Huey: Spirit of the Panther [Hardcover]

David Hilliard (Author), Keith Zimmerman (Author), Kent Zimmerman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2005

Huey P. Newton remains one of the most misunderstood political figures of the twentieth century. As cofounder and leader of the Black Panther Party for more than twenty years, Newton (1942-1989) was at the forefront of the radical political activism of the 1960s and '70s.

Raised in poverty in Oakland, California, and named for corrupt Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, Newton embodied both the passions and the contradictions of the civil rights movement he sought to advance. In this first authorized biography, Newton's former chief of staff David Hilliard teams up with best-selling authors Keith and Kent Zimmerman to tell the whole story of the man behind the organization that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover infamously dubbed "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

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. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press (November 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560258373
• ISBN-13: 978-1560258377
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,554,585 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spirit of the Panther, May 9, 2006

By 

matthewslaughter "matthewslaughter" (Arlington, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Huey: Spirit of the Panther (Hardcover)

As an authorized biography of Huey P. Newton, written by his longtime comrade David Hilliard, "Huey: Spirit of the Panther" presents the most thorough, friendly account of Newton, his ideas, his struggles and his downfall. Unfortunately, because Newton's life was so eventful, intersecting with all the major political, social and cultural of the late 1960s and early 1970s, many things are going to be overlooked. Also, because of Hilliard's closeness to the subject, we are not clearly presented with the reasons, legitimate or not, why Reagan or the FBI/the Nixon administration wanted to destroy him, no matter how obvious their racist/capitalist motives might seem. I found myself wanting to know exactly how Newton was portrayed in the mainstream press. But since Hilliard and co-writers Keith and Kent Zimmerman (who also co-wrote one of my favorite rock autobiographies, John Lydon's "Rotten" [1995]) are more concerned with the intimate details of Newton's life, as well they should, his biography lacks a more global, dialectical vision of the man, what he represented, and how people (ab-)used him for their own political advantage.

Because Hilliard, one of the few surviving founding leaders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was in the trenches with Newton, he has access to some excellent behind-the-scenes information. He does an excellent retelling of the James Frey shooting that landed Newton a three-year prison term. He also presents FBI and COINTELPRO documents, forged by the government in part to break-up the relationship between Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, adding a new wrinkle to their fraught friendship. He tells about how the FBI rented the apartment across from Newton's Penthouse for the sole purpose of spying on him. He finds it curious that blueprints of Newton's apartment were found in raids on SLA compounds in 1974 (but, unlike Elaine Brown, does not speculate that they were a counterrevolutionary group created by COINTELPRO). He also gives a wonderful account of Newton's exile in Cuba during the mid-1970s.

Where Hilliard's book lacks punch is in the details he overlooks. He skims through Newton's childhood in Louisiana and his adolescence in Oakland. He doesn't talk about the regimentation of the Black Panther members' lifestyle (a model, early on, based on the Nation of Islam's dietary code), which was, apparently, contradicted by Newton's own problems with alcohol and controlled substances (Hilliard does not say if Newton did anything more than drink during while he actively lead the BPP, though he was in direct contact with some of Oakland's major drug dealers). Hilliard, in large part trying to protect the dignity of his fallen comrade, doesn't focus much on this life in the 1980s, after the Panthers had effectively dissolved (though he does talk about how Newton got his Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz).

That being said, the last two chapters--one a recounting of Huey's last days by his second wife Fredericka--show Newton, sadly, as a hopeless drug addict. The chapter does not forwardly state that he was addicted to crack, but implies it. This could have been an opportunity for Hilliard to talk about the infiltration of hard drugs into Oakland and other black urban centers in the 1970s and 1980s. These final two chapters humanize Newton, and they are tragically sad to read. These aspects of Newton's personality (who was, later in life, apparently diagnosed as bipolar), his excessiveness and his need for adrenaline, are not fully pursued throughout the preceding chapters. In the final chapter, Hilliard admits his own problems with substance abuse. Hilliard makes reference to himself several times throughout the biography, and it leaves me wishing that he would have said more about his role in the Panther Party and his relationship with Newton. I do not think this would in any wya make him seem self-important. Following the tragedy of his "reactionary" descent into drug abuse, Hilliard ends the book with a celebrated passage from Newton's autobiography, where he defines his idea of "revolutionary suicide." It is a fitting way to conclude the biography.

