• 1 Oakland Tribune 5 January 1969, cited in Jane Rhodes, Framing the Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of (...)

1In October 1967, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), Huey P. Newton was arrested and charged with the murder of an Oakland police officer, John Frey. Newton’s organization rallied around him, initiating a major ‘Free Huey’ campaign that ran through his trial and his two years in prison, and that rescued the BPP from oblivion. The campaign was significant enough for the Oakland Tribune to state that the trial became one of the two biggest news events of the year.1 ‘Free Huey’ also became a rallying cry for radicals across the globe. It propelled Newton into the forefront of the radical movement and transformed the BPP into one of the most visible political organizations of the era.

• 2 Earl Caldwell, ‘Newton is Freed on $50,000 Bail’ New York Times August 6, 1970, 24; idem., ‘Young W (...)

2Formed in October 1966 in Oakland, California by Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP initially focused its energies on opposing police brutality in Oakland’s inner city and similar local neighborhoods. Attracting a small but committed membership, it conducted a sequence of armed police patrols that unnerved the Oakland Police Department while alerting locals to their rights as citizens under arrest. Inspired by black nationalist, anticolonial, and internationalist traditions, the BPP took particular influence from Marxist theorists such as Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Mao Zedong, and especially Frantz Fanon’s coruscating critique of French colonialism as outlined in his classic text, The Wretched of the Earth. A widely-publicized confrontation with San Francisco police that followed the BPP’s armed protection of Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, during a visit to the city in February 1967 elevated the organization to regional notoriety. On May 2, 1967, prompted by a legislative proposal to end California’s citizens’ rights to bear arms in public, the BPP conducted one of the most sensational events of the 1960s. A collection of armed Panthers entered the California State Capitol Building in Sacramento to protest the so-called Mulford Bill. A series of arrests followed that deprived the BPP of its most skilled organizers, and the organization entered a decline. In the early hours of October 28, 1967, Newton became embroiled in a melee with police officers Frey and Herbert Heanes, leading to Frey’s death and Newton receiving a gunshot wound. Charged with murder, Newton faced the death penalty. The BPP set about deifying its imprisoned founder, transforming him into an international icon. Convicted of voluntary manslaughter in September 1968, Newton’s conviction was quashed on appeal nearly two years later. The BPP welcomed him upon his return much like the Bolsheviks received Lenin from exile, a near-legendary leader ready to spearhead the revolution.2

• 3 Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers 103-5, 116-80, 190.
• 4 Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Par (...)
• 5 Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black (...)
• 6 Lise Pearlman, The Sky’s The Limit: People v. Newton, The Real Trial of the 20^th Century? (Berkeley (...)

3Most historical assessments of the Free Huey campaign emphasize the role of the ‘Free Huey’ rallies in bringing the BPP to a wide audience, and similarly point to the mass media’s response to the BPP. For Jane Rhodes, the campaign rendered the BPP media icons while enabling Eldridge Cleaver to cement himself at the organization’s head.3 Curtis Austin, Donna Murch, and Robyn Spencer present the campaign as fundamental to the BPP’s meteoric growth as members and supporters joined in their thousands and transformed the organization.4 As the campaign gathered pace, the BPP reached out to other radical groups. Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin chronicle the inter-organizational tensions that emerged, while Joel Wilson and David Barber evaluate the BPP alliances with white radicals and Aaron Bae its multiracial alliances.5 Less interested in the popular movement to free Newton, Lise Pearlman chronicles events inside the courtroom.6

• 7 Cleaver cited in Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 118.
• 8 FBI telegram, October 28, 1967 Huey Newton FBI File #HQ105-165429 section one (hereafter FBIHPN); F (...)
• 9 Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (New York: Abr (...)
• 10 Shames and Seale, Power to the People, 32 suggests 5,000 members in November 1968.

5Kathleen Cleaver argues that the campaign intended to ensure that Newton would not be executed whilst elevating him to a symbol of everything that the BPP was fighting for and against, so countering the accusation that he was merely a criminal.7 It ensured that the people of the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond understood the disputed facts of the case and became aware of Newton’s importance to the African American struggle against white power. It also built upon the BPP’s early street protests to render the area around the Alameda County Courthouse a focal point for activists, the police, the media, and the wider community. Rallies nearby brought great publicity to Newton and the BPP, and evoked the pomp of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association parades. As important, the campaign transformed the BPP. On the night of Newton’s arrest, it was little more than a community group with a handful of members. Its co-founder Bobby Seale later admitted that, at this point, the BPP had ‘totally fallen apart; it didn’t exist.’8 The recently arrived SNCC activist Kathleen Neal, BPP stalwart Emory Douglas, and Eldridge Cleaver – who soon married Neal – reinvigorated an organization that was little more than the three individuals themselves.9 By the Free Huey campaign’s conclusion, the BPP was an international sensation with thousands of dollars pouring into its coffers each month and tens of thousands of sympathizers across the world. Accurate membership numbers are impossible to verify, although it is safe to state that the numbers of Panthers increased exponentially between October 1967 and November 1968.10

