Race, gender and class in the autobiography of Huey P. Newton¹

Chloé Avril, University of Gothenburg

“We’ll just have to get guns and be men”, such was the powerful rallying cry uttered by Black Panther member (and later leader) Elaine Brown in her 1969 song “The End of Silence”. I take Brown’s words as the point of departure for my article, since they seem to encapsulate much of what is at stake in relation to gender and the Black Power movement. Brown’s call to arms in “The End of Silence” immediately poses the question of the significance as well as the function of masculinity in the movement. It also highlights the link between masculinity and armed resistance. However, the use of the verb “to be” signals that “men” are the product of an action—getting guns—rather than a pre-existing subject performing the action, thus putting into question the automatic correlation between masculinity and the male body, a feeling reinforced by the words being uttered by the female voice of Elaine Brown. The contradictions and problematic aspects of the Black Power movement’s invocation of black masculinity, as well as the intersections of race, gender and class, will be at the core of this discussion. In order to explore these issues, I will focus on the autobiography of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, where I will examine the tensions in this activist narrative’s construction of a racialized, classed and gendered self.

Historical background

As far as mainstream U.S. history goes, the Black Power movement has characteristically been understood as a distinct historical phenomenon following on, and breaking from the more widely accepted Civil Rights movement. According to the traditional periodization of the era, Black

1

Lisbeth Lewander gave me the benefit of her expert critical advice in the process of writing this article. I will always cherish the memory of her support and inspiration.

6

Chloé Avril

Power spans the years between 1966² and 1975. 1966 corresponds to the year in which Stokely Carmichael, leader of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee), brought the slogan of Black Power to national attention during the March Against Fear,³ by uttering the now famous words: “This is the twenty-seventh time that I’ve been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” (quoted in Joseph 2006: 2). 1975, the year marking the decline of the movement, more diffusely stands for a time when its ideological fractures became overwhelming, as well as when the popular media lost interest in Black Power and its leaders. In other words, the movement was eventually silenced (Van Deburg 1992: 15).
In dividing the Civil Rights era into two distinct periods, historians of course have done more than simply impose a tidy order onto politically tumultuous times and help clarify the divergent strategies characteristic of both movements. They have also implicitly or explicitly constructed a value-laden narrative in which Black Power often functions as the constitutive Other of the Civil Rights movement, or even its “evil twin”, to use the words of historian Peniel E. Joseph (2001: 2). The Black Power leaders’ advocacy of self-defense is thus made to contrast neatly with the Civil Rights movement’s nonviolent stance, while the call for black nationalism offers a counterpoint to the Civil Rights movement’s path toward liberal integration.
Another aspect that has come to be more specifically associated with the Black Power movement, and which I hinted at in the opening paragraph of this article, is its often narrow definition of black liberation as the liberation of black men and its adoption of a traditional understanding of gender roles (Estes 2005: 2-8). The reclaiming of black men’s manhood occupied a central place in the Black Power movement’s rhetoric and activism, one that also necessitated the subsuming of the

2

1965, the year of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, is often also given as the starting point for the Black Power movement (Joseph 2006: xi). ³ The March Against Fear was originally begun by Mississippi University’s first black student, James Meredith, who singly decided to walk across what remained the most dangerous state for black people to live in. After he was shot on the second day of the March, however, Civil Rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, joined together to support Meredith and to finish what he had started (Joseph 2006: 1).

Race, gender and class in the autobiography of Huey P. Newton

7interests of black women to those of black men in the political struggle. Still today, the image of the (male) Black Panther, complete with leather jacket, black beret and shotgun, remains powerfully evocative of this period in history (Williams 2006: 90).⁴
Moreover, in the black nationalist struggle to forge a society free of racism, blackness as an identity category took central stage and aimed to transcend the differences within the group (be they of class or gender for example). The subscription to the idea of black authenticity, as well as the tendency to offer black masculinity as the one-size-fits-all model for African American activist subjectivity has, however, been a problematic aspect of the movement that continues to require critical attention—as part of the aim both to understand the past and to theorize about the future.
More recently, the last decade has seen a significant revival of interest in the Black Power era, in particular by historians interested in offering new and more nuanced interpretations of the period and of the movement.⁵ This article thus inscribes itself within the growing field of research now known as Black Power Studies. Since I have chosen to examine this movement through the lens of an autobiographical text, I also need to account for autobiographical studies as a field of research, as well as for its relevance for exploring issues of race, gender and class.

