Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party Explained with Dr. Delio Vasquez

Yeah, I want to start with what first got you into specifically wanting to study about the Black Panthers and Huey P. Newton.

What was the kind of the origin spot for you?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So, you know, I was aware about the Panthers as a teenager in my early 20s through popular culture, through really underground and political hip-hop especially.

But, well, when I went to do my PhD in philosophy and political theory, I happened to go to the place where Huey Newton had completed his PhD in 1980, where Angela Davis died.

of decades.

And I didn't go in with the intention to do that work.

But while I was there, I had, well, a lot of things kind of fell into my hands where this history and Newton's intellectual production, all the essays that he wrote, these unpublished works, unpublished books, kind of kept coming across my radar.

People sharing with me, you know, records about his time at the grad program, indicating some of his mistreatment.

There was a question about why the legacy of his presence was so marginalized.

And at a certain point, I realized that I was in a prime position to do the work of excavating that history and trying to bring his memory back salvage his memory and emphasize, in particular, his intellectual production because of the work that I had already been doing that allowed me to be more empathetic towards criminalized people because of the work I had done in philosophy that allowed me to understand the depths of the writings that he was producing that many others had dismissed as nonsensical or gibberish, even to quote some people specifically.

So...

Yeah, that's a kind of condensed version of the story.

Happy to talk about it more, but really things kind of fell into my hands and I realized that I had a responsibility to do this work.

No, I love that.

And in the book, you talk about this idea of how Huey P. Newton, after he goes, is released from jail, he becomes almost like this, this bigger, larger than life figure where they don't know how to, they put them on such a high level.

It's the freed Huey.

It's all this thing that's going into him.

I'm curious of what you ultimately wanted to get from, you know, when writing this book about how we should perceive and how we should think about Huey P. Newton.

Cause I think in this book, you get a much more rounded version of him.

You get more understanding of who he is as a person, who he was, Obviously, before some of the things that happened to him in prison.

So can you talk about that side of Huey P. Newton and what you want to get from writing this story?

Yeah, you're absolutely right that Newton was actively turned.

It was quite intentional into a symbol, a political symbol.

Part of it had to do with people's hopes and wishes coming out of the civil rights movement.