The Huey P. Newton Reader

I first studied law to become a better burglar. Figuring I might get busted at any time and wanting to be ready when it happened, I bought some books on criminal law and burglary and felony and looked up as much as possible. I tried to find out what kind of evidence they needed, what things were actually considered violations of the law, what the loopholes were, and what you could do to avoid being charged at all. They had a law for everything. I studied the California penal code and books like California Criminal Evidence and California Criminal Law by Fricke and Alarcon, concentrating on those areas that were somewhat vague. The California penal code says that any law which is vague to the ordinary citizen—the average reasonable man who lives in California and who is exposed to the state’s rules, regulations, and culture—does not qualify as a statute.

Later on, law enforcement courses helped me to know how to deal with the police. Before I took Criminal Evidence in school, I had no idea what my rights really were. I did not know, for instance, that police can be arrested. My studying helped, because every time I got arrested I was released with no charge. Until I went to prison for something I was innocent of, I had no convictions against me; yet I had done a little of everything. The court would convict you if it could, but if you knew the law and were articulate, then the judges figured you were not too bad because your very manner of speaking indicated that you had been “indoctrinated” into their way of thinking.

I was doing a lot of things that were technically unlawful. Sometimes my friends and I received stolen blank checks from a company, which we would then make out for $150 to $200, never more than an amount consistent with a weekly paycheck. Sometimes we stole the checks ourselves; other times we bought them from guys who had stolen them. You had to do this fast, before the companies distributed check numbers to banks and stores.

We burglarized homes in the Oakland and Berkeley hills in broad daylight. Sometimes we borrowed a pickup truck and put a lawn mower and garden tools in it. Then we drove up to a house that appeared empty and rang the bell. If no one answered, we rolled the lawn mower around to the back, as if we planned to cut the grass and trim the hedges. Then, swiftly, we broke into the house and took what we wanted.

We scored best, however, with the credit game or short-change games. We stole or bought stolen credit cards and then purchased as much as possible with them before their numbers were distributed. You could either sell the booty or use it yourself.

A very profitable credit game went like this: we would pay $20 or $30 to someone who owned a small business to say that we had worked for him five years or so. This established a work record good enough for credit in one of the big stores. Then we would charge about $150 worth of merchandise and pay $20 down. Of course, we used an assumed name and a phony address, but we let them check the address, because we gave them a location and telephone number where one of our friends lived. We made payments for a couple of months. Then we would charge over the $150 limit. If you were making payments, they raised your credit. We would buy a big order, and then stop making payments. If they called our “place of work,” they were told we had just quit. If they called our alleged address, they learned we had “moved over a month ago.” The store was left hanging. They did not really lose, because they were actually robbing the community blind. They just wrote off the amount and continued their robbing. The lesson: you can survive through petty crime and hurt those who hurt you.

The most successful game I ran was the short-change game. Short-changing was an art I developed so well that I could make $50 to $60 a day. I ran it everywhere, in small and large stores, and even on bank tellers. In the short-change game I would go into a store with five one-dollar bills, ask the clerk for change, and walk out with a ten-dollar bill. This was the $5-to-$10 short-change. You could also do a $10-to-$20 short-change by walking into the store with ten one-dollar bills and coming out with a twenty-dollar bill.

The $5-to-$10 short-change worked this way: you folded up four of the bills into a small tight wad. Then you bought something like candy or gum with the other bill so that the clerk had to open the cash register to give you change. I always stood a little distance from the register so that the clerk had to come to me to give me the change. You have to get the cash register open and get the clerk to move away from it so that his mind is taken off what he has in the register.

When he brought my change from the candy, I handed him the wad of four one-dollar bills and said, “Here are five singles. Will you give me a five-dollar bill for them?” He would then hand me the five-dollar bill before he realized that there were only four singles in the wad. He has the register open, and I am prepared for him to discover the error. When he did, I would then hand him another single, but also the five-dollar bill he had given me and say, “Well, here’s six more; give me a ten.” He would do it, and I would take the $10 and be gone before he realized what had happened. Most of the time they never understood. It happened so fast they would simply go on to another customer. By the time things began to click in their minds, they could never be sure that something had in fact gone wrong until the end of the day when they tallied up the register. By that time I was just a vague memory. Of course, if the clerk was quick and sensed that something was not right, then I pretended to be confused and would say I had made a mistake and give him the right amount. It was a pretty safe game, and it worked for me many times.