• 11 Rhodes, Framing, 119

6The campaign itself took numerous forms. One tactic was to ensure that members of the Party and the community were always present in the courtroom’s public gallery. This was to convey a threefold message: first, to remind Newton that the BPP was not abandoning him. Second, it reminded the court that the BPP was watching, a little like the Party’s police patrols did to the Oakland Police Department. With an African American man on trial and a gallery full of African American faces facing a white judge, white lawyers, and a majority white jury, the racial connotations of the trial would be on show throughout. Third, their presence gave the press another opportunity to publicize the Party. The Oakland Tribune, for example, regularly noted the BPP supporters in the courtroom, inadvertently suggesting that the BPP had a membership that far exceeded its real numbers.11

• 12 Bloom and Martin, Black, 109.
• 13 Cleaver, ‘Bunchy’ in Cleaver (ed.), Target Zero, 127-128; Shames and Seale, Power, 34; Wilson, ‘Inv (...)
• 14 Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party (London: Arrow, 1970), 240-241; E (...)

7Another tactic was to reach out to other organizations, most notably the PFP and SNCC, in an effort to broaden the BPP’s support base and build a viable support infrastructure, something that the small and inexperienced BPP lacked. That Newton would be tried by a majority-white jury encouraged the BPP to reach out to the white community. It announced an alliance with the PFP in late December 1967.12 Aware that the PFP needed allies in the black community and that its links with the antiwar, civil rights, and campus movements suggested that it was committed and sincere, Eldridge Cleaver felt that it was well placed to aid Newton’s cause. As important, a BPP alliance could bring extra momentum to the PFP’s faltering quest to place itself on the ballot in the November 1968 election, particularly in the Bay Area’s black communities.13 The alliance thus signified the BPP’s tacit acceptance that electoral politics might be a necessary step towards the revolution, and that the two-party system in the nation could be disrupted and ultimately overthrown, whilst providing the BPP an infrastructure through which it could promote itself. In March, Eldridge Cleaver reinforced this message, informing the PFP’s convention of the BPP’s quest for a UN-observed plebiscite of black America over their national destiny.14

• 15 Rhodes, Framing, 122-3
• 16 Seale, Seize the Time, 240; Pearlman, Sky’s The Limit, 342, 351-352; ‘Backers Pack Court for Huey’ (...)

8The alliance ensured the vigorous pursuit of the Free Huey campaign, enabling its slogan to become one of the rallying cries of the era. Immediately after its announcement, even the antagonistic Tribune published the BPP’s Ten Point Platform and Program, while the PFP flooded the Bay Area with literature publicizing both Newton and the BPP.15 It thus repositioned the BPP on the radical left while cementing Eldridge Cleaver’s position at the Party’s core. It also boosted the demonstrations at Newton’s trial. In November, sixty Panthers were present for Newton’s second court appearance. A court hearing late in December saw roughly 400 demonstrators, including numerous PFP members. Such was the fervor that one protester was inspired to scale the courthouse’s flagpole to remove Old Glory and re-raise it upside down to signify that the nation was in distress. The radical-countercultural magazine Berkeley Barb delightedly revealed that Newton’s supporters packed the court and reported a successful ‘Honkies for Huey’ meeting that same week, illustrating that the BPP was now a significant player in Bay Area radical circles.16

• 17 Huey P. Newton, Executive Mandate No. 2: June 29, 1967 in Toni Morrison (ed.), To Die for the Peopl (...)

9The other major coalition of the Free Huey period was with one of the storied organizations of the 1960s civil rights movement. Newton inducted Kwame Ture (then known as Stokely Carmichael), one of SNCC’s greatest organizers and one of the most prominent black activists in the world, into the BPP in June 1967, hoping to take advantage of his renown and organizational experience. By the end of 1967, the two organizations’ mutual appreciation extended to the negotiation of a formal bond. This foundered, however, over whether it was a formal merger, as the BPP’s negotiator Eldridge Cleaver thought, or a more flexible alliance, as SNCC’s James Forman believed.17 The arguments would rumble through 1968 as SNCC withered and the BPP focused more intently on freeing Newton.

• 18 Joseph, Stokely, 240-241.

10Early 1968 saw the emergence of the third chief tactic within the Free Huey campaign and the first major outcomes of the alliances. The BPP organized two major events for Newton’s birthday weekend: in Oakland on February 17, and in Los Angeles the following day. Designed to announce the partnership with SNCC and give Ture the opportunity to speak, the birthday galas were major publicity coups. Ture met with Newton in prison shortly before the Oakland gala. The discussion was apparently not as straightforward as Ture’s dazzling smile to reporters on his exit suggested, however. Rumors suggested that the two disagreed over the roles of whites and armed revolution in the African American struggle. Ture, who had witnessed the betrayal of SNCC by many of its white supporters in the previous three years, felt that Newton was naïve in believing that the BPP could prevent its white allies dominating the BPP-PFP relationship.18

• 19 Ibid., 243; FBI letter, March 5, 1968, 1-3 FBIHPN section one; transcript of speeches, February 18, (...)

