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Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, the seventh and youngest child in his family, from Armelia and Walter Newton, a sharecropper and Baptist minister. He was named after Louisiana governor Huey Long. Newton's family moved to Oakland, California when he was three. Despite "completing" his secondary education at Oakland Technical High School, Newton still did not know how to read. During his course of self-study, he struggled to read Plato's Republic, which he believed he understood after persistently reading it through five times. This success, he told an interviewer, was the spark that caused him to become a reader. While at Oakland City College, Newton had become involved in politics in the Bay Area. He joined the Afro-American Association, became a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc., and played a role in getting the first black history course adopted as part of the college's curriculum. He read the works of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Mao Tse-tung, and Che Guevara. It was during his time at Oakland City College[citation needed] that Newton, along with Bobby Seale, organized the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in October 1966. Bobby Seale assumed the role of Chairman, while Huey P. Newton became Minister of Defense Newton and Seale decided early on that the police abuse of power in Oakland against African-Americans 'must be stopped'. From his college study of law, Newton understood the California penal code and the state's law regarding weapons and was thus able to persuade a number of African-Americans to exercise their legal right to openly bear arms (concealed firearms were illegal). Members of the Black Panther Party carrying rifles and shotguns began patrolling areas where the Oakland police were said to commit racially-motivated crimes against the community's black citizens, in order to stop such crimes. This program was widely supported in the local African-American community. In addition to patrolling, Newton and Seale were responsible for writing the Black Panther Party Platform and Program, which drew largely upon Newton’s Maoist influences. Newton was also instrumental in the creation of a breakfast program that fed hundreds of children of the local communities before they went to school each day. Former Panther Earl Anthony (black panther) said the party was created with the goal to organize America for an armed Maoist revolution to change the social situation to help black people. For Black Panthers this meant the realignment of economic policies in the United States to benefit everyone (including other races) who were being crushed under the weight of American big-business capitalism .