While Hilliard's book is filled with wonderful inside information, it doesn't quite precisely articulate just how crazy his life was, especially during the period after he was released from prison in 1970. There was a lot of pressure on him from supporters and (government) detractors alike. Also, as I said earlier, there is just too much information that is left out, owing to the vastness of the Black Panther Party and the revolutionary movements of the times (Hilliard says there were BPP chapters, at one point, in 47 of the 50 United States). Criticisms aside, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this tumultous but necessary moment in America's history and to anybody fascinated with the visionary genius of Huey Newton, who ultimately rejected the term "revolution" in favor of "the transformation of society." Other books I highly recommend: Huey P. Newton's "Revolutionary Suicide," Elaine Brown's "A Taste of Power" and Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars good for the neophyte, July 1, 2006

By 

Malcoln_Rodgers "scrolls" (san francisco, ca United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Huey: Spirit of the Panther (Hardcover)

this is a good book for someone that doesn't know jack about the panthers. it touches on all the main points. i think fredericka newton puts a little too much dirty laundry out there, but then again, i didn't have to live with huey. i think she's earned the right to say whatever she damn well pleases. the main point for someone that doesn't know anything, isn't to judge the panthers, but to realize that through the force of a sense of justice and passion and commitment, the panthers went from semi-delusional youngsters who wanted to play at being superheroes, to growing, evolving, changing and becoming an army of justice for the overall black community. soldiers were killed. propoganda was disseminated, the u.s. govt. did everything they could to take them down and drive them apart. but in the final analysis, the "army" of the panthers laid their bodies down, fed, clothed, educated, nationalized and internationalized the struggle... and thus.. every black man and woman who breathes air today, is that much more advanced and able to walk upright due to the battles won by the panthers. yes, huey was only human. but you only have to scratch the surface of black history to understand the man, his angels, demons and choices. like i said. a good book for someone that wants to take a nice shortcut in their journey to understanding the black experience as seen through the eyes of the panthers.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Human Rights 101, January 15, 2006

By 

Kyra (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Huey: Spirit of the Panther (Hardcover)

This book should be taught in ALL college level US History courses. Not "special interest" African American studies courses, but mainstream education.

It is EVERY CITIZEN OF THIS COUNTRY'S United States Government that it is revealed in this book. It is a moment in history never to be forgotten so that in this democratic society we do not ever yield to or turn a blind eye to such explicit violence and corruption; something we are still too close to today.

Huey, Spirit of the Panther is a thoroughly referenced, footnoted historic documentation of the strategic workings of the US Government's branches of the Criminal Justice System and the Federal Bureau of Investigations to maintain an unjust and supremacist status quo. The mainstream needs to know and understand this history. White people, specifically, need to understand police brutality, unlawful arrest, explicit oppression of dark skinned people by the local, state and federal governing bodies of this country.

People of all races will greatly benefit from understanding the true ideology-not the sensationalized FICTION that the state and federal governments succeeded in portraying in mainstream media-of the Black Panther Party and its critical contribution to this very important moment in the struggle for freedom in a white supremacist country.

Huey, Spirit of the Panther reveals Huey P. Newton's true vision and his ideology for social transformation. We learn that Huey P. Newton was a revolutionary who understood that a revolution will not happen overnight, it is a constant work in progress. There is much to learn from his ideology: it is not about a war between any one organization and the oppressor but a war between the oppressor and those who are being oppressed.

Thank you David Hilliard for this crucial historic document.