Eldridge Cleaver

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Cleaver, Eldridge (b. 1935), essayist, socio-cultural theorist, and minister. Born in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, Leroy Eldridge Cleaver moved west to Los Angeles in 1946, where his family lived in an impoverished African American/Chicano neighborhood. In 1953 and 1957 Cleaver was convicted for narcotics possession and assault and spent almost thirteen years in the California penitentiary system. While in prison he affiliated with the Black Muslims and became an ardent follower of Malcolm X.

After his 1966 parole Cleaver worked for Ramparts magazine and met several radical and countercultural activists, among them Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, cofounders of the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, of which he soon became the minister of information. On 6 April 1968 Cleaver was wounded and arrested after a violent encounter between the Black Panthers and the Oakland police.

In February 1968 Cleaver published Soul on Ice, an enormously popular and influential collection of essays and letters on American culture, race and gender relations, and his own prison life. Soul on Ice gained Cleaver instant national recognition as the potential intellectual and political heir to Malcolm X. During 1968 Cleaver became involved in several political controversies, including an invitation to lecture at the University of California at Berkeley and his own legal struggle to remain free. Ordered back to prison, Cleaver fled the country on 27 November 1968 and spent the next seven years in Cuba, Algeria, and France. He continued to publish radical essays in Black Panther, Ramparts, and the Black Scholar.

During his exile he became increasingly disenchanted with the Third World and authoritarian communism and returned in 1975 as a political conservative to prison in the United States, totally rejected by his former associates. He also began a religious odyssey that took him through evangelical Christianity to the Mormon Church, some of which is chronicled in Soul on Fire (1978), a conversion autobiography.

Bibliography

• Robert Scheer, ed., Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, 1969.
• Kathleen Rout, Eldridge Cleaver, 1991

Roger A. Berger

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Leroy Eldridge Cleaver (born 1935), an American writer and a leader of the Black Panther party, was noted for advocating violent revolution within the United States.

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was born August 31, 1935 in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, the son of Leroy Cleaver, a waiter and piano player, and Thelma Cleaver, an elementary school teacher. When his father became a dining car waiter on the Super Chief, a train running from Chicago to Los Angeles, the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, one of the train's stops. Young Cleaver earned money by shining shoes after school. Two years later, the family moved to the Watts section of Los Angeles. Cleaver dropped out of Abraham Lincoln Junior High School after his parents separated. His petty crime record began at the age of 12 with the theft of a bicycle. He was sent to the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys in Whittier, California, where he was inspired to commit more sophisticated crimes. In 1953, he was released from Nelles and was soon sent to the Preston School of Industry for selling marijuana. Soon after his release from Preston, he was again arrested for possession of marijuana and, now an adult, was sentenced to a two-and one-half-year sentence at the California State Prison at Soledad in June of 1954.

At Soledad, Cleaver completed his high school education and read the works of Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Thomas Paine. After his release from Soledad, he went back to selling marijuana and became a rapist on the weekend. This led him to be arrested for "assault with intent to murder" at the end of 1957 and was sentenced to two to fourteen years at San Quentin Prison. He later was transferred to Folsom Prison in Represa, California.

In the early 1960s, while in jail, Cleaver decided to give up crime. He was influenced by the teachings of the Black Muslims and became a follower of Malcolm X. When Malcolm broke with the Black Muslims, so did Cleaver. Then he became an advocate of "black power," as this position was enunciated by Stokely Carmichael.

Also while in jail, Cleaver wrote essays, some published in 1962 in the Negro History Bulletin; these dealing mainly with racial pride and black nationalism. Out of these autobiographical essays came his first book, Soul on Ice (1968).

Ramparts magazine, which had brought Cleaver to public attention by publishing some of his prison articles, and Cleaver's lawyer were instrumental in securing his parole in 1966. He immediately began a new life as a writer and political activist. He helped found Black House, a social center for San Francisco youth. In 1967, he met the men who had founded the Black Panther party the year before. He became the party's minister of information, responsible for editing its newspaper. Later that year, he married Kathleen Neal. She became the communications secretary of the Black Panther party. The couple had two children.

With Soul on Ice Cleaver gained national prominence. On April 15, 1968, along with the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., and others, he addressed a mass rally against the Vietnam War in San Francisco.

