Huey P. Newton
Biography
Huey P. Newton was the co-founder, with Bobby Seale, of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966 and served as the party's Minister of Defense and chief theorist throughout its life. On October 28, 1967, he was wounded in an Oakland traffic stop in which Officer John Frey was killed and Officer Herbert Heanes was wounded. Newton was charged with first-degree murder; the 'Free Huey' campaign that followed his arrest became the largest single mobilization of Black Panther Party history.
He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in September 1968 and sentenced to two-to-fifteen years. The California Court of Appeal reversed the conviction in May 1970 on procedural grounds (an erroneous jury instruction); two retrials in 1971 both ended in hung juries and the charges were finally dismissed in December 1971. After several years of exile in Cuba (1974–1977) following an unrelated 1974 prosecution, he returned voluntarily and was eventually acquitted at retrial in 1979. He was killed in Oakland in 1989 in a dispute unrelated to his politics.
