Huey Newton electrified the nation

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Staff: Paul Colvin, May May Gong, David Kirschner, Hayden Perry, Socialist Action (ISSN 0747-4237) is published monthly for $8 per year Francisco, CA 94110. Second-class postage is paid at San Francisco, Calif.

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Roberts and Codispodi were not given jail terms but were ordered to pay another $11,000 in damages to the clinic. They will also have to pay for court costs, which could amount to $100,000 in attorney fees, alone, for four years' work.

Criminal tactics

RICO was originally designed to be used to fight "organized crime." Last year, for the first time, the RICO statute was used against anti-abortion protesters in Philadelphia. A women's clinic there was awarded $100,000 in damages, and 26 "prolifers" were found guilty of "assaulting clinic workers, destroying surgical equipment and causing employees to resign because of threats."

That judgment was upheld in March 1989. The "pro-lifers" say they will take their case to the Supreme Court. Evidently, they feel that they have friends on the High Court.

If ever a group matched the RICO statute of "organized conspiratorial AcTioN Editor: ALAN BENJAMIN Asst. Editors: MICHAEL SCHREIBER Kwame M.A. Somburu, Sylvia Weinstein.

Business Manager: KATHY SANDS St., No. 308, San Francisco, CA 94110.

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Signed articles do not necessarily represent These are expressed in editorials. end women's rights.

By MICHAEL SCHREIBER I read the news today, oh boy: "Former Black Panther Huey Newton found dead on West Oakland street," sang the headlines. "Newton's death by violence seemed preordained," the newswriters exClosing date:

Aug. 28, 1989 the views of Socialist Action. plained. The reason? "Cocaine and alcohol," they pointed out.

I read what some people thought about Huey Newton. Law-enforcement officers were especially eager to share their opinions. They had worked for years to put Newton behind bars; now they felt vindicated.

"He who lives by the sword dies by the sword," Assistant District Attorney Tom Orloff observed. "He was nothing more than a gangster." And Sheriff Charles Plummer heartily agreed. "An intimidator," he said.

Other opinions appeared on the inside pages. "For everyone under 30, it's just another dead guy in Oakland," shrugged San Francisco Examiner columnist Rob Morse. On the other hand, attorney Charles Garry ventured that Newton was an historic figure-right up with Martin Luther King.

A gangster? Just another dead guy? Or an historic figure? I approached one of my union brothers, Frank, who works on the streetcars with me. Twenty years ago, Frank came to the Bay Area from his native Louisiana in order to join the Black Panther Party.

"Huey Newton? I loved the man," Frank told me. "In his early years, Huey made a profound contribution. He helped Black people get over our fear. We saw that they'll shoot you down even if you don't fight. So you might as well stand up for your rights."

"Followed Malcolm X' Like it or not, Huey Newton was a hero to thousands of people like Frank. "Free Huey" was a rallying cry for young people-Black and white-all over America.

It's possible to look beyond Newton's postcard publicity image. Newton's role as a leader of the Black Panther Party was an important one in the history of the Black liberation movement; that's why his failures also loom so large.

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense on Oct. 22, 1966. "Peaceful demonstrators all over America were being brutalized," Seale recently explained. "We decided to take the stand Malcolm X told us to and defend ourselves."

Six months later, Newton was one of about 40 Panthers who startled the country when they entered the California state capitol carrying loaded weapons. That incident is still highlighted as evidence of the Panther's "gangsterism."

Actually, the Panthers' campaign against police brutality and repression rapidly gained support in the Black community.

The Panthers began to build an organization of a new type; it was one that held great promise.

Other militant Black organizations that had come out of the civil rights struggle, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), saw themselves as small bands of "specialists." The Panthers, on the other hand, set out to build a large membership organization in which masses of people could "get involved" in the struggle.

During the next two years, hundreds of Black youth around the country-including college and high-school students-flocked into Panther chapters in their areas.

Need for alliances

The Panthers published a Ten Point Program that incorporated demands coming out of the struggle of the Black community. But they never seriously attempted to build a movement around those demands. They refused to make common cause with other groups in unitedfront-type action coalitions.

Readers of the "Panther Paper" were exhorted to build a "Marxist-Leninist Vanguard." At the same time, the Panthers gave support to Black politicians who were up and coming in the ruling-class Democratic Party. This and empty jargon like "Off the Pigs!" did nothing to educate the Panther cadre and only cut them off from movements in the Black community and the campuses.

The pronouncements, fiats, and decrees made by Newton and the other top leaders came forth with little discussion by the membership. Those who disagreed were denounced as "pigs" and "counterrevolutionaries" and purged from the rolls. Such undemocratic functioning only helped pave the way for disruption by the FBI and the police.

In the early 1970s, soon after Newton was released from jail on his manslaughter conviction (he was later cleared of all charges), the Black Panther Party split in two. One faction of the party, led by Newton, opted for a "Black capitalism" strategy. Another faction, led by Eldredge Cleaver, kept up the old "pick up the gun" rhetoric.

From time to time during the next few years, Black and white supporters of the Panthers continued to haunt the fringes of protest demonstrations, hawking the "Panther Paper" and admonishing the crowd with their slogans. The Panthers were about to go the way of the saber-toothed tiger-into extinction.

But the Panthers have not been forgotten. A new generation is awakening in the Black communities. These young people will fulfill the promise shown by Huey Newton and his comrades when, for a brief instant, they electrified the nation.