11The first gala was a mixed success. The Oakland Auditorium, almost within earshot of Newton’s cell at the Alameda County Courthouse, filled with a mixture of black, white, young, old, employed, and jobless, demonstrating widespread support for Newton. Speakers included Bob Avakian of the PFP; SNCC’s Ture, Forman, and H. Rap Brown; Newton’s mother, and his attorney Charles Garry. Ron Dellums, the recently elected Berkeley City Councilman, announced his intention to table a council motion for Newton to be set free. At center stage stood the empty wicker chair that Newton occupied for his famous photoshoot with spear and rifle. Its emptiness was a simple and effective visual ploy. A reprise took place at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles on the following day, with Maulana Karenga, a former Afro American Association colleague of Newton and founder of the LA-based African American pressure group US, and local pastor the Reverend Thomas Kilgore replacing Dellums. A crowd numbering over 3,000, including six FBI informants and one FBI agent observed matters.19 The FBI’s presence both indicated the increased importance of the BPP during 1968 and offers a taste of the extensive counterintelligence operation that the FBI waged against the BPP.

• 20 ‘Huey Must be Set Free’ The Black Panther March 16, 1968, 20.
• 21 Rhodes, Framing, 127.
• 22 Huey (1968).

13The BPP’s newspaper lauded the Oakland gala as the ‘first liberated rally ever held in Babylon.’20 The printed press was more hostile, and television merely ignored it, apparently a consequence of the BPP demanding $1,000 for broadcast rights. Berkeley’s KPFA radio station known colloquially as Pacifica, recorded it for radio broadcast. Famed for its willingness to engage with the Bay Area’s radicals, Pacifica’s presence demonstrates that the BPP had maneuvered itself into the center of the Bay Area radical movement.21 American Documentary Films, a radical filmmaking collective that was preparing a documentary about the BPP, also recorded the event. Its production, Huey!, juxtaposed footage of the rally with footage of BPP Treasurer Bobby Hutton’s April 1968 funeral, some white supremacists, and various Oakland police officers, before soliciting the opinions of white oppression held by some Oaklanders in a barbershop. Concluding with excerpts from Ture’s speech, the documentary offered a sympathetic outsider’s perspective, suggesting that the BPP sat at the core of 1968’s political expression.22

• 23 James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), (...)
• 24 Audio recording of Bobby Seale speech at February 17, 1968 BPP rally at ‘Huey Newton Birthday Rally (...)
• 25 ‘H. Rap Brown Free Huey Rally, February 1968’ transcript at The Pacifica Radio/UC Berkeley Social A (...)
• 26 Wilson, ‘Invisible Cages,’ 201, 219n43; Seale, Seize the Time, 245-246.
• 27 Pictures of Oakland rally The Black Panther March 16, 1968, 12-13.
• 28 Rhodes, Framing, 125.
• 29 ‘Stokely Carmichael Free Huey Rally, February 1968’ transcript UCB: BPP http://www.lib.berkeley.edu (...)

14This coverage revealed that tensions existed at the heart of the BPP’s new coalition. Forman struggled to define the terms of the alliance.23 Bobby Seale reinforced Newton’s centrality to the BPP and the wider racial struggle before discussing the BPP’s Ten Point Platform and Program, its firearms policy, and direct action in the community.24 In contrast to the polite applause that met Seale’s speech, pandemonium followed Rap Brown’s address. In his now familiar sunglasses and beret, Brown opened with a denunciation of Thurgood Marshall before stating that the only difference between Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace was the fact that ‘one of them’s wife’s got cancer.’ Anticipating Ture’s speech, he denounced integrationism, although he mused on the potential of a rainbow alliance of the dispossessed led, of course, by black revolutionaries.25 Anointed Prime Minister of Afro-America to the crowd’s further acclaim, Ture then took the stage. Uneasy at the BPP-PFP alliance, he begrudged the presence of PFP luminaries at the event. (This was somewhat ironic given that the PFP funded Cleaver and Seale’s trip to invite Ture to the rally. He might have raised a smile, however, at the knowledge that they apparently had to denounce the PFP as liars and racists before receiving the cash.26) As if to underscore the division between him and his new comrades, Ture eschewed the BPP uniform of black leather jacket, beret and rollneck jersey in favor of a dashiki: attire more associated with Pan Africanism.27 The Tribune reported that Ture’s thoughts on the Newton trial were straightforward: Newton would be freed, or else.28 His apocalyptic speech, however, gave little indication of his sympathies for the BPP’s program, instead focusing on the value of racial nationalism to the worldwide liberation struggle. He concluded to a standing ovation, ‘The major enemy is the honky,’ a position that directly challenged the BPP’s willingness to enter into alliances with white radicals.29

• 30 Ture quoted in Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: (...)
• 31 Morry Wright, ‘If the Pigs Don’t Kill Cleaver, Watch Him’ Berkeley Barb 7, 5 (August 2-8, 1968), 11

15His speech placed the BPP in a bind. It was in no position to censure its most famous recruit, despite a public address that opposed one of its own core tenets. Yet this bind is revealing of the BPP’s attempt to embed itself within the rival (black) nationalist and (white) radical political groups. This might also have prompted Ture’s insistence that the ideology of the BPP was ‘up for grabs’ in early 1968.30 Schooled in the fissiparous atmosphere of leftist and civil rights pressure groups, Ture was a wily political operator, always attentive to such schismatic tendencies. Later in 1968, Eldridge Cleaver reflected on this maneuvering, arguing that Newton’s arrest and the formation of the PFP represented an opportunity to unite Bay Area blacks with radical whites behind Newton, one that worked to the BPP’s advantage.31 Whilst skeptical of Ture’s brand of nationalism, Cleaver was acutely aware of the publicity that Ture’s appearance – and whatever controversy accompanied it – would bring to the BPP and that enveloping Ture within the BPP would bring great benefits to the organization even though it might be problematic at a personal and ideological level.

