The Racial Messiah: On Huey P. Newton

While the Black Panther Party has often been presented as the secularist reaction to the politically ineffective religiosity of the civil rights movement, religious histories, symbols, and concepts are closely connected with the Panthers and particularly with their photogenic leader, Huey P. Newton. Reading the iconography of Newton along with Seale’s hagiography, Seize the Time, and Newton’s own Revolutionary Suicide, this chapter suggests that the Panthers offer a black theological aesthetics that has political implications. Moving between an analysis of Newton and attempts at political reflection made by white critics, particularly Raymond Geuss, this chapter also makes a case for black theology that takes political practice seriously, that takes political practice as a form of theological practice, in contrast to those who would simply apply abstract theological concepts to political problems.