As he became increasingly outspoken against racial, economic, and political injustices in America, Cleaver's parole officer advised him to discontinue his political activities. But Cleaver was becoming convinced that conditions for African-American people could not be alleviated without a violent revolution. To effect this, he felt, massive education was required to politicize the people. One method was to utilize a political campaign. In 1968, he urged the Black Panther party to unite with the predominantly white Peace and Freedom party in California to nominate candidates for local and state offices. Cleaver's wife became a candidate on the Peace and Freedom party ticket for the California State Assembly, along with the Black Panther's Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.

In April 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and after harassment by the police of the Black Panther party, Cleaver was involved in a shoot-out with the Oakland police. One man was killed, and Cleaver was wounded in the foot and arrested. He was accused of violating his parole by possessing a gun, associating with people of bad reputation, and failing to cooperate with his parole agent. He was released on $50,000 bail.

In the next few months, Cleaver became a prominent spokesman of the radical, revolutionary left. He had moved from cultural, African-American nationalism to a more Marxist interpretation of revolutionary change. Cleaver believed that African-Americans should ally themselves with radical whites, and he criticized those African-American nationalists who refused such coalitions. During this period, he toured America as the presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom party. He lectured on racism at the University of California in the fall of 1968.

Cleaver was scheduled to surrender to prison authorities in November 1968 for hearings on the charge of parole violation. Instead, he disappeared. He went to Cuba, North Korea, and Algeria and in September 1970 announced the establishment of an international office for the Black Panther party in Algiers.

While in exile, Cleaver championed "the angels of destruction" and the "great educational value" of murder. Cleaver accused Newton of putting the Black Panthers in the past by advocating community service programs over armed revolution. Cleaver was accused by others of abusing his wife while in Algeria and of having other Black Panthers killed. In March of 1971, Cleaver and Newton expelled each others' faction from the party, thus ending its heyday as the major voice for African-American activism in America.

In 1976, Cleaver returned to America to vote for Jimmy Carter and to face his accusers in California. Cleaver had changed his beliefs again while in Africa and now "stopped being a communist or socialist and developed an understanding and respect for free enterprise and the democratic political system." He joined the Mormon church and began to lecture on conservative issues and sell ceramic pots. He eventually set up a recycling business and tried, unsuccessfully, to get the backing of the Republican party for the a 1984 run for the US Senate.

Cleaver later divorced his wife and went to Harvard Law School. Cleaver then moved back to Berkeley, California and became a preacher. A recovering drug addict, Cleaver now speaks in school, prisons, and churches about the importance of resolving conflicts without violence and is working on a new autobiography.

Further Reading

Eldridge Cleaver: Post Prison Writings and Speeches was edited by Robert Scheer in 1968. Lee Lockwood's talks with Cleaver were published as Conversations with Eldridge Cleaver: Algiers (1970). Books about the Black Panthers that include Cleaver are Gene Marine The Black Panthers (1969), Ruth Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones The Vanguard: A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers (1970), Philip S. Foner, ed. The Black Panthers Speak (1970), and Bobby Seale Seize the Time (1970). Two books critical of the Black Panthers are Earl Anthony Picking Up the Gun (1970), and I Was a Black Panther, as told to C. J. Moore (1970). Cleaver's own autobiography is Soul On Fire (1978). Much biographical information on Cleaver can be found in David Leon Leaders From the 1960s: A Biographical Sourcebook of American Activism (1994), and a biography of Cleaver to that point can be found in the 1970 issue of Current Biography. Cleaver also appears in August 1996 issue of Ebony magazine.

activist; writer

Personal Information

Born Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, August 3, 1935, in Wabbaseka, AR; son of Leroy (a dining car waiter) and Thelma (a teacher and janitor) Cleaver; married Kathleen Neal (a law professor), December 1967 (divorced, 1987); children: Maceo (son), Joju (daughter).
Education: Attended junior college; also educated in Soledad Prison.

Career

Ramparts (magazine), assistant editor and contributing writer, 1966-68; Black Panther Party, Oakland, CA, minister of information, 1967-71; U.S. presidential candidate, Peace and Freedom Party, 1968; lived in exile in Algeria, Cuba, and Paris, 1968-76; returned to United States, 1976. Writer, 1966--; public speaker, 1976--; political activist based in California. Men's clothing designer and marketer, 1978; artist and owner of a recycling business in Berkeley, CA, 1988--.

