He ran the party as its first leader and crafted its ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale in Under Newton's leadership, the Black Panther Party founded over 60 community support programs [ 1 ] renamed survival programs in including food banks , medical clinics, sickle cell anemia tests, prison busing for families of inmates, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing cooperatives, and their own ambulance service.
The most famous of these programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program which fed thousands of impoverished children daily during the early s. In , he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for Frey's death and sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. In May , the conviction was reversed and after two subsequent trials ended in hung juries, the charges were dropped. Later in life, he was also accused of murdering Kathleen Smith and Betty Van Patter , although he was never convicted for either death.
Newton learned to read using Plato's Republic , which influenced his philosophy of activism. Newton was known for being an advocate of the right of self-defense and used his position as a leader within the Black Panther Party to welcome women as well. His parents named him after Huey Long , former governor of Louisiana. Monroe is located in Louisiana's Ouachita Parish , which has had a history of violence against Black people since the Reconstruction era.
According to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative , from to , a total of 37 Black people were documented as lynched in that parish. Most murders had taken place around the turn of the 20th century. As a response to the violence, the Newton family migrated to Oakland, California, participating in the second wave of the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South. Despite this, Newton said he never went without food and shelter as a child. As a teenager, he was arrested several times for criminal offenses, including gun possession and vandalism at age In his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide , he wrote:.
During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history.
