Fredrika Newton, widow of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton, delivered the keynote address for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration opening ceremony on Thursday, Jan. 22. Newton is a former Black Panther and the co-founder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the history of her late husband and the BPP. In her keynote address at the Colgate Memorial Chapel, Newton underscored the importance of not hiding the hardships of history in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights activist who confronted the truth.
Newton began her speech by reflecting on how she was exposed to the inner workings of advocacy at an early age, leading her on a path to the BPP. Although Newton’s mother was a real estate agent for the BPP, she had never interacted extensively with its members until college when her mom invited them over for lunch.
Among the Black Panthers, Newton met Huey P. Newton whom she saw as a young man vulnerable enough to recount his experiences of incarceration to her. Newton said she was invigorated by the Black Panther Party’s many community survival programs, specifically their free breakfast initiative that fed 20,000 low-income children each week, and finally became a member.
Newton explained how media portrayals of the BPP were detrimental to their mission of fighting injustice. She said that while law-enforcement-influenced media portrayed the BPP as anti-white terrorists, it was, in reality, a diverse organization of disciplined and educated individuals who fought against the oppression of all people.
“The media showed the Black Panthers as angry, gun-toting, leather-jacket-wearing men, but they wouldn’t show the same brother feeding hungry children at 5 a.m.,” Newton said.
Newton detailed the violence against the Black Panthers encouraged by the media, stating that every member had an understanding that their life could be cut short by brutality at any time.
“When I was an active member, I just assumed I would not live a long life,” Newton said.
A couple of years after the BPP dissolved, Huey P. Newton was tragically murdered. Newton chronicled the shock that came with finding out her husband had died. Through the pain of losing her life partner, she realized the hundreds of BPP photographs, documents and archives she possessed in her basement contained a history that the world needed to see.
“I think it took me a long time to unpack that grief. With that grief, however, came a legacy, and it wasn’t just in my heart and in my head — it was physical,” Newton said.
Newton founded the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland, Calif., to further her life mission of promoting and telling an accurate story of the Black Panther community, one that she hoped would represent the fact that community building, not terrorism, was the foundation for the Black Panthers. By emphasizing her current efforts to elevate her history and by continuing to uphold the Black Panthers’ veneration of community, Newton prompted the audience to take this year’s MLK Week Celebration theme, “Live the Values and Lift Each Other,” more earnestly to heart.
Newton concluded her address with a call to action for Colgate and the world at large.
“So today, let us honor Dr. King not with comfort, but with commitment. Let us honor him by telling the truth fully, honestly and without apology,” Newton said.
Sophomore Emy Pacheco Ramirez reflected on how Newton’s values inspired young people like herself to engage in activism and delve deeper into history.
“I really enjoyed her speech because it felt like she was empowering us on a personal level,” Ramirez said. “I went to two of her sessions before the keynote [address] where a lot of people asked her about how to stand up for a cause that not many people may believe in, and she advised everyone to not waste our energy on trying to change anyone’s mind, but instead surround ourselves with people who care.”
Darline Wattles, associate director of the ALANA Cultural Center, echoed Ramirez’s sentiment, stating that Newton was specifically chosen as this year’s keynote speaker because of her community-oriented work in challenging the extremist label history had given her former organization.
“It’s not every day that you get confronted with history in such a real way,” Wattles said. “I really appreciated her storytelling and the care that she took to correct that narrative of the Black Panther Party.”
Newton ended her Thursday talk by inviting the audience to visit the museum to learn more about Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther legacy. She welcomes all who are willing to thoughtfully engage with history and is always excited to see more people learn about the work of one of the world’s most influential activist groups.
