by Katy Knapp
Daily Lobo
Huey Newton and David Hilliard met when they were 11 years old.
Thirteen years later, Newton and Hilliard co-founded the Black Panther Party.
"He was not only a leader of a movement, he was also my childhood friend," Hilliard said of Newton.
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Hilliard, 63, will launch a book tour of Huey: Spirit of the Panther today at the UNM Bookstore from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
Huey's widow and co-author of the book, Fredrika Newton, will also be present.
The book, Hilliard said, is the first authorized biography of the late Black Panther leader. He said much of the book is drawn from articles and position papers from Newton's archives.
"It is almost entirely in Huey's voice," he said.
The Black Panthers will be at UNM this weekend celebrating the 40th anniversary of the party's creation.
Anicia Esposito, a marketing representative at the UNM Bookstore, said 45 to 50 copies of the book have already been sold. She expects about 200 to be available for signing.
Setting the record straight
Hilliard, who is the director of the Huey P. Newton Foundation, said the purpose of the book is to set the historical record straight about the purpose of the Black Panther Party.
"This is to counter the misinformation, and the people who have decided to tell their own versions," he said. "This is Huey Newton's movement, his vision, the true history of our movement."
The common belief about the Black Panther Party is that they were a black power separatist movement, Hilliard said.
"We were not that," he said. "We were an international, class-based movement."
The Black Panthers supported other civil rights movements at the time including the Chicano movement, the women's movement and the gay rights movement.
Newton, also a humanitarian, adopted a program in San Francisco that gave free breakfast for underprivileged children.
"We also gave away tens of thousands of bags of groceries to hungry people," Hilliard said.
Newton, Hilliard and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in 1966 in Oakland, Calif. The movement centered on the group's 10 Point Program, which sought equality to African-Americans and other disenfranchised people in the United States.
In the late '60s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States."
Hilliard blames the media and the United States Federal government for sensationalizing the party and overshadowing the social work they were doing.
Esposito said through organizing the book signing, she has learned a lot from Hilliard.
She didn't know about their humanitarian and social work, she said.
"It was so neat for him to teach me that," she said.
Citizens of the world
Hilliard said the party chose UNM as the host for the celebration because they hope to place the Black Panther archives at the University.
New Mexico is diverse, he said, and their movement supports the rights of everyone, not just African-Americans.
"New Mexico is a part of the U.S., and we are all citizens of the world," he said.
Hilliard hopes his visit to UNM will inform a new generation of students about the Black Panther Party.
"We would like to be there at that campus sharing," he said. "We were the youth of America and we belong in classrooms as a part of American history, just like Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP."
Newton's vision
Newton was a scholar who received a doctorate from the University of California. Hilliard said he was always reading books by Socrates, Plato and Shakespeare, among others.
The party was created at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement, which inspired Newton to create his own movement, Hilliard said.
He also drew inspiration from Malcolm X and other radical social activists like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Franz Fanon.
"He was a well-read man who saw some of those characteristics could be applied to the party," Hilliard said.
Newton's vision was an America with full employment opportunities for African-Americans, universal health care and better education.
Hilliard said America still has a way to go before fulfilling Newton's vision.
"In a lot of ways, things are much worse," he said. "There were movements on college campuses and in the community. There were people trying to confront the government and initiate social change. I don't see that happening now. These are dangerous times. That's why this book is such an important document for people trying to field new movements."
A victim of violence
Newton was killed while walking down an Oakland street in 1989. He was 47.
Hilliard said his death was a result of an epidemic that all communities in America are experiencing.
"He was a victim of this culture of violence that all of our cities are suffering from," he said.
The book and the Huey P. Newton Foundation will hopefully help give people information to prevent other tragedies like that, Hilliard said.
The global movement
At the height of the Black Panther Party, there were 47 chapters in 50 states and supporters in about eight foreign countries. The party dissolved in the '70s due to internal strife and persecution from the federal government, Hilliard said.
Tallying an official membership count is difficult, he said, because their movement was a continuation of a centuries long struggle.
"It started with the first Africans who came here in 1619," he said. "We were not some accidental movement."