Life's Work

"As the charismatic Information Minister of the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver was one of the most dazzling and controversial fixtures of the '60s," judged an Ebony magazine contributor. "For more than a decade, the Arkansas-born writer-activist mesmerized audiences with his calls for revolutionary violence against the agents of racism, capitalism and Christianity." Cleaver was an early leader of the Black Panthers, a political union of disenchanted African Americans that eventually attracted nationwide membership. From the pages of his bestselling book Soul on Ice as well as from public platforms, Cleaver urged blacks and whites alike to oppose repression, police brutality, and unequal economic opportunity. To racist whites, Cleaver represented a clear threat: he eloquently advocated extreme measures to assure the overthrow of a society that discriminated against minorities.

Cleaver told People magazine that during the late 1960s he felt "there was no hope of effecting real freedom within the capitalistic system. I was the guy who demanded we go down shooting." Cleaver's rhetoric caught up with him in 1968 after a gun battle between the Black Panthers and the San Francisco police. Fleeing a federal warrant for his arrest, he took refuge in Cuba, Algeria, and later Paris in an exile that lasted almost a decade. The firsthand experience of life in communist nations dramatically transformed Cleaver's thinking on his American homeland. Since his return to the United States in 1976, he has pursued a more conventional political agenda. "During the eight years that I was absent from the United States, I underwent a change in my whole philosophy based on my observations," Cleaver told Ebony. "I stopped being a communist or socialist and developed an understanding and respect for free enterprise and the democratic political system.... I found the systems of dictatorships and communism to be absolutely unacceptable. Living in those countries put an end to my advocacy of communism."

Eldridge Cleaver was born in 1935 in Wabbaseka, a small Arkansas town near Little Rock. His father, Leroy, worked as a waiter and entertainer in a Little Rock nightclub, and his mother taught elementary school. While Cleaver was still young, his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, because Leroy Cleaver had gotten a job in the dining car of the Super Chief, a train running between Chicago and Los Angeles. Eventually the Cleavers moved on to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. There Cleaver's parents separated, and his mother supported the children by serving as a janitor at a junior high school.

Cleaver's first brush with the law came just as he entered junior high. After a conviction on bicycle theft, he was sent to a California reform school. Released in 1953, he was arrested again for selling marijuana. This time he was remanded to the Preston School of Industry for a year. At the end of his sentence, he was arrested yet again for selling marijuana and was sent to the California State Prison at Soledad. Cleaver spent the lion's share of his teen years behind bars in one institution or another. He earned his high school degree at Soledad and read widely, including the works of such authors as Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Richard Wright, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

In Soul on Ice, Cleaver writes that a youth spent in prison filled him with rage. Upon his release from Soledad, he began selling marijuana again and then engaged in increasingly violent acts. Once again the law caught up with Cleaver, and he was convicted of assault with intent to murder and remanded to San Quentin and Folsom prisons.

Further incarceration gave Cleaver an opportunity to examine his life and to seek the source of his rage and despair. In an effort to understand himself and his society, he began to write essays and snatches of autobiography. He became a disciple of the Black Muslim movement founded by Elijah Muhammad and was moved by the fiery speeches of Malcolm X. Attempts to win converts to the faith among his fellow convicts were punished by long stints in solitary confinement. Cleaver used these periods of isolation to write and to study the Bible, the only book he was allowed to take with him.

Cleaver spent eight years in prison before he became eligible for parole in 1965. In an effort to secure his freedom, he wrote to civil liberties lawyer Beverly Axelrod in San Francisco. Axelrod took his case and showed his manuscripts to left-wing writer Edward M. Keating. Keating published a Cleaver essay, "Notes on a Native Son," in Ramparts magazine and promised Cleaver a job at the magazine should he receive parole. Subsequent Cleaver essays in Ramparts attracted the support of Maxwell Geismar, Norman Mailer, and other influential writers. Cleaver was granted parole in November of 1966.

Eldridge Cleaver literally leaped from confinement in a tough, maximum-security prison to a high-profile life among West Coast intellectuals and African American community leaders. He served as an editor and contributor to Ramparts and, in his spare time, helped to start Black House, a San Francisco cultural center for African American youth. At Black House in the early months of 1967, Cleaver met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the founders of the Black Panther Party. From a base in neighboring Oakland, the Black Panther Party offered urban blacks the possibility of aggressive self-defense and self-determination. A chief concern of the Panthers was police brutality. Members would follow law officers through the ghetto to guard against the use of undue force or the false arrest of black citizens. As a paroled felon, Cleaver ran a great risk by becoming involved with the Panthers, but his zeal for the cause outweighed his caution.