• 32 Earl Anthony, Picking up the Gun: A Report on the Black Panthers (New York: Pyramid, 1971), 103-104
• 33 FBI transcript of Bobby Seale speech at February 18, 1968 rally, Los Angeles, 15-26 FBIHPN section (...)
• 34 FBI transcript of Ron Karenga speech at February 18, 1968 rally, Los Angeles, 36-43 (quotes 40, 42) (...)
• 35 FBI transcript of H. Rap Brown speech at February 18, 1968 rally, Los Angeles, 47-56 (quotes 49, 56 (...)
• 36 FBI transcript of Stokely Carmichael speech at February 18, 1968 rally, Los Angeles, 57-84 FBIHPN s (...)

16Meanwhile, James Forman brokered talks with various African American groups in an attempt to extend the BPP’s foothold in southern California.32 Such work ensured that the February 18 Los Angeles rally included a cross-section of African-American radicals. The speeches that day lacked Oakland’s electricity but reinforced the sense that the BPP was entangled in a struggle for the future of African-American radicalism in California. Seale’s speech embraced the broad sweep of post-Civil War American history and offered a potted guide to the BPP, before ending with a ‘Free Huey or else’ chant.33 Karenga, safe on home turf, outlined his belief that only nationalism offered the black population a legitimate political ideology before telling his audience: ‘Let’s talk about how to get white people fighting each other…. Let them shoot each other… and after it’s all finished we will have a better world.’ He finished by praising Newton as a ‘symbolic figure’ for the black community.34 Rap Brown raised laughter that was loud enough even for the FBI to notice when he pondered ‘The only thing that Huey Newton is guilty of, perhaps, is that he didn’t tell me he was going down on the honkies that day.’ After repeating some of the themes of his Oakland speech he concluded nihilistically, ‘We say freedom or death. Fuck it. Black Power, brother.’35 Ture repeated many of the themes of his Oakland speech, adding that his audience should be prepared to kill police in retribution should Newton be executed.36

• 37 Seale, Seize the Time, 256-257; ‘Interview with Bobby Seale’ KPIX Eyewitness News report, February (...)
• 38 Kathleen Rout, Eldridge Cleaver (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 62, 100, 134, 164; Colin McGlashan, ‘Black (...)

17The Birthday Galas, then, reveal the inconsistency in the public messages associated with the BPP during the early stages of the Free Huey campaign. This was in part a consequence of the glare of publicity leading to the BPP’s growing pains occurring more or less in public. Observers such as the many FBI agents who tracked the organization and the press outlets that were keen to emphasize internecine disputes in the African American struggle thus gathered enough raw material with which to work. The rallies also intensified police repression of the Party. Within one week Bobby Seale was arrested in his own home and charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and numerous Panther activists were stopped and searched by local police, prompting Newton to mandate that all BPP members ‘acquire the technical equipment to defend their homes and their dependents.’37 Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice appeared at the end of the month. It was an instant sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and propelling Cleaver, and hence the BPP, to international celebrity.38

• 39 Pearlman, Sky’s The Limit, 355; Joe Street, ‘Shadow of the Soul Breaker: Solitary Confinement, Coca (...)
• 40 Marc Weingarten, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote & the New J (...)
• 41 Joan Didion, ‘Black Panther’ Saturday Evening Post May 4 1968 in Reporting Civil Rights: Part Two, (...)

18In January, Newton gave his last press interview without Charles Garry ready to pounce on any missteps. Garry’s presence meant that interviews could take place in the courthouse’s attorney-client meeting room rather than in the dramatic surroundings of Newton’s cell.39 Reframing Newton not as a criminal – literally behind bars – but as a free man whose liberty was only temporary restricted, this could reinforce his claims to innocence by presenting him in less suggestive surroundings, even though it undercut the BPP’s suggestion that Newton was already a martyr. Illustrating the extent of the BPP’s rise, Newton’s interviewers in March were KPFA, the Los Angeles Times, his comrade Eldridge Cleaver, and Joan Didion, whose spare journalistic style was beginning to attract major attention. Didion’s piece appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on May 4 and raised the BPP to another level of celebrity.40 It was perfectly calibrated to appeal to the Post’s genteel, conservative readership, although that issue’s cover, depicting The Beatles meeting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, suggested that the Post cautiously embraced elements of 1968’s counterculture, albeit in the guise of the spiritual quest of the most popular rock group of the era. While Didion suggested that the matter of Newton’s guilt was irrelevant to the situation facing the BPP, she lamented Newton’s preference for rehearsed political statements over personal confession. ‘Almost everything Huey Newton said had that same odd ring of being a “quotation,” a “pronouncement” ready to be employed whenever the need arose,’ she sniffed before suggesting that she saw Newton as little more than an ‘educational fun-fair machine… where pressing a button elicits great thoughts on selected subjects.’41

• 43 Joan Didion, The White Album (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1979), 20.

