“That Part of Us That Is Mystical”: The Paradoxical Pieties of Huey P. Newton

Born the seventh son of a Louisiana preacher in 1942 and becoming the co-founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, Huey P. Newton evidenced a complex, changing, and contradictory synthesis of faith and facts until his death in 1989. Focusing on 1960s’ U.S. Black Nationalism as materialist, Maoist, and Marxist in its appeals to objectivity, rationality, and positivist science, some scholars have presented Black Nationalist contempt for religion as pacifying and counter-revolutionary. Conversely, others have focused on the religious-like nature of formally secular 1960s’ Black Nationalism, even framing it as a “form of piety” and a “politics of transcendence”. Between these bookends, the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton have simultaneously been characterized as both “anti-religious” and as possessing an “innate spirituality”. I attempt to reconcile these divergent interpretations through an analysis of Newton’s worldviews (culled from his graduate school papers, published articles and books, and speeches and interviews). Newton frequently described aspects of the human condition as partially spiritual and in so doing, regularly married dialectical materialist variants of anti-capitalism, Black Nationalism, and ethno-racial self-determinism with “mystical” and theological aesthetics, concepts, stories, and styles from a variety of religious and philosophic traditions. These “paradoxical pieties” included, but were not limited to, the embrace and critique of spiritual existentialism and transcendentalism; deism and theosis; Christian hermeneutics; Zen Buddhism; and Vedic and Pranic Hinduism.