Newton was born in
Monroe, Louisiana. He was the youngest of seven children of Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, a
sharecropper and
Baptist lay preacher. His parents named him after former
Governor of Louisiana Huey Long. In 1945, the family migrated to
Oakland, California, as part of the second wave of the
Great Migration of African Americans out of the South to the Northeast, Midwest and West. The Newton family was close-knit, but quite poor, and often relocated throughout the
San Francisco Bay Area during Newton's childhood. Despite this, Newton said he never went without food and shelter as a child. As a teenager, he was arrested several times for criminal offenses, including
gun possession and
vandalism at age 14. Growing up in Oakland, Newton stated that he was "made to feel ashamed of being black." In his autobiography,
Revolutionary Suicide, he wrote,
"During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire."
Newton graduated from
Oakland Technical High School in 1959 without being
able to read, although he later taught himself;
The Republic by
Plato was the first book he read. Newton also attended
Merritt College, where he earned an Associate of Arts degree in 1966. He then attended
San Francisco Law School, and the
University of California at Santa Cruz, where he earned a bachelor's degree and, in 1980, a Ph.D. After Newton taught himself to read, he started questioning everything. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, he states: "Most of all, I questioned what was happening in my own family and in the community around me." This was the start of his involvement in the civil rights movement.
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