The brother who introduced me to short-changing eventually became a Muslim, but before that he taught me to burglarize cars parked by the emergency entrances of hospitals. People would come to the hospital in a rush and leave their cars unlocked, with valuables in the open. I never scored on Blacks under any condition, but scoring on whites was a strike against injustice.

Whenever I had liberated enough cash to give me a stretch of free time, I stayed home reading, books like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Devils, and The House of the Dead; The Trial by Franz Kafka; and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. I read and reread Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, the story of Jean Valjean, a French-man who spent thirty years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his hungry family. This really reached me, because I identified with Valjean, and I often thought of my father being in a kind of social prison because he wanted to feed his family. Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus made me feel even more justified in my pattern of liberating property from the oppressor as an antidote to social suicide.

I felt that white people were criminals because they plundered the world. It was more, however, than a simple antiwhite feeling, because I never wanted to hurt poor whites, even though I had met some in school who called me “nigger” and other names. I fought them, but I never took their lunches or money because I knew that they had nothing to start with. With those who had money it was a different story. I still equated having money with whiteness, and to take what was mine and what the white criminals called theirs gave me a feeling of real freedom.

I even bragged to my friends how good I felt about the whole matter. When they were at my apartment during times when there wasn’t any food to eat, I told them that even though I starved, my time was my own and I could do anything I wanted with it. I didn’t have a car then, because most of my money was spent on the apartment, food, and clothes. When friends asked me why I did not get a car, I told them it was because I did not want bills and that a car was not my main goal or desire. My purpose was to have as much leisure time as possible. I could have pulled bigger jobs and gotten more, but I did not want any status symbols. I wanted most of all to be free from the life of a servant forced to take those low-paying jobs and looked at with scorn by white bosses.

Eventually, I got caught, and more than once, but by then I had developed a fairly good working knowledge of the law, and I decided to defend myself. Although no skilled legal technician, I could make a good defense. If you are an existentialist, defending yourself is another manifestation of freedom. When you are brought into the courts of the Establishment, you can show your contempt for them. Most defendants want to get high-priced counsel or use the state to speak for them through the Public Defender. If you speak for yourself, you can say exactly what you want, or at least not say what you do not want to. Or you can laugh at them. As Elaine Brown, a member of the Black Panther Party, says in her song, “The End of Silence,” “You laugh at laws passed by a silly lot that tell you to give thanks for what you’ve already got.” The laws exist to defend those who possess property. They protect the possessors who should share but who do not. By defending myself, I showed my contempt for that structure.

It gave me real pleasure to defend myself. I never thought in terms of conviction or acquittal, although it was an added treat to escape their net. But even a conviction would not have dismayed me, because at least I had the opportunity to laugh at them and show my contempt. They would see that I was not intimidated enough to raise the money to get counsel—money that I did not have in the first place—or to accept a Public Defender.

I especially liked traffic violations. For a while, I paid a lot of traffic tickets. When I became my own defender, I never paid another one. Of the three major cases in which I defended myself, the only one I lost was the one in which I was innocent.

Once, I was indicted on sixteen counts of burglary through trickery as a result of the short-change game, and I beat the cases during the pretrial period because the police could not establish the corpus delicti or the elements of the case. Each law had a body of elements, and each element has to be violated in order for a crime to have been committed. That’s what they call the corpus delicti. People think that term means the physical body, but it really means the body of elements. For example, according to California law, in order to commit armed robbery you have to be armed, and you must expropriate through fear or force related to weapons; you can have armed robbery without any bullets in the gun. The elements of the case relate to fear and force in connection with weapons.

In the short-change or “bunko” case I was accused of running my game in sixteen stores. However, they could get only a few people to say they were short in their registers. I was really saved from being convicted because the police tried to get a young woman teller from a bank to say that I had short-changed her. A lot of people will not admit they have been short-changed. In the pretrial, in which they were trying to get a federal case, they asked me whether I had gone into the bank. I refused to admit it. I knew that the young woman whom they wanted to testify against me had not shown up at court. When I bailed out, I went to her bank and asked her if the police had been there. She said they had and that they were trying to persuade her that I had short-changed her. She said she would not testify because she knew it had not happened. I invited her to court to testify on my behalf. She came and explained to the judge that the police had tried to persuade her to testify, but she would not comply.

