Huey P. Newton

Huey Percy Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966 alongside Bobby Seale in Oakland, California. What began as armed citizen patrols monitoring police brutality evolved into one of the most significant political organizations of the twentieth century, with chapters across the nation and revolutionary community programs that included free breakfasts, health clinics, and schools.

Born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1942 and raised in Oakland, Newton was functionally illiterate when he graduated high school. He taught himself to read by studying Plato's Republic — a detail that captures both the failures of the system he fought against and the ferocious intelligence he brought to that fight. At Merritt College, he met Bobby Seale, and together they drafted the Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Program demanding land, bread, housing, education, justice, and peace.

Newton's life was marked by both brilliance and contradiction. He survived a 1967 shootout with police, was imprisoned, freed after a global campaign, and spent years navigating the relentless pressure of FBI surveillance. The survival programs he championed — particularly the Free Breakfast for School Children Program — were so effective that the federal government eventually adopted the model nationwide.