On the Importance of Class Analysis: Lessons from Huey Newton

by BAR contributor Danny Haiphong

Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party were about much more than guns.

On the Importance of Class Analysis: Lessons from Huey Newton

by BAR contributor Danny Haiphong

“Theory and organization guided by a class analysis is the difference between becoming the vanguard of history or simply a victim of it.”

Black August has come and gone, but the conditions that originally inspired the annual celebration persist into the present. Dozens of Black revolutionaries continue to live their lives locked away in the steel cages of the mass Black incarceration state, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, and Herman Bell. The majority of political prisoners were thrown behind the walls because of their political participation in the Black liberation movementof a generation ago. Such activity was motivated in part by the ideas of Black revolutionary, Huey P. Newton. As the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Newton imbued a generation of activists with the weapon of class analysis. It is in the interest of anyone who claims to carry on the tradition of Huey P. Newton to raise the question of class to the forefront of the contemporary struggle for liberation.

Huey P. Newton was a member of the "brothers from the block." When he co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966, he was just 24 years-old. By this time Newton had already passed through a range of experiences that influenced his political development. As a working class Black American, Newton experienced school as nothing but a center