My argument was that the police had invented the short-change rap against me. I pointed out that clerks who were short-changed would have missed the money either when I was in the store or at the end of the day. None of these people had notified the police. The police had sought them out and by suggesting that they had been short-changed were really offering the clerks a chance to make five or ten extra dollars—a sort of pay-off for testifying. Most people, I said, are not as honest as the young girl bank teller.

Another argument I put forth in my defense was that if someone else had gotten change after I had been in the store before inventory of the register, it was quite possible, even probable, that the money had been lost at some other time. I got a dismissal on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

In the second major case, I was accused of having stolen some books from a store near the school and of having burglarized the car of another student and taken his books. He reported to the bookstore that his books had been stolen. They were on the lookout for books with the marking he had described. I had not stolen the books, even though they were in my possession. I was doing a lot of gambling at the time, and some students who owed me money gave me the books instead. We used books for money, because if a book was required in a course, we could sell it to the bookstore. Even though I did not know where the books came from, I suspected that they were stolen.

I figured there was about $60 worth of books in the stack. When I needed money, I sent my cousin to the bookstore to cash them in. The bookstore took them away from her, claiming that they were stolen. They would not give her any money, nor would they return the books. I went down to the store and told them they could not confiscate my books without due process of law. They knew I was a student at the college and that they could call the police on me any time they wanted. I told them that either they return the books right then or I would take as many books as I thought would equal the amount they had stolen from me. They gave me the books, and I went on to class.

Apparently the bookstore notified the Dean of Students, who called the police. While I was in class, the Oakland police came and escorted me with the books to the campus police, who took me to the Dean’s office. No one could arrest me, because there was no warrant. The bookstore wanted to wait until the man who had reported the books stolen returned from the Army to identify them. So they took me to the Dean’s office, and the Dean said he would give me a receipt, keeping the books until the owner came back. I told him that he would not give me a receipt, because they were my books and he could not confiscate my property without due process of law; to do so would be a violation of my constitutional rights. I added, “Furthermore, if you try to confiscate my property, I will ask the police over there to have you arrested.” The police stood looking stupid, not knowing what to do. The Dean said the man would not be back for about a week, but he wanted the books. I took the books off his desk and said, “I’m enrolled here, and when you want to talk to me, I’ll be around.” Then I walked out of the office. They did not know how to deal with a poor oppressed Black man who knew their law and had dignity.

When I was charged and brought to trial, I defended myself again. The case revolved around identifying the books. The man knew that his books had been stolen; the bookstore knew they had lost some books. Identification had not been made, but I was charged with a theft. I had stashed the books away so that nobody could locate them, and when I came to court, I left them behind. They brought me to trial without any factual evidence against me, and I beat the case with the defense I conducted, particularly my cross-examination.

The woman who owned the bookstore took the stand. The previous year, on Christmas Eve, she had invited me to her home, and I had seen her off and on after that. When I was unwilling to continue a relationship with her, she became angry. I wanted to bring this out, but when I began this line of questioning, the judge was outraged and stopped it. By this time, however, she had broken down in tears on the stand, and it was apparent to the jury by the questions I asked and her reaction to them that she had personal reasons for testifying against me.

When the Dean testified, I really went to work. Although no books were entered into evidence, he said that I had in my possession some books identical to those on the list the day the police brought me to his office. I asked him, “Well, if the police were right there, why didn’t you put me under arrest?” He said, “I wasn’t sure of my rights.” This was the opening I needed. I said, “You mean to say that I attend your school, and you’re teaching me my rights without even knowing your own? You’re giving me knowledge, and you don’t know your basic civil rights?” Then I turned to the jury and argued that this was strange indeed. The judge was furious and almost cited me for contempt of court. I was in contempt, all right, and not only of the court. I was contemptuous of the whole system of exploitation, which I was coming to understand better and better.

I knew what the jury was thinking, and when the Dean said that he did not know his rights, I used his ignorance to my advantage. People automatically think, “You mean you’re a college professor and you don’t know something that basic and simple?” Once I planted this idea in the minds of the jurors, it completely negated the Dean’s testimony.

I told the jury that I collected books, which I did, traded and sold them, and that I had some volumes similar to those named in the indictment—same names, authors, and so forth. When they wanted to view the books, I asked the judge if I could go home and get them. The judge said that he could not stop a trial in the middle (it was a misdemeanor case) to let me go home. My strategy worked, however, and I ended up with a hung jury.

