Abstract

Our work analyses revolutionary suicide, as it was conceived by Huey Pierce Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Its historical-philosophical context is some political revolutionary self-sacrificial theories. These theories underpin both the link and the difference between Newton and other theories of civil resistance. Our method consists in focusing mainly in Newton’s essays entitled To Die for the People and in his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide. The originality of our proposal is based on the fact that the subject has scarcely been developed and that it was even absent in the special issue about the Black Panther Party published in 2017 by the Journal of African American Studies. Our conclusion asserts that self-sacrifice is the key that allows Newton him to embrace, renew and transmit a singular inflexion of civil resistance tradition, which also stems from some authors who are rarely quoted by Newton.