19In a later revision, Didion reflected that she was pretentious, self-absorbed, and somewhat bored during the late 1960s, belatedly acknowledging that she was unsuitable to interview, let alone understand, Newton.43 Her desire to engage Newton – a man she had not previously met – at a highly personal level exposes Didion’s youthful sense of white privilege rather than Newton’s inarticulacy. Similarly, her unpleasant reference to Newton’s education and its impact on his articulacy again reinforces the suggestion that the interview was an exercise in condescension. Rather than celebrating Newton’s determination to overcome the failures of his schoolteachers it instead reinforced any existing prejudices held by Didion’s readers even as it brought the world of the BPP further into the suburban homes of middle America.

• 44 ‘From Riches to Rags on Road to Revolution’ Berkeley Barb 6, 12 (March 15-21, 1968), 8; David Welsh (...)
• 45 ‘Huey Must be Set Free’.
• 46 Rhodes, Framing, 145, 149.

20By the publication of Didion’s article, such was the BPP’s repute within radical circles that the Ramparts editor David Welsh was writing that the Newton trial would ‘rock this rotten system to its foundations.’44 The BPP’s newspaper went further still, asserting that the Newton trial ‘marks the end of history.’45 Regular press conferences fed a constant stream of information to the media, the BPP’s newspaper could be found almost everywhere in the Bay Area, and flyers coated lampposts, walls, and windows. The BPP even developed a speaker’s kit, designed to offer its representatives bite-sized histories of the Party, biographies of its jailed leaders, and information on the BPP’s various legal cases and their significance for the wider African American population. This information was designed to ensure that each BPP speaker could not only detail the Newton trial but also facts pertaining to a plethora of cases, ranging from low-level harassment to police brutality, thus presenting Newton’s case as symptomatic of a wider system of repression.46

• 47 Henry Weinstein, ‘“Free Huey”: A White Man’s View’ Daily Californian May 20, 1968, 15; ‘Huey Must b (...)

21Even Eldridge Cleaver’s arrest following the death of BPP treasurer Bobby Hutton during a shoot-out with Oakland police in April 1968 did not contain the Free Huey campaign: Seale and Kathleen Cleaver simply took over as major spokespersons. Soon afterwards, Seale compared Newton to Jesus, echoing the BPP newspaper’s insistence that, like the Son of God, Newton ‘laid his life on the line so that twenty million black people can find out just where they are at.’47 Here, the BPP began Newton’s martyrdom, calling on Christian iconography to establish his innocence and saintliness. Whilst this was a little paradoxical given the BPP’s advocacy of Marxism (not to mention somewhat hyperbolic), it referenced the importance of Christianity to vast swathes of the African American population and created a narrative for Newton that was familiar to any American observer. It also slyly indicted the American government, suggesting that Newton’s life, like Jesus’s, hung on the whims of a capricious legal system that could sentence him to death despite being innocent of any capital crime.

• 48 The Black Panther June 10, 1968.
• 49 Rhodes, Framing, 153; ‘A Rally For Huey Newton’ San Francisco Chronicle 15 July 1968, 2; FBI telety (...)
• 50 ‘Trial of Huey P. Newton’ FBI letterhead memo, July 16, 1968 FBIHPN section two; ‘Black Panthers Su (...)
• 51 ‘“Free Huey, Free Huey” – An Awesome Outburst’ San Francisco Chronicle 16 July 1968, 1, 16; ‘Bobby (...)
• 52 ‘Trial of Huey P. Newton’ FBI letterhead memo, July 22, 1968, 2; ‘Trial of Huey P. Newton’ FBI lett (...)
• 53 FBI teletype, ‘Trial of Huey Newton’ August 8, 1968 FBIHPN section two.

22Newton’s trial opened with the BPP in determined mood. That week’s newspaper was covered by a photomontage of Newton, headlined: ‘Free Huey Now: Huey Must Be Tried By His Peers.’48 Chanting and fist-raising Panthers paraded in front of the Alameda County Courthouse, helping to transform the public image of the Party. Rather than a disorganized rabble, the BPP appeared as highly organized and regimented, militarized even. Rather than a chaotic gathering of gun-happy youths, it was a disciplined unit. In mid-July, the BPP held a sequence of rallies in the Bay Area, all monitored by the FBI.49 Crowds peaked on July 15, with even the FBI noting the impressive sight of 1,500 people gathered outside the courthouse.50 The San Francisco Chronicle estimated that twice as many were present, chanting ‘Free Huey’ in an ‘awesome outburst’ of popular sentiment that was met with a police baton charge in an effort to clear the vicinity.51 Unfortunately, the BPP could not maintain the momentum. By the week’s end, numbers were dwindling, and the demonstrations ceased before the end of the month.52 The recently-bailed Cleaver, meanwhile, met with the Cuban and Tanzanian delegations at the United Nations Building in New York City, and promised that he and other BPP members were prepared to die ‘before seeing Huey Newton sentenced to death.’53 The BPP then called for UN Observers to be placed in all American cities that had black ghettos. ‘This action is necessary,’ the BPP newspaper stated,

• 55 Ward Just, ‘The Making of a Martyr’ Washington Post July 28, 1968, B2.
• 56 James Schreiber, ‘Crossroads Trial: Nation’s Life at Stake’ Berkeley Barb 7, 3 (July 19-25, 1968), (...)

