I had some contact with Hugh over the last two years regarding our mutual interests in the history of blacks and the writing of biography. I always found him to be a gentleman and willing to take time to provide help and advice. He kindly publicized my reseach (along with Linda Beito) on T.R.M. Howard and the Emmett Till murder on his website NYAge.net.

Hugh was an accomplished journalist who had worked for The Wall Street Journal (as an editorial writer) and The Village Voice. In 1994, the biography of his namesake Huey P. Newton, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America, was published. It was a superbly written but brutally honest account of Newton's thuggery and opportunism. It is well worth assigning in a history course (as I am doing this semester).

Many leftists lambasted that book and many conservatives praised it. But the conservatives were wrong if they thought that Hugh was one of them. He did not fit into any ideological category. He was a fiercely independent thinker. He never held back in his condemnation of racism and despised Bush's foreign policy. At the same time time, Hugh constantly admonished blacks to hold up the accomplishments of black creators, builders, and entrepreneurs and deplored the current emphasis on gangsta rappers. He complained to me that publishers did not seem interested in books about blacks except if they were entertainers, athletes, and civil rights leaders.

Another of his books, Under the Knife: How a Wealthy Negro Surgeon Wielded Power in the Jim Crow South, was a homage to his great uncle, Joseph Griffin, a highly accomplished doctor. Though Hugh admired his great uncle, his account never held back from the truth. According to the dust jacket, the book focused on the"the struggles of other successful men in his family, charting his forefathers' rise from slavery to ownership of large Georgia farms and flourishing businesses in Jacksonville, Fla., and the accomplishments of his own father, who became the first person of any color in his rural Georgia county to earn a medical degree."

Because of this work on Griffin, we began to correspond about my research on Griffin's contemporary in Mississippi, Dr. T.R.M. Howard.

At the time of his death, Hugh was writing a biography of James Weldon Johnson. He was enthusiastic about the project and I'm sure he would have put his heart into making it of the highest quality.

Sandy Close, who worked with Hugh at the Pacific News Service has commented:

"I don't think anyone who knew Hugh could not feel tremendous sadness...he was a fighter. He was so ambitious to be a writer. He struggled and fought and was really determined to be a writer. The books he published and the essays he wrote certainly demonstrated that he accomplished that."