Cleaver was named minister of information for the Black Panther Party. As a top Panther official, he made speeches and sought new members for the growing organization. Within a year the group had attracted followers in most major American cities, and the black leather-clad Panthers became symbolic of a new, vocal menace to white supremacy. Tensions mounted as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local law enforcement sought to undermine the movement and its leadership.

On April 6, 1968, Cleaver was wounded in an armed confrontation between the Black Panthers and the San Francisco police. New York Times Magazine correspondent T. D. Allman described the incident: "Cleaver and a companion, Black Panther Treasurer Bobby Hutton, were holed up in a house with a rifle and a few pistols. The police poured thousands of rounds of ammunition into the house. Though some fire was returned, no policemen were wounded. Hutton, however, was shot dead, apparently while trying to surrender." Arrested at the scene, Cleaver faced another stint in prison. A local judge ruled that the charges against him were politically motivated, however, and for some months he was allowed to go free. Cleaver used the time to continue his agenda with the Panthers and to run for president of the United States on the radical Peace and Freedom Party ticket.

Late in 1968, a higher court ruled that Cleaver should return to jail for parole violation and face new charges stemming from the April shoot-out incident. Cleaver became a fugitive, traveling to Cuba by way of Canada. "When Cleaver dropped out of sight, he was Black Panther minister of information, a potent force in an exploding people's movement," wrote Laile E. Bartlett in Reader's Digest. "Under his leadership, the Black Panthers had developed from a local Oakland organization into an international movement being copied by liberationists around the world. As a writer--his Soul on Ice was a bestseller--Cleaver was both symbol and spokesman for a public that transcended race and class. His enemies had good reason to want him out of the way."

Cleaver was accorded a warm welcome in Cuba. He met Cuban leader Fidel Castro and the senior ministers of the Cuban Communist party. After some time there, he moved on to Algeria, where he became a sort of foreign ambassador for the Black Panthers. Throughout the communist empire Cleaver was greeted as a revolutionary hero. He discovered, however, that the very government systems he had admired for so long were repressing citizens more forcefully than anything he had encountered in America.

"I came to see that there is a fundamental mistake contained in the Marxist-Leninist ideologies, where they make the distinction between idealism and materialism," Cleaver told Reader's Digest. "Everything dealing with the spirit or with religious subjects is lumped under 'idealism' and condemned as being 'the opium of the people.' I came to feel that there is not only room but a necessity for us to address ourselves to morality and the relationship between people. What made Marxism-Leninism unworkable was that there was no humanity in it, no love." He added: "So I was wrong, and the Black Panthers were wrong. We had a totally political and economic approach, without giving any consideration to the more civilizing influences. Materialism, racial separation, destructive negativism, hate--they won't do the job. I can see that, now."

The transformation in Cleaver's thinking was a gradual process, fueled by the isolation he felt because he could not speak any foreign languages. He lived abroad for eight years with his wife and two children, eventually moving to Paris. By December of 1975 he was ready to return to America, even if it meant going back to prison. "I'd rather be in jail in America than free anywhere else," he told Reader's Digest.

At first, Cleaver was incarcerated, but his conservative political philosophy and blossoming Christian faith found him powerful supporters from among the very people he once scorned the most. By 1978 he was cleared of charges and was a sought-after speaker at universities, religious gatherings, and political rallies. Some of his former associates questioned his conversion to Americanism and Christianity, but Cleaver steadfastly maintained that he had the right to change if he wanted to. "They try to make it look like I'm doing flip-flops all over the ocean," he said in Ebony. "I have a very good track record of being ahead of other people in understanding certain truths and taking political positions far in advance of the crowd and turn out to be vindicated by subsequent experience. Yet, when I take these experiences, I have been attacked for taking them."

Since 1980 Cleaver has lived in Berkeley, California. He has run for various political offices there, including city council in 1984, the U.S. Senate in 1986, and the San Francisco Regional Transit Board in 1992. He has not won any of the seats he has sought. Financially Cleaver has almost always been on shaky ground, since the Internal Revenue Service staked a claim on the earnings he might have received from Soul on Ice, which has sold more than two million copies. In the late 1980s, he began running a recycling pickup service and making ceramic pottery for sale.

