Quotes from Huey P. Newton

No longer dependent on the things of the world, I felt really free for the first time in my life. In the past I had been like my jailers; I had pursued the goals of capitalistic America. Now I had a higher freedom.

It was almost like being on an urban plantation, a kind of modern-day sharecropping. You worked hard, brought in your crop, and you were always in debt to the landholder.

My comrades on the block continued to resist that authority, and I felt that I could not let college pull me away, no matter how attractive education was. These brothers had the sense of harmony and communion I needed to maintain that part of myself not totally crushed by the schools and other authorities.

There is an old African saying, "I am we." If you met an African in ancient times and asked him who he was, he would reply, "I am we." This is revolutionary suicide: I, we, all of us are the one and the multitude.

This street philosophy also crept into my academic work. The brothers were hostile toward the police because they were always brutalizing and intimidating us. So I began to study police science in school to learn more about the thinking of police and how to outmaneuver them. I learned how they conducted investigations.

He maintains that the primary cause of suicide is not individual temperament but forces in the social environment. In other words, suicide is caused primarily by external factors, not internal ones.

Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the

This was how we grew up—in a close family with a proud, strong, protective father and a loving, joyful mother. No wonder we came to feel that all our needs—from religion to friendship to entertainment—were met within the family circle. There was no felt need for outside friends; we were such good friends with each other.

Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.

Misfortune is a test of people's fidelity. Those who protest at injustice are people of true merit.

One of the first things any Black child must learn is how to fight well.

It seemed as though most of the cats that we'd come up with just hadn't made it," he says. "Almost everybody was dead or in jail." Many young Black men in our generation can say the same thing. Drugs, oppression, and despair take their toll. Survival is not a simple matter or something to be taken for granted.

I began to read. What I discovered in books led me to think, to question, to explore, and finally to redirect my life.

Looking back, I see that my friends and I were all in the same boat—heading for hell on earth and trying to reach heaven in church.

When I became aware of the effect of the bills on my family, I wanted to be free of them. It was more than the bills that disturbed me, however. We were in an impoverished state, and I found it hard to understand how my father could work so hard yet have so little.

At an early age I made up my mind never to have bills when I grew up. I could not know then that this determination would extend eventually to the point of not being married or having a family of my own.

When I began to read, a whole new world opened to me. I became interested in books. I still could not read very well, but each new book made it easier. I did not mind spending many hours, because reading was enjoyment, rather than work. When I reached this point, I accumulated books and read one after another. I did this all through my senior year in high school and the summer following. By the time I really knew my way through a book, I had graduated from high school.