23The BPP’s warnings reflected wider sentiments. The Washington Post mused that the trial could create the first martyr of the American left since the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Many believed that the anarchists were executed for their political beliefs rather than for the crime they were supposed to have committed.55 Newton, who likewise was as much on trial for his politics and his race as he was for Frey’s death, thus transfigured into the pre-eminent symbol of revolution as the country reeled from the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. The Berkeley Barb, in full apocalyptic mode, told its readers ‘History has its pivotal points. This trial is one of them.’ It was, the Barb warned, ‘life or death for the United States.’56

• 57 Forman, Making, 526.
• 58 Carson, In Struggle 282; Pearlman, Sky’s the Limit 397; The Black Panther September 7, 1968, 1; FBI (...)

24Such extravagant language had its roots in the early stages of the Free Huey campaign. At a meeting prior to the February rallies SNCC’s James Forman outlined a taxonomy of retaliation should any African American militant leaders be assassinated: for his own death, he considered a fair price the destruction of ten ‘war factories,’ fifteen police stations, thirty power plants, one southern governor, two mayors, and 500 police. The cost for Ture and Rap Brown would be tripled, ‘and I tell you this,’ he promised, ‘the sky is the limit if you kill Huey Newton. The sky is the limit if Huey Newton dies.’57 He repeated the slogan at the Oakland birthday rally. By April, the slogan ‘Free Huey, or the Sky’s the Limit’ was on placards wielded by sympathizers at various Bay Area protests and as Newton’s trial jury considered its verdict, the BPP’s own newspaper devoted its cover to the same line.58

• 59 ‘October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program’ in Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Black Panther (...)
• 60 Both quotes: Weinstein, ‘Free Huey’, 16. See also Wilson, ‘Invisible Cages’ 199-201; Wallace Turner (...)

25This famous slogan was more than simply a rhetorical ploy. In the first instance, ‘Free Huey’ offered blanket condemnation of the very trial itself. If the jury found him guilty, it was merely a consequence of the iniquity of the American legal system, as established in Point Nine of the BPP’s foundational document, specifically Newton and Seale’s somewhat Marxian understanding that a jury of Newton’s peers should include people from ‘similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background[s].’59 The slogan also reminded Panthers and other observers of the historic crimes perpetuated against African American people by the very legal system that was supposed to protect them. ‘Free Huey’ went further, however, rejecting even the suggestion that Newton could receive a fair trial. In denying even the slim possibility that a jury of Newton’s peers could be selected, it denounced the American legal system while asserting Newton’s innocence. Bobby Seale elaborated, stating that any claim for a fair trial represented ‘old white liberal[ism]’ and an ‘endors[ement of] continued racism,’ an implied swipe at the faith of the mainstream African American civil rights movement in using the law to address black inequality and white racism. Kathleen Cleaver was even blunter: ‘Asking whether a black man can get a fair trial in America is tantamount to asking if a Jew could get a fair trial in Nazi Germany.’60

• 61 Shames and Seale, Power, 31.
• 62 Seale, Seize the Time, 277; Pearlman, Sky’s The Limit, 467-468.
• 63 Charles Garry and Art Goldberg, Streetfighter in the Courtroom: The People’s Advocate (New York: E. (...)
• 64 ‘Bobby Seale Calls for Huey P. Newton’s Release’; Wallace Turner, ‘Black Panthers, White Power: Vio (...)

26The slogan’s second clause was more complex. ‘The sky’s the limit’ suggested that the BPP was fully prepared to take whatever means necessary to obtain justice should Newton not be freed. Seale later recalled that this statement was essentially ‘anarchistic.’61 Within the context of the BPP’s willingness to present arms in public, protest at the California State Capitol, and offer stinging rebukes to the white power structure, it was tantamount to suggesting that the BPP was readying itself for war. When pressed, though, Panthers stated that ‘the sky’s the limit’ referred to their willingness to go to the highest court in the land – the United States Supreme Court – to ensure Newton’s liberty.62 This took advantage of the statement’s ambiguity and echoed Charles Garry’s courtroom strategy in Newton’s defense. During the trial, Garry called Dr. J. Herman Blake from UC-Santa Cruz to testify about the gulf between the literal and metaphorical meanings of BPP rhetoric. He outlined the concept of signifying, a linguistic strategy used heavily by black Americans, in which the speaker talks about one particular idea while having a completely different idea in mind. The example Blake used on the witness stand was a group of young men talking of a ‘fine day today’ when a pretty woman walks past.63 The comment might ostensibly be about the weather but it also signifies the speaker’s appreciation of the woman’s beauty. If this concept were applied to ‘the sky’s the limit,’ one might suggest that the BPP had the Supreme Court in mind when using the metaphor. This claim is untenable, however. The BPP considered the California judicial system to be racist, unfair, and unrepresentative of the population. No factors suggest that the nine justices of the Supreme Court were any less so. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Seale promised reporters ‘that Huey P. Newton must be set free or the sky is the limit around the world,’ including locations well outside the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, and Cleaver told the New York Times that the BPP would do ‘anything within our power’ to protect Newton from the death penalty.64

• 65 Garry and Goldberg, Streetfighter, 150.
• 66 Bloom and Martin, Black, 199.
• 67 ‘The Sky’s the Limit’ The Black Panther September 14, 1968, 5; ‘The Sky’s the Limit’ ibid., 8; Kath (...)

