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

Hut, as some defenders have observed, to focus on any "bad seeds" within the
organization, or to highlight the criminal tendencies of some members (which
unquestionably existed), would be to reduce the Black Panther Party to its worst element.
After all, the drugs and alcohol, and law-breaking and violence, were only part of the
story. Carl Miller, a reader of the East Bay ExDr+ess , reacted to news of Huey Newton's
murder by a drug dealer in 1989 in a letter to the editor :
Sure the Huey Newton some riffraff shot was probably a murderer, thief,
alcoholic, and drug addict . . . But the man we remember was much more than just
another thug. We remember the Huey Newton who stood up strong and black,
who faced down the pigs and scared shit out of racists whose worst nightmare
seemed about to come true . . . We knew in our heart of hearts that they [the Black
Panthers] never really had a chance . And that the tactic of armed resistance was
contradictory, at best counterproductive, and for sure downright dangerous . But
oh what a rush Huey gave us . . . The Huey we remember was a tonic that at the
time our community sorely needed . . . a2
As Huey's brother, Melvin Newton, noted, the Black Panther Party was about "ideals ." It
was about "a social movement." It was about "social change ." s3
The original name of the Panthers-the "Black Panther Party for Self-Defense"-
was clunky and cumbersome, but it captured the spirit of the organization . The Panthers
began, like Robert Williams and the Deacons for Defense and Justice, as self-defense
advocates ; however, the group rapidly became the vanguard of a social revolution,
moving away from the ~ of self-defense (that is, immediate self-protection) at the same
time that they justified their actions using the I~i4IIg of self-defense . In baoming a
revolutionary vanguard, the Black Panthers ceased staving off attacks and began
82Car1 Miller, quoted in Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 328 .
,3Melvin Newton, quoted in Hilliacd, This Side of Glorv, 6-7 .
18 4