Impact Of Huey P. Newton In African American Culture

10 Pages 2530 Words

thought school to Huey was just “entertainment to Huey’s mind”.
On the streets, Huey Newton had a hidden reputation as Bobby Seale say’s “ there were guys who were known throughout the community as being bad. Huey didn’t have this reputation. The bad cats terrorized the community and Huey terrorized the bad cats”. On Campus however, Newton was respected because of his insight on topics relating to blacks and the need for self-knowledge. In college, Huey Newton was apart of many nationalist groups such as the Afro-American Association, which was developing the first nationalist philosophy on the West Coast. Newton would soon leave the organization because of his belief that the Afro-American Association’s leader Donald Warden was using the program as a means to deceive black people. Newton claims that one day, while in San Francisco on Fillmore street, a gang of whites were hanging out of an apartment window hollering cuss words and some of the members came down to fight. Newton and another member one of the Afro-American Association were fighting off the whites. But Donald Warden would not fight for his principles. Also in college, Newton had to be his own lawyer in a petty theft case. He was accused of stealing a book. After he won the court case, Newton had become very notorious against anyone who had done him wrong around college. Huey met Bobby Seale in the early 60’s at a Cuban blockade rally. From then on the two saw each other around campus and around the city. One day Seale brought Newton “Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon. From that moment on Newton and Seale knew they had to involve the black community and the lumpen-proletariats, (The lowest, most degraded stratum of the proletariat. Used originally in Marxist theory to describe those members of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked class-consciousness) because if the lumpen-proletariats weren’t organiz...