Who was Huey Newton?
PEARSON: Huey Newton was the — he is called the co-founder who is actually the founder and driving force behind the Black Panther Party. He founded the party in the fall of 1966. He and Bobby Seale actually founded the party, but Bobby Seale was more a public relations person along with Eldridge Cleaver. Newton was really the driving force, the real power behind everything. I think that the Black Panther Party is an organization that without question got its start kind of coming out of what had been started by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So I think that Huey Newton is definitely a person who had two sides, as I point out in the book. The one side of him was a criminal, very criminal from the very beginning, petty criminal, and then he became much more serious later on. But the other side, he was an intellectual, something that I think you don’t see, a kind of mix you don’t see too often in African-American men anymore. It would almost be like Tupac Shakur, a person