Then came the second trial. This time I had the books in court, but nobody could identify them. I had acquired some different books—same authors and same names—and put some similar markings in them. The man who claimed his car had been burglarized, the Dean, and the owner of the bookstore could not positively identify them. They kept saying that the books were either similar or the same, but they were not sure.

I emphasized this uncertainty, saying that all I knew was I had purchased the books from another person. I told the jury that I had not in fact stolen the books and that by bringing them to court I was trying to find out if they belonged to those who had brought the charges. I got another hung jury.

They tried me a third time, with the same result. When they brought the case up a fourth time, the judge dismissed it. Off and on, with continuances and mistrials, the case dragged over a period of nine months. It was simple harassment, as far as I was concerned, because I had not stolen the books. They might also have been trying to test new prosecutors; I had a different one every time, every chump in Alameda County, and still they got nowhere. I looked them straight in the eye and advanced.

The third case came out of a party I attended with Melvin at the home of a probation officer who had gone to San Jose State College with him. Melvin had known some of the people at the party quite a while, and most of them were related to each other in some way, either by blood or by marriage. Melvin and I were outsiders. As usual, I started a discussion. A party was good or bad for me depending on whether I could start a rap session. I taught that way for the Afro-American Association and recruited a lot of the lumpens.

Some of these sessions ended in fights. It was almost like the dozens again, although, here, ideas, not mothers, were at issue. The guy who could ask the most penetrating questions and give the smartest answers “capped,” or topped, all the others. Sometimes after a guy was defeated, or “shot down,” if he wanted to fight, I would accommodate him. It was all the same. If I could get into a good rap and a good fight, too, the night was complete.

At the party, while we were talking, someone called Odell Lee came up and entered the conversation. I did not know him, had only seen him dancing earlier in the evening, but I had gone to school with his wife, Margo, who was there. Odell Lee walked up and said, “You must be an Afro-American.” I replied, “I don’t know what you mean. Are you asking me if I am of African descent, or are you asking me if I’m a member of Donald Warden’s Afro-American Association? If the latter, then I am not. But if you’re asking me if I’m of African ancestry, then I am an Afro-American, just as you are.” He said some words in Chinese and I came back in Swahili. Then he asked me, “Well, how do you know that I’m an Afro-American?” I replied, “Well, I have twenty-twenty vision, and I can see your hair is just as kinky as mine, and your face just as black, so I conclude that you must be exactly what I am, an Afro-American.”

Saying that, I turned my back and began to cut my steak. I was the only one in the room with a steak knife. All the others had plastic utensils, but since the steak was kind of tough, I had gone into the kitchen for a regular steak knife. Having made my point, my move, so to speak, I turned my back on Lee in a kind of put-down. To him it was a provocative act.

Odell had a scar on his face from about the ear to just below his chin. This was a very significant point, because on the block you run into plenty of guys with scars like that, which usually means that the person has seen a lot of action with knives. This is not always the case, but when you are trying to survive on the block, you learn to be hip to the cues.

So I turned my back and began cutting steak with the knife I had in my right hand. He grabbed my left arm with his right and turned me around abruptly. When he did, my knife was pointed right at him in ready position. Lee said, “Don’t turn your back on me when I’m talking to you.” I pushed his hand off my arm. “Don’t you ever put your hands on me again,” I said, and turned around once more to my steak.

Ordinarily I would not have turned my back a second time, because he had all the signs of a tush hog. But somehow the conditions did not add up. Most people there were professionals—or training to become professionals—and this man with the scar did not seem to fit. We were not on the block, so I thought perhaps the scar meant nothing. All of a sudden, however, he was acting like a bully, and now he wanted everyone to know he was not finished with me. When I turned my back on him a second time, this would have ended the whole argument for the Black bourgeoisie, but the tush hog responded in his way.

He turned me around again, and the tempo picked up. “You must not know who you’re talking to,” he said, moving his left hand to his left hip pocket. I figured I had better hurry up. Since the best defense is a good offense, my steak knife was again in a ready position, instinctively. I said to him, “Don’t draw a knife on me,” and I thrust my knife forward, stabbing him several times before he could come up with his left hand. He held on to me with his right hand and tried to advance, but I pushed him away. I still do not know what he was doing with his left, but I was expecting to be hurt any time and determined to beat him to the punch.

