Nation: The Odyssey of Huey Newton

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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.

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