28The jury decided in September to convict Newton of voluntary manslaughter, a decision that Garry denounced as ‘chickenshit,’ but that saved Newton from the death penalty.65 It might have initially been a shock, but the BPP regrouped and resolved to continue the campaign, spurred perhaps by the reaction of the Oakland Police Department to the verdict. Two of its officers announced their disgust by offloading a volley of bullets into the BPP’s Grove Street headquarters in the early hours of September 10.66 The special issue of The Black Panther on September 14 retorted that the BPP would free Newton, with a portrait of the BPP leader hovering above the ‘sky’s the limit’ slogan which itself rested over a rifle. Two photographs cited the slogan and presented one young man brandishing a Bowie knife and a revolver, ready to pounce, and another aiming a rifle at an off-camera target. Kathleen Cleaver’s accompanying editorial painted an apocalyptic picture of the repression of the BPP within a Marxian critique of American capitalism, concluding that the African American population faced a stark choice between ‘total liberation or total extinction.’67

• 68 Street, ‘Shadow’, 343.
• 69 Bobby Seale, ‘Huey Newton: How the Black Panther Party and the community can still set him free fro (...)

29By the end of the year, however, the Free Huey campaign downshifted. With Newton removed to the state prison at Vacaville and subsequently the men’s colony at San Luis Obispo, Oakland-based demonstrations lacked a focal point.68 Now that the death sentence had been avoided, the BPP could shift focus to Newton’s absence, mythologizing his role in the creation and definition of the BPP. Bobby Seale wrote of the community’s role in rescuing Newton in The Black Panther in December 1968, shortly after Eldridge Cleaver fled the US to avoid returning to prison. He mentioned a plan to petition the Supreme Court to declare a mistrial but nary a mention of the sky being the limit should Newton remain imprisoned.69 The quiet abandonment of the slogan might suggest the BPP’s awareness that it was more problematic than it first appeared. More important, it reflected the recalibration of the BPP’s rhetoric and strategy, which accelerated with Cleaver’s exile.

• 70 Shames and Seale, Power, 42.
• 71 Michael Casey, Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (New York: Vintage, 2009), 48-49, 110-3, 123 (...)

30Meanwhile, Newton’s physical absence paradoxically became the basis for his omnipresence. Thus his image appeared everywhere the BPP was present. He stared out of the masthead of the BPP’s newspaper each week, his profile eerily echoing Alberto Korda’s image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, perhaps the quintessential 1968 symbol. Shot from below and lit from the left, both photographs elevate their subjects, offering them an omniscient gaze. Both men look sternly outwards, suggestively to the viewer’s left. Both sport berets, Guevara’s trademark headgear. According to Bobby Seale, he and Newton chose the beret after watching a movie about the French Resistance, in which the resistance fighters wore the headgear.70 Their decision was thus a conscious display of their antifascist credentials, one that Guevara’s death – which occurred three weeks before John Frey stopped Newton – intensified. Within months, Korda’s image became an icon, reproduced on posters, banners, and handbills across the world, helping to render its subject a legend who willingly sacrificed himself for the masses and in the process achieved apotheosis.71 The subtle, albeit unconscious, echoes of Korda’s photograph in the pages of The Black Panther fueled Newton’s own myth and suggested a similar construction of his image.

• 72 FBI airtel, March 4, 1968, 3 FBI COINTELPRO: Black Extremist 100-448006 section one; Rhodes, Framin (...)

33While the FBI was working to prevent the rise of a black messiah, the BPP also attempted to keep Newton the intellectual in the public eye, issuing a number of his writings and opinions, placing them in outlets such as the radical publications The Movement and the Berkeley Barb.72 The desired impact was manifold. By touting his work to other publications, the BPP opened up new revenue streams while reducing the pressure on its own organization to reach out to wealthy white radicals. Such income was essential to keep on top of the escalating cost of bail and legal fees for arrested Panthers. While the BPP presented Newton as a martyr of the black revolution, his writings ensured that he was ever present in the minds of members and supporters, enabling the BPP to maintain the momentum of the early months of the campaign.

• 73 Street, ‘Shadow,’ 334-7, 340-9.