Melvin grabbed Lee’s right arm and pushed him into a corner, where he fell, bleeding heavily. He got up and charged me again, and I continued to hold my knife ready. Then Melvin jumped between us, and Lee fainted in his arms. As Melvin took the knife from me, we turned to the rest of the people, and somebody asked, “Why did you cut him?” Melvin said, “He cut him because he should have cut him,” and we backed out of the room. Melvin wanted me to press charges against the man, but I would never go to the police.

About two weeks later, Odell Lee swore out charges against me. I don’t know why he delayed so long, perhaps because he was in the hospital for a few days. Maybe he was hesitant. He had been talking about getting me, I know, but I also heard that his wife had urged him to press charges instead. To me, he was not the kind of character who would go to the police. I saw him as a guy who would rather look for me himself and deal right there. When he sent word that he was after me, I started packing a gun. Instead, I was arrested at my house on a warrant and indicted for assault with a deadly weapon. After I pleaded not guilty, it went to a jury trial. I defended myself again.

I was found guilty as charged, but only because I lacked a jury of my peers. My defense was based on the grounds that I was not guilty, either by white law or by the culture of the Black community. I did not deny that I stabbed Odell Lee—I admitted it—but the law says that when one sees or feels he is in imminent danger of great bodily harm or death, he may use whatever force necessary to defend himself. If he kills his assailant, the homicide is justified. This section of the California penal code is almost impossible for a man to defend himself under unless he is a part of the oppressor class. The oppressed have no chance, for people who sit on juries always think you could have picked another means of defense. They cannot see or understand the danger.

A jury of my peers would have understood the situation and exonerated me. But the jurors in Alameda County come out of big houses in the hills to pass judgment on the people whom they feel threaten their “peace.” When these people see a scar on the face of a man on the block, they have no understanding of its symbolism. Odell Lee got on the stand and said that his scar resulted from an automobile accident. It may well have. But taking everything in context—his behavior at the party, the move toward his left hip, and his scar—my peers would never have convicted me.

Bobby Seale explains it brilliantly in Seize the Time: you may go to a party and step on someone’s shoes and apologize, and if the person accepts the apology, then nothing happens. If you hear something like “An apology won’t shine my shoes,” then you know he is really saying, “I’m going to fight you.” So you defend yourself, and in that case striking first would be a defensive act, not an offensive one. You are trying to get an advantage over an opponent who has already declared war.

It is all a matter of life styles that spills over into the problem of getting a jury of one’s peers. If a truck driver is the defendant, should there be only truck drivers on the jury, or all white racists on the jury if a white racist is on trial? I say no. There is, nevertheless, an internal contradiction in a jury system that totally divides the accused and his jury. Different cultures and life styles in America use the same words with different shades of meaning. All belong to one society yet live in different worlds.

I was found guilty of a felony, assault with a deadly weapon, and faced a long jail sentence for the first time. Before and during the trial, I had been out on bail for several months. I came to court each time I was supposed to, but when I was convicted, the judge decided to revoke my bail immediately and place me in the custody of the bailiff while he considered what sentence to impose. Wanting none of this, I demanded to be sentenced right then. The judge said that if he sentenced me then, I would be sent to the state penitentiary. I told him to send me there immediately so that I could start serving my time. He refused, asking me, “Do you realize what you’re saying?” I said, “I know what I’m saying, that you found me guilty. But I am not guilty, and now I don’t want to wait around a month serving dead time while you think about it.” No time was dead to me. It was all live time, life. I felt that if the judge wanted to think about it for thirty days, he should let me stay out on bail while he did so. But he would not. He had me confined to the Alameda County jail, a place I would get to know well—very well.

While I was waiting, my family hired a lawyer to represent me at the sentencing. The judge was a man named Leonard Dieden, who did not give lawyers, much less defendants, any respect. He has sent so many people to the penitentiary that a section of San Quentin is called “Dieden’s Row.” I was against my family hiring a lawyer because I felt it was useless. Nevertheless, they did, and he charged them $1,500 to go to court one time. When I arrived for sentencing, he was there, and he worked his “white magic”: the judge sentenced me to six months in the county jail. Even though I had been convicted of a felony, the time they gave me was for a misdemeanor. This was to become a critical issue in my later capital trial, because the law says you can reduce a felony to a misdemeanor by serving less time. The penalty for a felony is no less than a year in the state penitentiary and no more than a life sentence or death. For a misdemeanor the maximum is one year in the county jail.