Huey: Spirit of the Panther

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.

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

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.