34This was not merely about Newton’s role as a revenue stream or focal point of BPP organizing, however. His ongoing writings ensured that he became not simply a symbol of the BPP’s campaign but one of its driving forces. By continuing to issue his writing, the BPP suggested that his incarceration was only a temporary hiatus to his physical activities and no barrier to his intellectual leadership. Newton’s prison writings might therefore be compared to Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, disseminated as a tool through which to reveal the injustice of the prevailing justice system while also ensuring that jail did not remove the writer from the struggle. Supporters could thus draw sustenance from his continued determination to fight while Newton had something to focus on during the long hours of solitary confinement that he endured.73

• 74 Newton, ‘In Defense of Self Defense: Executive Mandate Number One’ in Foner (ed.) Black Panthers Sp (...)
• 75 Newton, ‘The Correct Handling of a Revolution’ ibid., 40-45 (quote, 44); idem., ‘Talks to The Movem (...)

35As important, such work burnished Newton’s intellectual credentials. While feted for his activism in radical circles, Newton was not renowned as an intellectual, as Didion’s dismissal suggested. The BPP Ten Point Platform and Program was in the process of becoming a classic of 1960s protest literature but Newton’s thought did not move far beyond its tightly focused ideas until his incarceration. Missives such as ‘In Defense of Self-Defense’ and ‘The Correct Handling of a Revolution’ – both written before his conviction and neither as renowned as the Platform and Program – suggest that Newton’s parameters broadened during his imprisonment. The first warned African Americans that they were close to being railroaded toward destruction and remains the greatest demonstration of Newton’s rhetorical brilliance. Its historical sweep extends from the colonial period to the 1960s, encompassing the genocide of the American Indians, internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, and even atomic diplomacy. It notes bitterly that, despite all of the peaceful protesting, political lobbying, praying, and petitioning, the tyrannical grip of white America over black America showed no sign of loosening. After drawing this dystopian tableau, it offers a stark conclusion: as Fanon concluded of the Algerian independence movement, armed resistance was the only option remaining.74 It thus positioned California at the forefront of the racial struggle, and placed the BPP at the very heart of 1960s protest. Using the Cuban Revolution as a model, ‘The Correct Handing of a Revolution’ presents the vanguard party as the essential vehicle for the revolution that would lead the people away from inchoate protest towards guerrilla warfare and urges readers to heed Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, another indication of the broadening of Newton’s intellectual horizons.75 This sequence of publications allowed Newton to develop a broader platform for the BPP and demonstrate that he was using his jail time to immerse himself in radical literature, place the BPP’s current struggles in context, and develop new directions for the Party to pursue. His writings thus played a crucial role in ensuring that Newton lived up to his billing as a central figure in the African American struggle.

• 76 Tim Findley, ‘Newton’s Message at Berkeley Party’ San Francisco Chronicle 17 February 1969, 8; ‘Mes (...)

36In February 1969, Berkeley’s community theater hosted a birthday rally for over 2,000 supporters who heard a special tape-recorded message from Newton extolling the rainbow alliance of anti-imperialists and promising a new offensive that would bring about the revolutionary change that the BPP craved. Charles Garry gave a barnstorming speech, followed by the BPP’s friend, Reverend Earl Neil, who opined that the empty wicker chair onstage symbolized not merely Newton’s absence but the absence of any meaning in society without Newton.76 Neil’s mythmaking deepened the BPP’s attempt to render Newton a living martyr. Where the empty chair at the 1968 galas was an ominous vision of what might occur should the campaign fail, in 1969 the chair represented both Newton’s physical absence and his divine, even transcendental presence. He thus achieved omniscience: always listening, always thinking, and always watching. His apotheosis continued to give the BPP purpose but also detached him from his own humanity. He was no longer capable of error, doubt, or vacillation.

• 78 ‘Message from Huey, June 2, 1970’ The Black Panther June 6, 1970, 3. He nods to Malcolm X, ‘Message (...)

39Newton’s official response to freedom was telling. While expressing gratitude for his legal team’s work, he announced his belief that popular opinion, expressed largely through the BPP’s public actions, compelled the court to reverse his conviction. As important, he argued that release from prison did not constitute freedom, citing Malcolm X in the process: ‘I’m being transferred for institutional convenience, as they say, from maximum security to minimum security.’ Freedom, he suggested, could only begin with the release of all African American political prisoners; moreover, America itself was, for its black population, the prison.78

• 79 Leroy F. Aarons, ‘Hundreds Greet Newton on Release from Prison’ Washington Post August 6, 1970, A3 (...)
• 80 Huey Newton comments at San Francisco press conference, c. Aug. 5, 1970, UCB: BPP http://www.lib.be (...)
• 81 FBI teletype August 6, 1970 FBI Black Extremist 100-48006 section twenty.
• 82 Caldwell, ‘Young White Army Rallies to Newton’ New York Times August 7, 1970, 14.

40His release also revealed the extent to which his sanctification was complete. The Washington Post declared that he had achieved ‘legendary proportions’ among the American left and put a photograph of his release on its front page.79 Shortly afterward, Newton held court at a press conference in Charles Garry’s offices, where he seemed overwhelmed at the attention.80 In the FBI’s headquarters, J. Edgar Hoover plotted his next move, telling his agents that Newton’s release ‘offers excellent opportunity for effective counterintelligence.’81 Indeed, underneath the jubilation, the New York Times’s Earl Caldwell noticed a chilling fact: during the trial, hundreds of Panthers marched in the streets; by August 5, 1970, few remained. Significant numbers were in prison or were dead.82