Race, gender and class in the autobiography of Huey P. Newton<sup>1</sup>

Abstract

“We’ll just have to get guns and be men”, such was the powerful rallying cry uttered by Black Panther member (and later leader) Elaine Brown in her 1969 song “The End of Silence”. I take Brown’s words as the point of departure for my article, since they seem to encapsulate much of what is at stake in relation to gender and the Black Power movement. Brown’s call to arms in “The End of Silence” immediately poses the question of the significance as well as the function of masculinity in the movement. It also highlights the link between masculinity and armed resistance. However, the use of the verb “to be” signals that “men” are the product of an action—getting guns—rather than a pre-existing subject performing the action, thus putting into question the automatic correlation between masculinity and the male body, a feeling reinforced by the words being uttered by the female voice of Elaine Brown. The contradictions and problematic aspects of the Black Power movement’s invocation of black masculinity, as well as the intersections of race, gender and class, will be at the core of this discussion. In order to explore these issues, I will focus on the autobiography of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, where I will examine the tensions in this activist narrative’s construction of a racialized, classed and gendered self.