Titles

Huey: Spirit of the Panther

David Hilliard
With Keith & Kent Zimmerman
Foreword by Fredrika Newton
Thunder's Mouth Press / Avalon
January 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-837-3

Huey P. Newton remains one of the most misunderstood political figures of the twentieth century. As cofounder and leader of the Black Panther Party for more than twenty years, Newton (1942–1989) was at the forefront of the radical political activism of the 1960s and ’70s.

Raised in poverty in Oakland, California, and named for corrupt Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, Newton embodied both the passions and the contradictions of the civil rights movement he sought to advance. In this first authorized biography, Newton’s former chief of staff David Hilliard teams up with best-selling authors Keith and Kent Zimmerman to tell the whole story of the man behind the organization that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover infamously dubbed “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

Author Bio

David Hilliard, a founding member and Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party, is an incomparable authority on the life, legacy, and intellectual history of Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton. Indeed, no other scholar of or direct participant in the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s offers a more intimate understanding of Newton’s activism and ideas. First as childhood classmates and later as young adult comrades in the African-American freedom struggle, Hilliard enjoyed a close association with Newton that endured throughout the Black Panther leader’s lifetime. Hilliard is author of the book, This Side of Glory, a compelling personal narrative and electrifying eyewitness account of the Black Panther Party.