Huey and Bobby

On February 17, 1942, in Monroe, Louisiana, Huey P. Newton was born, the seventh and youngest child of Walter and Armelia Newton. Walter Newton was a paragon of responsibility. He held down two jobs at any given time, working in the gravel pit, the carbon plant, sugarcane mills, sawmills, and eventually as a brakeman for the Union Saw Mill Company. On Sundays, he served as the minister at the Bethel Baptist Church in Monroe, where he and his family lived. He preached as the spirit moved him, often promising to address his parishioners on a particular topic, then improvising an inspirational sermon salient to the moment. The rest of the time he spent with his family, the joy and purpose of his life.

Armelia Johnson liked to say that she married young and finished growing up with her children. She was only seventeen when she gave birth to her first child. The others soon followed. Unlike most black women in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, Armelia stayed at home, raising her children, seeing them through life's challenges, and relishing life's humor. The Newton family saw Armelia's not working as a domestic servant for whites as an act of rebellion.

Walter Newton often used to say, "You can take a killing but you can't take a beating." On one occasion, Walter Newton got into an argument with a younger white man for whom he worked about a detail of the job. The white man told him that when a "colored" disputed his word, he whipped him. Walter Newton replied that no man whipped him unless he was a better man, and he doubted that the white man qualified. The man was shocked at this uncharacteristic response and backed down.

This was just one of many times that Walter Newton defied whites in ways that often got blacks in the South lynched. He developed a reputation for being "crazy," so whites steered clear of him, gaining him powerful respect among blacks. Newton's ability to challenge whites and stay alive is something of a mystery. One factor, according to Huey Newton, may have been his mixed race. Walter Newton's father was a white man who had raped his black mother. Thus, local whites knew his father, cousins, aunts, and blood relatives, and while they might not have hesitated to kill a black person, they may have been reluctant to shed his white family's blood.

The Newtons moved to Oakland in 1945, following the path of many black families migrating from the South to the cities of the North and West to fill the jobs in the shipyards and industries that opened up with the onset of World War II. When the war ended, many blacks were laid off as wartime industry waned, and soldiers returning from the war created a labor surplus. Both new and expanded black communities in cities across the country rapidly sank into poverty. While the Newtons were better off than many of the black families they knew, they were poor, with seven children to feed, and often ate cush, a dish made of fried cornbread, several times a day. Making payments on the family's bills became Walter Newton's constant preoccupation.

The Newton family was on the edge, and Huey looked to his older brothers for survival strategies. Each coped with ghetto life in a different way. Walter Newton Jr., the oldest, became a hustler, working outside legal channels to keep poverty at bay. He always dressed sharp, and he drove a nice car. Everyone in the neighborhood called him "Sonny Man." Lee Edward gained a reputation as a street fighter before joining the military. He knew how "to persist in the face of bad odds, always to look an adversary straight in the eye, and to keep moving forward." Melvin Newton took a different path. He became a bookworm, went to college, and eventually taught sociology at Oakland's Merritt College.

Huey P. Newton became all of these things—hustler, fighter, and scholar. From his oldest brothers, Lee Edward and "Sonny Man," he mastered the ways of the street and learned how to fight. Through his teen years, Huey fought constantly. Unlike Melvin, Huey was not a bookworm. For years he rebelled at school. By the time he entered the eleventh grade, he still could not read, and his teachers often told him he was unintelligent. But outside of school, he had been learning how to think. With Melvin, he memorized and analyzed poetry. When a counselor in his high school told him he was "not college material," Huey decided to prove him wrong. Over the next two years, through intense focus and will, he taught himself to read, graduated high school, and in 1959, enrolled in Merritt College.

By the time Huey Newton became involved in the Afro-American Association at Merritt, he could debate theory as well as any of his peers. Yet he had a side that most of the budding intellectuals around him lacked; he knew the street. He could understand and relate to the plight of the swelling ranks of unemployed, the "brothers on the block" who lived outside the law. Newton's street knowledge helped put him through college, as he covered his bills through theft and fraud. But when Newton was caught, he used his book knowledge to study the law and defend himself in court, impressing the jury and defeating several misdemeanor charges.

In 1962, at a rally at Merritt College opposing the U.S. blockade of Cuba, Newton's political life took a leap forward: there, he met fellow student Bobby Seale, with whom he would eventually found the Black Panther Party. The rally featured Donald Warden, leader of the Afro-American Association. Warden praised Cuba's Fidel Castro and voiced opposition to domestic civil rights organizations. After the speeches, an informal debate began among the students, during which Newton convinced Seale that the U.S. policy in Cuba was wrong and also made him question mainstream civil rights organizations. Newton impressed Seale with his command of the argument presented by E. Franklin Frazier in Black Bourgeoisie, a scathing critique of the black middle class that he had read with Warden. Seale soon joined Warden's group.

More than five years older than Newton, Bobby Seale was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 22, 1936, the oldest of three siblings, and raised in Oakland. His father worked as a carpenter, and his mother also worked, sometimes as a caterer. Besides teaching Bobby how to build things and how to hunt and fish, Bobby's father also taught him about injustice, often beating him badly for no apparent reason.

The...