3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

Williams, a Panther. "We'd read Nat Turner. We said, look--maybe it is just a black-
white thing, and so what we golfs do is just take as many of `em with us as we can . And
so we armed up." s9 Huey Newton himself would later declare : "We're not a self-defense
group in the limited fashion that you usually think of self-defense groups :'6o
Like Charles Sims, the Black Panthers sometimes confused self-defense and
aggressive violence. Newton's understanding andjustifications of self-defense, like
David Hilliard's, grew out of the marginal and sometimes violent settings of his
adolescence : street corners, parties, local clubs, and bars. For example, he explained:
[Y]ou may go to a party and step on someone's shoes and apologize, and if the
person accepts the apology, then nothing happens. If you hear something like "An
apology won't shine my shoes," then you know he is really saying, "fm going to
Oght you." So you defend yourself, and in that case striking first would be a
defensive act, not an offensive one . You arc trying to get an advantage over an
opponent who has already declared war .6 ~
Within these broad parameters, self-defense evolved into an offensive weapon. `"fo show
them [bigger guys] I was as `bad' as they were," Newton told of his youth, "I would fight
at the drop of a hat. As soon as I saw a dude rearing up, I struck him before he struck me,
but only when there was going to be a fight anyway." He struck first "because a fight
usually did not last very long," and because "nine times out of ten the winner was the one
S9Landon Williams, panel discussion, Berkeley Graduate Assembly, Booth
Auditorium, Boalt Hall, University of California, October 25, 1990, video recording,
Media Resource Center, UC Berkeley.
bo dy, video recording .
b~Newton, Revolutionary Suicide , 89. Newton was paraphrasing Seale; see Seale,
Seize the Time , 15 .
17 3