Autobiographical studies

The advent of autobiographical studies as a recognized field of research has gone hand in hand with the transformation of the academic landscape to include issues relevant to more than simply white middle-class men.

As Kenneth Mostern has argued in Autobiography and Black Identity

Politics, “the very development of autobiography as a field of study has depended on the entrance of African American as well as other minority

4

Although black masculinity is central to how Black Power is represented and understood, many women were in fact involved in the movement and were crucial to its organization. Women represented, for example, more than half of the membership of the Black Panthers (Ogbar 2004: 104). ⁵ See for example Nikhil Pal Singh Black Is a Country (2004); Peniel E. Joseph

Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour (2006), The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights – Black Power Era (2006); Cedric Johnson Revolutionaries to Race Leaders (2007) and Amy Abugo Ongiri Spectacular Blackness (2010).

8

Chloé Avril

and feminist literatures into academic study” (1999: 11). Similarly, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have claimed, in their introduction to

Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, that “interest in women’s

autobiographical practices […] was acknowledged as a field around 1980” and was informed by a perception of this “as both an articulation of women’s life experience and a source for articulating feminist theory” (1998: 5). The correlation of these two phenomena—the emergence of autobiographical studies as a field of research and the process of diversification of academia—suggests that, from the outset, this new focus on the genre of autobiography has been fundamentally interlinked with different emancipatory political projects.
The genre has indeed been of particular significance to marginalized groups, not least African Americans, in their struggle for social liberation. In fact, autobiography, in the form of slave narratives, constitutes the beginning of the whole African American literary tradition. It is therefore not accidental that so many African American writers have used the genre to articulate both their own personal experience as well as a collective history of exploitation and resistance, making African American autobiography, according to Paul Gilroy, the most powerful expression of a “process of simultaneous self-creation and self-emancipation” (quoted in Mostern 1999: 11).
The significance of personal narratives to such marginalized subjects rests in part on the fact that it provides them with a decisive first step in constituting oneself as a subject worthy of interest, or even in constituting oneself as a subject at all. These writers, having previously been socially marginalized and silenced, could at least claim authority over their own experience and, in this way, enter the public debate. The link that exists between personal experience and political consciousness is therefore particularly relevant to scholars within the field. To once again cite Mostern: “the origins of revolt are always necessarily in people’s self-understanding of their lived conditions, their autobiographies” (Mostern 1999: 27). The nature of the articulation of personal experience and politics is, however, a controversial subject within autobiographical studies, something that I will return to later.
The link between the personal and the political is one that also points to the fundamental nexus between the individual and the collective. The ways in which the individual “I” of the writer meets the collective “I” of the group they are perceived to belong to, is something that scholars of

Race, gender and class in the autobiography of Huey P. Newton

9the genre have been particularly concerned with. These narratives hold therefore a potential of representativity. As Smith and Watson for example point out: “[W]omen reading other women’s autobiographical writings have experienced them as ‘mirrors’ of their own unvoiced aspirations” (1998: 5). In providing, in some sense, “models of heroic identity” (1998: 5), autobiographies can thus perform political work in themselves through helping other marginalized people to come to consciousness and find a voice. bell hooks also stresses the central role that autobiographical writing, in particular by black women activists, can play in helping other black women develop a “radical subjectivity” (1992: 56). Thus, paradoxically perhaps, while autobiographies by marginalized groups put into question the universal character of privileged white men’s experience and subjectivity, they also subvert the individualist ideology often underpinning the genre through their reliance on the idea of a collective. The articulation of collective experience by the autobiographical “I” also implies to a certain extent the notion of authenticity: the subject needs to show that her/his experiences are representative of the community allowing her/him to speak on its behalf.
As can be seen from the above, the autobiographical narrative occupies a privileged position in relation to the exploration of issues of gender and race. The first problem that confronts us in our discussion, however, is the question of definition. What is meant by these two concepts? Even before asking ourselves what they mean or represent, one first needs to grapple with the ontological status of such categories. Is there for example such a thing as race or gender? Is there in other words any biological basis for these concepts, as we often seem to infer in our everyday use of them.
These questions have long exercised critics investigating these issues in the wider context of emancipatory strategies. The refusal to accept the classification of black and female subjects as lesser human beings has led inevitably in contradictory directions, where the need on the one hand for positive re-evaluation and, on the other, for recognition of a universally accepted equal status has proven difficult to reconcile.⁶ Activists and scholars have thus in turn emphasized social constructivist and difference

6

Nancy Fraser has for example shown the political consequences of this dilemma for feminist and anti-racist movements as they struggle toward the twin goals of recognition and redistribution that often seem to take them in opposite directions (1995: 68-93).

