Daily Inspiration Quote by Huey Newton

Newton frames "Black Power" less as a slogan than as a technology of self-determination. The bluntness is the point: "power" appears twice in a single breath, refusing the softer vocabulary of harmony or patience that mainstream America preferred to hear in the late 1960s. He isn’t begging for inclusion; he’s naming an imbalance and prescribing redistribution. The repetition lands like a gavel: the moral question has already been adjudicated, now comes enforcement.

The phrase "determine their destiny" borrows the lofty cadence of civic scripture, but Newton yanks that language back to the people it has routinely excluded. It’s a strategic reframing. Civil rights discourse often treated Black freedom as a matter of rights granted by institutions; Newton’s subtext is that institutions are precisely where power is hoarded. Destiny here isn’t mystical; it’s material. Housing, policing, schools, jobs, the right to be safe in your neighborhood and still be in control of it. "People who have not had power" is a polite clause masking an accusation: power wasn’t absent, it was taken, and maintained.

Context matters: Newton is speaking from the Black Panther Party’s worldview, where community programs and armed self-defense weren’t theatrical militancy but practical answers to a state that policed Black life while neglecting Black needs. The intent is to make "Black Power" intelligible to skeptics without sanding off its edge. It’s not reverse domination; it’s the demand that the governed finally become authors of the conditions they’re forced to live under.