Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1942 during World War II, the youngest child of Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, a sharecropper and Baptist lay preacher. His parents named him after Huey Long, former Governor of Louisiana. Monroe was located in Louisiana's Ouachita Parish, which had a history of violence against blacks since Reconstruction. According to a 2015 report by the Equal Justice Institute, from 1877 to 1950, a total of 37 black people were documented as lynched in that parish. Most murders had taken place around the turn of the 20th century. This was the fifth-highest total of lynchings of any county in the South.