The Odyssey of Huey Newton

Violence is never far from the Black Panthers' leader

Just a decade ago, he seemed to many admirers an almost legendary figure. Enthroned in an oversized wicker chair, sporting a rak ish beret and clutching a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, he looked defiantly out at the world from a thousand wall posters of radical chic. FREE HUEY the bumper stickers cried, and everybody knew that meant Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, imprisoned for the death of a policeman in a Shootout in Oakland, Calif.

Last week a bearded Huey Newton, 36, imprisoned since Sept. 29 and half forgotten by the world that he once so loudly challenged, appeared in the Alameda County Court. There he received a new sentence of two years on a technical charge of carrying a gun while a felon, but he won his release on $50,000 bail pending appeal. Later this month, however, he is to go on trial for the street-corner shooting of a 17-year-old prostitute.

It was quite a comedown for a man who once debated Hegelian theories of revolution with Erik Erikson at Yale and who was nominated for Congress in 1968 as a candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. Newton's defenders argue that these are only the latest clashes in a nearly lifelong battle between Huey Newton and the Oakland police. Even as a teenager, the seventh child of a Baptist minister from Louisiana, Newton acquired a record of arrests for fighting with white policemen. Newton does not deny that he has a hot temper and has often said, "I'm against violence; I'm for self-defense."

The Black Panthers first came to prominence in the 1960s by appearing with guns in hand at scenes where white police were trying to arrest blacks. The police countered by repeatedly stopping and questioning Newton and his band. One of those confrontations led to the famous Shootout. There were three trials in all--a conviction reversed on appeal and two hung juries.

When Newton emerged from prison in 1970, he found the Panthers divided into rival factions. One reason was that the FBI had begun a campaign of dirty tricks--counterfeit Panther documents, fake denunciations of various Panthers as police informants--in an effort to disrupt what the agency's Washington intelligence chief called "the most violence prone of all the extremist groups."

By the summer of 1974, Newton had established himself as sole leader of the Panthers. But that was also the summer in which he got involved in several incidents of bizarre violence.

On Aug. 6, 1974, according to the account given by Assistant District Attorney Thomas Orloff, Newton was riding along in a new Lincoln Continental, when he was accosted by a group of prostitutes. One of the prostitutes called out something like "Hey, baby!" Newton jumped out of the car, Orloff says, and began arguing with one of them, Kathleen Smith, 17. The others ran. When they heard a shot fired, they turned back and saw Smith lying on the ground, shot in the head. The girl lingered in a coma for 96 days before she died.

Ten days later, according to Orloff, the dapper Newton was being visited in his penthouse by his tailor, Preston Callins. They began arguing about the price of suits. When Newton complained that he was being ripped off, Callins said, "Oh, baby, don't feel that way." Once again, apparently, the faintly belittling word infuriated Newton. "Nobody calls me no damn baby!" he cried. He seized a revolver, according to Orloff, and pistol whipped Callins, fracturing his skull.

Police charged Newton with assault, but he contacted the FBI and claimed that he was a target of the underworld. He said the Mafia had put a $10,000 price on his head because he was resisting Mafia drug pushing (the FBI expresses polite skepticism about this). Then Newton disappeared, in part to avoid the charges against him. He surfaced a year later in Cuba, and there he lived for the next two years, working in a cement factory.

During his absence, the Panthers came under the leadership of Newton's friend Elaine Brown, who urged the Panthers to put more emphasis on traditional politics. Brown ran for the Oakland city council in 1973 and 1975, finishing second both times. She also served as a Jerry Brown delegate to the 1976 Democratic Convention.

During her regime, the Panthers pursued a number of social enterprises that had been started under Newton. They founded and still operate the Oakland Community School, which provides high-level education to 150 ghetto kids. There was and is a program that helps old people to go out shopping and another that provides school lunches. One Panther program offers dances for teen-agers and training in martial arts. Says Oakland County Supervisor John George: "Huey could take street-gang types and give them a social consciousness."

For such community activities, the Panthers won $500,000 in government grants (and the attention of government auditors, who found a number of instances of sloppiness and mismanagement). Even in the midst of these good works, however, there were some violent incidents that seemed to lead back to the Panthers. The ugliest was the murder of Betty Van Patten, 45, the Panthers' earnest white bookkeeper, who in 1975 was found floating in San Francisco Bay with her head bashed in. There were rumors that she might have made enemies by questioning irregularities in party ledgers, but the case has never been solved.

In the summer of 1977, Newton figured that the political climate had mellowed enough for him to risk coming home. Three months later, the Panther Party was back in the police news. One night in October, three heavily armed men, dressed in dark blue jumpsuits and wearing black ski masks and gloves, started shooting through the door of a home in Richmond, Calif. The occupant, a black woman named Mary Matthews, 56, fired back with the .38-cal. revolver she kept by her bed. One man fell, killed by a burst of machine-gun fire--from behind. The two others fled. The dead man turned out to be a Panther.

The incident was inexplicable until Crystal Gray, who lived in the house in back of Matthews', went to the police and said she apparently was the intended victim. She was one of the witnesses in the murder of Prostitute Kathleen Smith. The assassins had attacked the wrong house.

Two weeks after this, a Panther named Nelson Lee Malloy was found, moaning, under a pile of stones in the Nevada desert. He had been shot and left for dead. As a result, Malloy is paralyzed for life from the neck down. He reluctantly told police that he had helped two Panthers escape after the attempted assassination of Gray, and that the Panthers had tried to silence him.

Newton vehemently denies any involvement in these shootings. Sitting in a visiting room on the tenth floor of the Alameda County courthouse, wearing white prison overalls, he admitted in an interview with TIME that the attacks "might have been the result of overzealous party members," but he quickly added, "There's no way my interests could have been served by activities like that." Indeed, he still sees most of his difficulties as a consequence of police harassment. During one of his last weeks out of prison, he claims, he was stopped three times by the police. Says Newton: "The cops said, 'Don't move, but put up your hands.' When I put up my hands, I dropped my cigarette. I was cited for littering."

Many citizens, both white and black, share the police suspicion of Newton and blame him for more than he has been charged with. The Oakland Tribune has published a number of stories suggesting that Panthers are dealing in drugs and extorting money from nightclubs, and one reporter covering these incidents had her car fire bombed.

But Newton has been remarkably successful in defeating the charges against him. Callins, the beaten tailor, changed his story several times, and when the case went to trial last month, he said he could not remember who had hit him. Newton was acquitted of assault, convicted only of the relatively minor gun charge for which he was sentenced last week. Newton was also involved in a barroom shooting in Santa Cruz last May, but charges against him were dropped. As for the killing of Kathleen Smith, Newton says: " don't know anything about it. I had heard I was going to be set up."

Newton talks of a bright future. Although the Panthers now number no more than 500, roughly half their strength a decade ago, he sees them as "very much alive because our survival programs are alive." He has been studying at the University of California for a doctorate in the history of social consciousness, and he looks forward to teaching at the Panther school and participating in local politics. "I plan to work in Oakland," he says. "I love Oakland."

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