| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist. By Judson L. Jeffries. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. xxviii, 195 pp. $35.00, ISBN 1-57806-432-5.)

Judson L. Jeffries' book on Huey P. Newton attempts to "take an objective and to some extent critical look at a number of ideas, issues and theories" (p. xiv) that Newton grappled with as he attempted to transform the United States as leader of the Black Panther party. Jeffries does a good job of relating the landmarks in Newton's life that helped to shape his development, including the family's migration from Louisiana to California, his experience of racism in the Oakland public schools, his efforts to teach himself to read (which enabled him to graduate from Oakland City College), and his receiving a Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Next, Jeffries argues that, as a result of growing up in a lower-class black ghetto community that was trapped in unemployment, poverty, and alienation and in which a mostly white police force treated blacks as colonial subjects, Newton came to see this class or black lumpen proletariat as the most revolutionary segment of American society. This was so because it had everything to gain and nothing to lose in a grass-roots (socialist) revolution that would be led by the Black Panthers. Seeing the lumpen proletariat as a revolutionary class is a dubious proposition, and Jeffries fails to show that Karl Marx was wrong to call this class the least revolutionary because of its instability, and so on.

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