Cleaver broke from the Black Panthers even before he returned to the United States in 1976. However, he does not disavow his actions from those days or the ultimate aims of the Panthers. "The Black Panthers? That's not where I am now, but it's where I learned," he told Reader's Digest. " Soul on Ice? Those are not my words now, but they were honest at the time." In fact, Cleaver told Ebony, "the Black Panther Party played a very positive role at a decisive moment toward the liberation of Black people in America." Cleaver said in People that his outlook on life now is not the result of mellowing as he becomes a senior citizen. "That implies your ideas have changed because of age," he concluded. "I've changed because of new conclusions."

Awards

Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, 1970, for Soul on Ice.

Works

Writings

• Soul on Ice, McGraw, 1968, reprinted, Dell, 1992.
• Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, Random House, 1969.
• Eldridge Cleaver's Black Papers, McGraw, 1969.
• Soul on Fire, Word, Inc., 1978.

Further Reading

Books

• Cleaver, Eldridge, Soul on Ice, McGraw, 1968, reprinted, Dell, 1992.
• Cleaver, Eldridge, Soul on Fire, Word, Inc., 1978.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 30, Gale, 1984.
• Oliver, John A., Eldridge Cleaver: Ice and Fire! Bible Voice, 1977.

Periodicals

• Ebony, March 1988, pp. 66-68.
• Entertainment Weekly, February 12, 1993, p. 68.
• Jet, February 24, 1986, p. 25; May 19, 1986, p. 12; October 26, 1987, p. 38.
• Life, February 6, 1970, p. 20.
• Newsweek, March 17, 1975, p. 40; December 1, 1975, p. 42.
• New York Times Magazine, January 16, 1977, p. 10.
• People, March 22, 1982.
• Playboy, May 1968.
• Reader's Digest, September 1976, pp. 65-72.
• Washington Post, August 1, 1992, p. A12.

— Mark Kram

Cleaver, Eldridge (Leroy Eldridge Cleaver), 1935-98, African-American social activist, b. Wabbaseka, Ark. Growing up in Los Angeles, he spent much of 1954-66 in prison for various crimes including rape. In 1966 he joined the staff of Ramparts magazine, and soon became a member of the Black Panthers. In 1968 his book Soul on Ice made him famous. The next year, fleeing arrest following a Panther shootout with Oakland (Calif.) police, he began a period of exile in Cuba, Algeria, and other points, during which he broke with the Panthers. After his return to the United States in 1975, he espoused a wide, even bizarre, range of political, religious, and commercial causes.

(1935-1998)

1968

Soul on Ice. This collection of essays, written during Cleaver's nine-year imprisonment for rape and drug dealing, recounts his involvement with Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. Inspired by writers such as Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, and James Baldwin, Cleaver's work expresses "the profound alienation from America which black nationalists feel and the extreme political and cultural view of its future which they take," according to reviewer Jervis Anderson.

1978

Soul on Fire. Cleaver supplies his memoirs after returning from an eight-year exile during which he lived in Cuba, Algeria, and France to escape capture by the FBI. It recounts the former Black Panthers leader's disillusionment with radical politics and his embrace of evangelical Christianity. The religious conversion described in the book helps Cleaver win a plea-bargain with the government and renews his celebrity in the United States, where he would later run for Congress as an independent conservative.

Eldridge Cleaver rose to prominence in the late 1960s as a leading African American intellectual and political revolutionary. As minister of information for the Black Panther Party during tumultuous years of social upheaval, Cleaver became a symbol of rebellion, freedom, and eloquence for those seeking political and social change. His 1968 best-selling book of essays Soul on Ice served as a kind of guidebook for radicals in the New Left, student, and civil rights movements of the day. Cleaver has been involved with the U.S. legal system as a convict, social critic, political activist, political candidate, fugitive, and business owner.

Cleaver was born August 3, 1935, in Wabbaseka, Arkansas. When he was still young, the family moved to Phoenix, and then to the Watts section of Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles during his teenage years, Cleaver was arrested for bicycle theft and for selling marijuana, and was sent to two different reformatories. In 1954, he was again arrested for dealing marijuana and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years at the California State Prison at Soledad.

Unreformed by his first prison stay, Cleaver resumed dealing drugs and embarked on a series of rapes, directed first at black women, then at white women. He later came to see the recklessness and inhumanity of these crimes as both a product of his own misguided choices and a reaction to the racism of U.S. society. In Soul on Ice, he described the delight he felt at "defying and trampling upon the white man's law" through these actions. He also claimed that his motivation in the rapes was to get "revenge" for "the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman."

