![]() Whenever he came across a word he didn’t know, he looked up its meaning.īy the time Huey got to college, he was a voracious reader. “I went through the book about eight or nine times before I felt I had mastered the material,” he later recalled. His older brother Melvin was a good student, and Huey borrowed his copy of The Republic. In high school, he’d realized he was functionally illiterate, a struggle he traced back to white teachers who’d insulted his intelligence in front of the entire class. “The dudes on the block still thought I was ‘out of sight’ and sometimes just plain crazy.”įor Huey, Plato’s writings were personal as well as political. But no one around him knew quite what to make of it. “The allegory seemed very appropriate to our own situation in society,” Huey later wrote in his 1973 autobiography. On the street with his drinking buddies, he’d deliver lectures on Plato’s cave allegory-the prisoners staring at shadows on the wall, afraid to go out into the sunlight. Huey was eccentric, sometimes walking into class barefoot and soaked with rain. The Black Panther Party’s co-founder, Bobby Seale, once said that the group “came right out of Huey Newton’s head.” The two men met in 1961 as students at Merritt College in Oakland. ![]() Then, on August 22, 1989, Huey was killed on the streets of Oakland, and Fredrika was left on her own, grieving and wondering what to do with her husband’s complicated legacy. But he came back, and in 1984, he and Fredrika finally decided to get married. Huey struggled to lead the Black Panthers through times of violence and identity crisis. She had to sneak back into her mother’s house the next morning.ĭuring the 14 years that followed, Fredrika and Huey came together and fell apart over and over again. She remembers the Isaac Hayes song “I Stand Accused” playing on the stereo and the awkward way Huey went in for a first kiss. “It’s a beautiful place,” Arlene told her daughter as Fredrika headed out the door in purple tie-dyed pants. Arlene knew where Huey lived-she’d helped the Black Panthers secure his high-rise apartment on Oakland’s Lakeshore Drive. That evening, Fredrika was washing dishes when a Black Panther called with a message: Huey wanted to see her, and he was sending over a car. “He gave such consideration to this simple question.” “He really took a long time to sort out his feelings,” she says. It was very lonely, he eventually replied. But she slipped in a question of her own: What was it like in prison? Huey paused for a long time before answering. Fredrika, who was home for Christmas, found the whole scene off-putting at first. He arrived with an entourage of fellow Panthers and white college students who tried to outdo each other with clever questions. The Black Panthers were clients of hers, and she invited Huey over for brunch a few months after his release. Arlene became a lifelong advocate for fair housing, often posing as the buyer to help people secure loans. The Slaughters had eloped to Mexico, and once they returned to the U.S., they’d struggled to find anyone who would rent or sell them a home. Arlene was a Jewish real estate agent who’d married a Black musician in the early 1940s, when interracial marriage was against California law. It was Fredrika’s mother, Arlene Slaughter, who brought her closer to the Black Panther leader. “I thought they were going to try and recruit me,” she says. ![]() She was 18, about to leave for college, and whenever she passed the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in Berkeley, she’d gotten into the habit of crossing to the other side of the street. But she had no interest in joining the movement. When Huey was released on appeal, some of Fredrika’s activist neighbors convinced her to come along to the courthouse. Before long, Black Panther Party offices popped up all over the United States, and Huey became a revolutionary icon like Malcolm X and Che Guevara.īlack Panthers hold "Free Huey" signs at a rally at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California, in September 1968. The slogan “ Free Huey” became a rallying cry, emblazoned on posters and buttons. His fellow Panthers eagerly took up his cause, insisting that Huey had been wrongly accused. When he’d been arrested in 1967, charged with killing a police officer, the group had only a few dozen members. Newton, at 28 years old, was the leader of the Black Panther Party, one of the most influential social movements of the 1960s. He made his way through the crowd and climbed up onto a car to make a speech, pulling off his shirt and standing bare-chested in the sun. When he came down the steps of the Alameda County Courthouse in California that afternoon of August 5, 1970, a sea of elated supporters surged around him. The first time Fredrika Newton saw her future husband was the day he got out of prison.
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