Huey Newton was murdered a few months after I moved to San Francisco, aged 22, just out of college. He was the stuff of legend. Famous and infamous. That was many years ago, where I have read many books by activists and revolutionaries. This one stunned me. Huey Newton doesn't deserve the legend he's earned ... No. He's not simply a radical loudmouth that the Establishment would have you believe. He constantly described himself the "theoretician" of the BPP, and he is that: a broad-thinking, critical, constantly evolving revolutionary. He was a man ahead of his time. I am on the second read of the book, having just gotten it. He wows me at so many turns as he breaks down his prison experience, the ruling class, technology, his stance in support of gay and women's liberation* [note: this was a time when those movements were radical, not bourgeois, but stigmatized by a homophobic and macho society]; Huey cut right through that.
You cannot be a radical or a revolutionary in the US and NOT read this book. It IS a must. For one, too often the African experience is overlooked, and two, stodgy intellectuals see Huey as that stuff of legend and perhaps think they cannot stomach the rhetoric. His penetrating excavations remind me of things I've read by Angela Davis, only Newton clearly is trying desperately to reach his audience. Hes states a thesis, then seeming unsure of himself breaks it down and down into smaller pieces.
Finally, I was encouraged to see a clip of him on a Bay Area show a year before he died. He was lucid and just as revolutionary into his 40's where some of his peers have sold out.
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