This is a good time for a confession.
On my my bookshelf is an Olympic style gold medal awarded to me by my friends for being on the United States ‘No Fly’ list. I am very proud of that medallion.
In the late 1970s I asked for a freedom of information report on my intelligence files. What I received was a folder of 100% redacted papers with nothing but black lines. I already knew that my file in Washington and in San Francisco took up an entire file drawer. Only the FBI, in its incompetence, could think that I was a threat to the government of the United States.
Which means it is time to introduce the fact that I was a friend of Huey Newton. I thought very highly of the man. The Wikipedia entry on Huey is reliable and quite sympathetic as it should be. Huey was a very intelligent, sensitive and competent person.
You can see from the following paragraph that his intelligence and competence led him to conclude that our black population needed to arm itself in order to gain power. I have said this many times about the need of every second class citizenry, including women. They need to achieve first-class status with firearms.
“"During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire."
Newton graduated from Oakland Technical High Schoolin 1959, without being able to read. He later taught himself to read, going on to read The Republic by Plato as his first book. As a teenager, he was arrested several times for minor offenses, including gun possession and vandalism at age 14. Newton supported himself in college by burglarizing homes in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills areas, and by committing other petty crimes. Newton once wrote that he began his law studies to become a better criminal, although he said that he had been a "big-time fool" for having such narrow ambitions.”
I spent many hours sitting quietly and talking with Huey. One of our conversations was about biology and was based on the Masters degree he had earned in that field. Our later discussions were about social thought, based on his doctorate from the University of California.
I met Huey because he had questions about Zen meditation based on his time in solitary confinement. It was at that point that I learned how permeable prisons were. Huey was able to run his Black Panther organization while in solitary confinement using audiotapes.
At one time I made a grant to Huey to provide him with an office in San Francisco. He didn't use it much. Oakland was more comfortable for him.
I feel it is necessary to write this blog to make sure that the world understands that Huey Newton was a brilliant man with clear goals and he acted entirely on the behalf of the common good for his black community. It was his strength and vision and his organizational skills that made him appear to be a threat.
If he committed violence it was because the community surrounding him was immersed in a world of violence (and still is) and Huey was always vulnerable.