A Huey P. Newton Story (Library Edition Audio CDs)

In his brilliantly imagined, Obie Award-winning show, Roger Guenveur Smith explores the life of the controversial Black Panther leader through a series of improvisations based on Newton's own words and writings. In 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California. In 1989, Newton was gunned down in Oakland during a drug-related incident. The intervening years saw Newton rise as an international symbol of organized resistance, while the government undertook a well-documented campaign to destroy the Party. Newton was incarcerated or in exile for a large measure of the era, a victim of official efforts and personal demons. His isolation fed an impossibly mythic image: The Supreme Servant of The People enthroned in black leather and beret, spear and rifle in hand. Newton is in fact a legal scholar who earned a PhD in social philosophy at UC Santa Cruz in 1980, and published several books, including To Die for The People (1972) and Revolutionary Suicide (1973). Jump to 1999 and Roger Guenver Smith's A Huey P. Newton Story is drawn largely from Newton s own words and illuminates his mythic rise and tragic fall. Mr. Smith s frequently improvised narrative is complimented by sound designer Marc Anthony Thompson s live mix of archival sounds and original music. Together they navigate Newton s cinematic stream of consciousness, from his Louisiana childhood to his untimely death on an Oakland street in 1989.