A review by outcolder
Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton

4.0

Huey was kind of strange guy. This Black Panther autobiography is different than most because he wrote it in ‘72, so it is not as reflective as say Hilliard’s or Elaine Brown’s. He is still thinking of it as a recruiting tool or at least as something to raise consciousness in the community. His strange personality and keep-it-real Blackness make the book a fun read, although the details of the trial kind of slowed things down a bit. Although I know the general history of the Panthers in the period the book covers, the stuff about his family and the civil rights organizations he checked out before was all new for me. His sour relationships with Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael are addressed but he didn’t get as mean-spirited as I had expected and I was surprised by how much love he shows for George Jackson... I knew they dug each other but I didn’t realize how much. The descriptions of prison life are more or less familiar if you have read other political prisoners’s stories, but what Huey has to say about homosexuality in the Penal Colony during his incarceration there ... I would like to somehow fact-check that. This edition has a wonderful preface by his widow. Probably the strangest thing about this book is its title. Obviously Revolutionary Suicide is a must-read if you are into the Panthers.