10 Chloé Avril

models of both race and gender. The former would understand the experience of being a woman and being black as shaped by a specific historical and social context rather than as the expression of a potential inherent in the subjects themselves, while the latter would engage in a project of valorization of black and female subjects in their specificity while interrogating the white male norm.
At the risk of being reductionist, one could exemplify this dilemma as it pertains to the concept of sex/gender by contrasting Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous formulation about the condition of womanhood: “On ne naît pas femme : on le devient” (One is not born a woman but rather becomes one) ([1949] 2002: 13), to Luce Irigaray’s dual project of rejection of phallogocentrism and re-evaluation of the experiences of women and of their bodies. Beauvoir, through her provocative claim, seeks to challenge the biologically deterministic notion that being a woman is reducible to the fact of being female (2002: 14-15). In The Second Sex, she thus emphasizes the significance of women’s experiences in a patriarchal society as shaping their existence. Irigaray, for her part, takes the starting point in women’s morphology in order to define the female imaginary. Her claim in This Sex Which Is not One that “Without any intervention or manipulation, you are a woman already” (85: 211, my emphasis) seems to be in complete opposition to Beauvoir and has led many to criticize Irigaray for her essentialism.⁷ A third way of looking at gender is through Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. To Butler, there is no essence to gender identity, instead “the anticipation of a gendered essence” is what in fact “produces that which it posits as outside itself” (2004: 94). Thus gender is not the expression of biological truth, but is instead “manufactured through a sustained set of acts” that take on a ritualistic character (2004: 94).
The discussion of the concept of race has similarly been divided along the lines of social construction, essence and performance. One way the social constructionist stance can be expressed is by the idea that race or racialization is the product rather than the cause of racism. In this respect it is significant to note that French philosopher Jean-Louis SagotDuvauroux has adapted Beauvoir’s statement as the title of one of his

7

See Diana J. Fuss for a reading of Irigaray that addresses and criticizes the charges of essentialism directed at her (1989: 62-80). The contrast between Beauvoir and Irigaray is not unequivocal on this point since Beauvoir never denied the role of anatomy to the experience of women (2002: 22).

Race, gender and class in the autobiography of Huey P. Newton

11

works: On ne nait pas Noir, on le devient (One is not born, but rather

becomes Black) (2004). The slogan of the Black Power era “Black is Beautiful” and James Brown’s invocation of black pride in “Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud” corresponded to a will to define the content of blackness in more positive terms, not least as a form of resistance to the institutional racism of U.S. society. More recently, Butler’s concept of performativity has also found currency in the discourse on blackness (Johnson 2003), something I will explore in more detail later.
While theories of gender have often taken women as their subject, masculinity studies have developed in the last two decades to focus both on the experience of men as gendered beings and on the meaning of masculinity. One aim of masculinity scholars has been to emphasize the multiplicity of experience that the category of “men” encompasses, where men from lower social backgrounds and who are not white are very differently situated in relation to male status and privilege (Connell [1995] 2005: 36). Of particular interest to a U.S. context and to the Black Power era in particular is the experience of black men, which needs to be discussed both in relation to their often privileged position vis à vis black women, as well as to the specifically gendered ways in which they have been discriminated against in racist society (Mostern 1999: 13; hooks 2004). In the context of Newton’s autobiography, I will also seek to show how the images of blackness and masculinity cannot be discussed without taking into account the issue of class. More than just a category that needs to be added to an analysis of gender and race, class in fact modifies the content of these other categories and plays a central role in how gender and race are both experienced and represented.
I am inclined to agree with Kwame Anthony Appiah who states in In
My Father’s House: “The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us” (1992: 45). The same, I would argue, could be said about gender. This, however, is not to minimize the significance of race and gender in people’s lives. Howsoever we might question the biological basis of these categories, race and gender do matter in the sense that they have serious material consequences. In line with Appiah’s claim, I would suggest a more revealing aspect to study is what uses are made of “race”, or “gender” even in emancipatory discourses. In the context of this article, I will therefore be interested in looking at the way one Black Power activist makes use of and conceptualizes these categories in order to make sense

