In Meron Hadero's A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, the main character of "Mekonnen aka Mack aka Huey Freakin' Newton" takes his titular nickname from Huey P. Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers were a group of revolutionaries focused on Black liberation in the 1960s-70s. Hadero's character Mekonnen takes Newton's name when he joins a clique of teens in Brooklyn who are interested in studying Black history and fighting racism.

Huey Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1942 and grew up in Oakland, California. While attending Merritt College, he met Bobby Seale, and the two formed what was originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. They intended for the group to be a means of liberating the Black working class from white supremacist institutions like the police and local government. The Panthers built their ideology on the tenets of Marxism, evident in the Ten-Point Program Newton and Seale wrote as the ...