Excerpt: The Night Huey P. Newton Met Shirley Chisholm

Political analyst and author Juanita Tolliver takes us back to when the Black Panther Party and Chisholm's bold and unexpected alliance shook the establishment during her historic presidential run.

Excerpted from the book A MORE PERFECT PARTY: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carroll Reshaped Politics by Juanita Tolliver. Copyright © 2025 by Juanita Tolliver. Reprinted with permission of Legacy Lit, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, missed his flight the day of the Welcome to Hollywood fundraiser. Newton was running extremely late that evening, but he was calm when his taxi pulled into the paved driveway of Diahann Carroll’s Benedict Canyon mansion. This wasn’t his first Hollywood soiree. He and the Black Panthers frequently attended high-profile functions hosted by celebrities and A-lister film directors who offered financial support for their community-based work. Plus, by April 1972, Newton had become so accustomed to years of surveillance and harassment that his late arrival to the Welcome to Hollywood party was likely more of a disruption for the federal agents trailing him than to Newton himself. Agents went so far as to note in the official FBI files that Newton and his travel companions were not met by anyone at the Los Angeles Airport as they hailed a cab, and that they planned to return home that same evening. While the Panthers accepted and maneuvered around the constant monitoring and invasion of privacy, the mental and emotional impact of what Newton and the Panthers experienced on a daily basis would surely give anyone whiplash.

Just two days before the party at Diahann Carroll’s home in Los Angeles, the Black Panthers hosted an event at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland to formally endorse Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign. Press releases were distributed to news outlets ahead of the endorsement announcement, making local law enforcement aware of the event. Before the press conference began, police officers parked outside the church in what the Panthers interpreted as a visible show of force. This intimidation tactic prompted the Panthers to modify their program so that Newton avoided the event entirely. The Panthers hypothesized that the local police force’s intention was to arrest Newton during the endorsement press conference and overtake the headline of the day from “Panthers Endorse Chisholm,” which was ultimately printed in newspapers across the nation, to “Newton Arrested During Panthers’ Chisholm Endorsement Event.” The officers’ assumed goal was to deliver a one-two punch that would embarrass Chisholm and her campaign and feed the narrative that the Panthers were a group to be feared, rather than one deeply involved in community work and voter engagement.

Huey P. Newton’s attendance at the Welcome to Hollywood party served as an exclamation point to the Black Panther Party’s pivot into politics. And our fundraiser host, Diahann Carroll, was thrilled to welcome Newton into the fold that evening. Her excitement to meet him could have been because the meeting served as a clapback to continuous criticism from Black people who declared that her hit show, Julia, wasn’t “telling it like it is.” Carroll resented this sentiment with her entire being, regularly asserting in interviews that her character, and the show writ large, was an accurate representation of her own middle-class childhood. Inviting Newton into her home was a gesture that these critics probably wouldn’t have expected but would have thoroughly respected, given the Black Panthers’ reputation for unequivocally eviscerating anything, and anyone, that was antithetical to Black culture. Additionally, Carroll’s support for the Panthers increased as they shifted from self-defense to social welfare programs, survival initiatives, and political engagement. When reporters and interviewers questioned her about the Black Panthers in the 1970s, Carroll was clear: “Their purpose is to give dignity, education, and economic opportunity to young Blacks, and that I support.”

The fundraiser would also mark the first time that Huey P. Newton and Shirley Chisholm met face-to-face. The mutual respect was immediately visible as Chisholm and Newton conversed. They were not inclined to leave the crowd of Hollywood stars and power players to speak in private, as they had no ulterior motives to hide. Rather, their conversation flowed effortlessly as other party guests mingled within earshot around the black tile pool. The pair’s dynamic collaboration was unexpected, yet necessary. Both leaders were committed to tapping into the power of the people to cut a new path in national politics and better the living conditions of marginalized people across the nation. For Shirley Chisholm, that meant breaking the tradition of only white men running for president and building a national coalition large enough to negotiate the addition of substantive solutions to the Democratic Party’s platform. Whether it was her idea for a basic income, or her calls for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, Chisholm’s policy proposals resonated with the marginalized because they were a direct response to their collective desperation. In fact, Chisholm’s call for unity across demographics during the fundraiser echoed Newton’s own endorsement statement in which he called on “every Black, poor, and progressive human being across this country to unite together, to join Sister Shirley Chisholm’s campaign …” Disruptive, inclusive coalition building was at hand.