12 Chloé Avril

of himself and his community and as a way to propagate a specific form of politics. I believe that these questions are particularly interesting and relevant to the study of Black Power texts, since the 1960s and 1970s corresponded to the heyday of both second-wave feminism and the Civil Rights movement, where issues of difference versus equality and the accompanying strategies of liberation increasingly led to confrontation.
In my analysis, I will focus particularly on three concepts: authenticity, performance and experience. These concepts are closely linked to the three approaches I have discussed above: essentialism, performativity, and social constructionism. Authenticity, in relation to race in a U.S. context, points to the belief in there being a genuine and agreed upon content to African American identity (Favor 1999: 2-3). It is linked to the concept of essence in that it presupposes an original model of identity against which each subject can be measured. Performativity, as I have already mentioned, undermines the notion that there is an essence to either gender or racial identity; gender and race are instead conceived as the product or effects of regulatory gender and racial norms rather than their origin. Finally, experience, to use Joan Scott’s words, is usually defined as “an expression of an individual’s being and consciousness” or, at a more collective level, refers to “influences external to individuals—social conditions, institutions, forms of belief or perception—‘real’ things outside them that they react to” (1998: 61). In looking at Newton’s autobiography I will try to analyze his construction of black masculinity with the help of these three concepts, as well as see how they are interlinked with one another.
As I have already pointed out, the text I have chosen to analyze is the autobiography written by Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide. My reasons for this choice are manifold: the first concerns Huey Newton’s status in the Black Power movement. Newton was the co-founder and leader of the Black Panther Party, the organization that remains the icon of black militancy (James 2009: 140). Through the successful “Free Huey” campaign, Newton himself became for a while a powerful symbol of the struggle for black liberation. Moreover the Black Panther Party appears as somewhat at odds with other Black Power groups. Unlike most Black Power organizations, the Black Panther Party for example opposed a strict separatist stance and advocated alliances with white radicals. The party also supported, at least rhetorically, the movements for women’s and gay liberation (Newton [1970] 2002: 157-59). This is

Race, gender and class in the autobiography of Huey P. Newton

13 why I believe issues relating to the construction of race and gender would be particularly significant to examine in a text produced by the leader of the organization.
The second point has to do with the autobiography as a genre of particular interest to African American and gender studies. Autobiographies also hold a privileged position in African American history and literature, allowing readers access to the weaving of subject, collective identity and politics, aspects I will return to later. In choosing this text, I have also been sensitive to the date of publication. Revolutionary Suicide was published in 1973 which makes the text concomitant with the Black Power struggle. Most of the other autobiographies written by members of the Black Panther Party were published some time after the event, between the 1980s and the 00s, and therefore responded to very different contexts, in relation to gender, race and politics in general. Moreover, relatively little critical work has been done on Huey Newton’s autobiography, compared to other members of the Panther party, such as Angela Davis and Elaine Brown. This might be related to the less literary nature of Newton’s text, but might also have been due to the lack of availability of the text. It is nevertheless relevant to note that Revolutionary Suicide has recently been re-edited as a Penguin classic (2009), a sign that Newton’s autobiography now enjoys Canonical status and is still considered politically and historically significant. This new edition should also open up for more scholarly work on the text. Finally, and most significantly, my claim is that Newton’s text provides a particularly illuminating case study of how gender, race and class are alternately articulated in terms of authenticity, performance and experience. My aim therefore is to investigate the significance of black masculinity to the construction of Newton’s autobiographical self, as well as the function masculinity occupies in relation to his overall political project. The main questions I want to try to answer are to what extent are gender and race, and more specifically in this study masculinity and blackness, understood in terms of authenticity, performance or experience in Newton’s autobiography? What is the function of class in his construction of black masculinity? And how does Newton relate masculinity to political violence and resistance?
In order to explore these particular critical questions, I intend to implement an interpretative reading of Newton’s autobiography which, in keeping with the modern trend in autobiographical studies, I will treat