His cause of death offers proof of this: he denounced drugs yet became addicted to crack and died at the hands of a drug dealer. Hilliard offers a highly readable, if hagiographic, introduction to Newton's life and the BPP's ideology. His own memoir, This Side of Glory
(1993), described his years as the BPP's chief of staff. Photos.
January 15, 2006
With authors Keith and Kent Zimmerman (Sing My Way Home: Voices of the New American Roots Rock), former Black Panther Party (BPP) chief of staff Hilliard (This Side of Glory, with Lewis Cole) presents an authorized biography of political activist Huey P. Newton. Hilliard knew Newton from childhood, both growing up poor in Oakland, CA. He reminisces about these early years and about Newton's becoming a petty criminal prior to his politicization and his foundation of the BPP in 1966 with Bobby Seale. The book does an excellent job of discussing the inner workings of the BPP and provides a detailed picture of Newton's relationship with Eldridge Cleaver until the two split in 1971. It also covers Newton's frequent run-ins with the law. Newton skipped bail on criminal charges in 1974 and fled to Cuba with the woman who became his first wife, returning to the United States in 1977. The book includes a penultimate chapter narrated by Newton's second wife, Fredrika, who describes her husband's descent into drug abuse, which led to his murder in 1989. The book gives an interesting personal perspective, but for more thorough critical examinations, see Hugh Pearson's The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America and Judson L. Jeffries's Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist. Recommended for academic and public libraries." -Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Lib., Parkersburg"
Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
December 15, 2005
Hilliard, chief of staff of the Black Panther Party, debunks the image of the gun-toting, violence-prone Newton immortalized in posters from the era. This is a sympathetic portrait of a young man, weary of debates about social injustice, who, along with Bobby Seale, started the Panthers in an effort to offer real solutions to oppressive social conditions, including police brutality. Newton, a somewhat shy intellectual, was as much inclined to use the law as the gun, wielding law books at every encounter with the police. The price Newton paid for his image was a long incarceration and a temporary exile in Cuba while the Panthers went on to develop local programs and international fame, always under the scrutiny of the FBI, which operated a series of counterintelligence programs, exploiting fissures in the group that eventually destroyed its leaders. Paranoid of the police and his own compatriots-notably Eldridge Cleaver-and unable to find a place for himself in a changing urban culture, Newton succumbed to drug abuse and was killed on the Oakland streets that he once ruled. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)