In an effort to proactively address any questions about the Black Panthers’ endorsement, Chisholm told the press that their endorsement “should not be misinterpreted,” emphasizing that they had a right to endorse her presidential campaign as American citizens. Chisholm insisted on reminding her existing supporters, and the nation, that the members of the Black Panther Party were citizens who had the right to be civically engaged as voters, countering the notions that they were “others” and threatening outsiders as defined by the FBI’s continuous public relations campaign against them. In the months after Newton’s announcement about their organizational shift, headlines ran across the nation asking, “Have the Black Panthers Really Changed at All?” Doubt was prevalent, but Shirley Chisholm was adamant about their rights and the reality of their experiences. She further humanized the Black Panthers by expressing, “What has happened to them as an oppressed group…has led them to the conclusion that perhaps with me there is hope.” Chisholm’s pitch to the Black Panthers was the same pitch she made to voters across the nation who wanted a new kind of leader who would shift entire systems to address their needs. It was the same call for unity to drive change via people power, and the Panthers answered the call.

Newton and the Panthers confirmed their willingness to support a dynamic leader, regardless of that leader’s gender—a notion that confounded other Black male political figures as it related to Chisholm in particular. These politicians, who often ran on similar platforms of civil rights and stronger social services, had rejected her presidential campaign outright, immediately casting her aside. That rejection wasn’t a polite “we’re not interested.” Rather it was a blanket “hell no” to Chisholm’s right to seek the presidency. It was loud, resentful, and expressed publicly. In a New York Times profile about the dynamic between Chisholm and her congressional colleagues, when asked about Chisholm and her run for the presidency, “U.S. Representative Louis Stokes of Ohio…simply shrugged and laughed, while Congressman [William Clay of Missouri] answered, ‘Who’s Shirley Chisholm?’” In response to their comments, Chisholm told the reporter, “What makes you think Black male politicians are any different from white male politicians?...This ‘woman thing’ is so deep.” What was particularly stinging was that Representatives Stokes and Clay were co-founders of the Congressional Black Caucus alongside Chisholm. They’d witnessed her trailblazing efforts as the first Black woman elected to Congress up close, but they took opportunities to diminish and undermine Chisholm publicly, including in the New York Times and in national publications that serve primarily Black audiences such as Jet magazine.

Similar sentiments that Chisholm shouldn’t be taken seriously had percolated during the March 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, just six weeks prior to the Welcome to Hollywood party. As Chisholm described it, there was a “machismo group [of Black men] who felt that a Black woman who didn’t consult the brothers had no business running for president.” Outraged by the decision at the Black National Convention to postpone presidential endorsement discussions, Chisholm’s campaign team members who attended the convention started wearing T-shirts that read, “Get your shit together.” The team was fed up, and rightfully so, by these Black leaders, these Black men, who were willing to forgo endorsing any candidate to avoid simply recognizing Chisholm’s historic candidacy. The blatant disrespect, misogynoir, and political gymnastics were exasperating for Chisholm.

In the face of discrimination and rejection, Shirley Chisholm turned to the community who supported her, and took a route that emphasized her willingness to establish unexpected alliances in this election. Huey P. Newton also understood this dynamic before he and the Black Panthers endorsed Shirley Chisholm six weeks after the Black National Convention. During a speaking engagement after the Welcome to Hollywood party, Newton commented, “Chisholm was unhappy that the Black bourgeoisie had rejected her, but because they rejected her, the Black Panther Party could support her.”

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Juanita Tolliver is the author of “A More Perfect Party: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carroll Reshaped Politics,” an MSNBC political analyst, and a contributor and guest host for SiriusXM Progress.