In 1958, roughly a year after his release from the Soledad prison, Cleaver was arrested again, this time for armed assault when he attempted to rape a nurse in a parking lot. During his subsequent eight-year stay in the San Quentin and Folsom prisons, Cleaver read widely and became a member and minister of the Nation of Islam, often called the Black Muslims. He also became an admirer of Malcolm X, a Nation of Islam leader. When Malcolm X broke from the Nation in 1963, Cleaver followed his example.

Cleaver was released from prison the second time in 1965—the same year that Malcolm X was assassinated, allegedly by Nation of Islam members—with the help of Beverly Axelrod, a white San Francisco lawyer. Correspondence and a brief love affair between Axelrod and Cleaver had led to Axelrod's help in getting several essays by Cleaver published in Ramparts, an influential left-wing magazine. These essays, in turn, had built support for Cleaver's cause among members of the U.S. intellectual community, including writer Norman Mailer. The support of such intellectuals had helped persuade the parole board to release Cleaver from prison.

After his parole Cleaver began writing for Ramparts. In 1967 while living in the San Francisco Bay area, Cleaver married Kathleen Neal, who had been an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In that same year, he befriended Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, cofounders of the Black Panthers, and he soon became that group's minister of information. The Black Panthers was an African American political organization that sought to defend the African American community from police intimidation and violence. As part of their self-defense actions, Black Panthers carried guns and law books, followed police cars, and observed police encounters with African Americans.

As a spokesperson for the Panthers, Cleaver explained the group's goals and ideas to the rest of the world. In media interviews, for example, he described how "Pig Power" or "the Gestapo power of the police" contributed to many of the problems in the African American community.

In February 1968, Cleaver published Soul on Ice, the book that made him a celebrity. It quickly became a best-seller and was named Book of the Year by the New York Times. The book begins with the observation that Cleaver's first year in prison, 1954, coincided with that of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873, the first significant legal victory African Americans achieved in the civil rights movement. The book explores, among its many topics, Cleaver's relationship to Malcolm X, Cleaver's rejection of U.S. capitalism, the solidarity between African Americans and citizens of third-world countries, the relationship between sexuality and race in the United States, and Cleaver's admiration of the student movement of the 1960s. The book also deals with themes that came to dominate African American political activism of the time: racial pride, rejection of white standards of beauty, and acceptance of violence as a necessary part of political struggle.

In his essay "Domestic Law and International Order," Cleaver reflected on the situation of African Americans in light of the Vietnam War and of the suppression of the Watts riots of 1965 by the National Guard. For Cleaver, both these events were examples of U.S. imperialism, with the Army in Vietnam and the police in Watts acting as essentially identical agents of state coercion over colonized peoples:

The police do on the domestic level what the armed forces do on the international level: protect the way of life of those in power. The police patrol the city, cordon off communities, blockade neighborhoods, invade homes, search for that which is hidden. The armed forces patrol the world, invade countries and continents, cordon off nations, blockade islands and whole peoples…. The policeman and the soldier will have the last word.

Accordingly, Cleaver called for African Americans, "who in this land of private property have all private and no property," to oppose this system and fight for power and property.

The success of Soul on Ice, combined with a vacuum in African American leadership caused by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X and the imprisonment of other leaders such as Newton, made Cleaver seem for a brief time to be an important African American leader. In the spring of 1968 he was nominated for the presidency of the United States by the white radical Peace and Freedom party. During his candidacy he spoke out for a revolutionary movement that involved both blacks and whites. He received thirty thousand votes nationally.

Cleaver's time in the U.S. spotlight was cut short as a result of violence that erupted between the police and the Panthers. On April 6,

1968—two days after the assassination of King—Cleaver was involved in a shoot-out with the police in which one Black Panther was killed. Cleaver was arrested but two months later was released on a writ of habeas corpus (release from unlawful imprisonment). A higher court later reversed his release and scheduled him for reincarceration in November 1968. Cleaver chose to become a fugitive from the law and fled to Cuba.

Cleaver's exile overseas was accompanied by a rapid decline in his influence as both a political and intellectual leader. His short stay in Cuba was followed by stints in Algeria, North Korea, and Paris. He continued to speak out as a revolutionary during his time overseas. Sometimes his revolutionary efforts were in the sartorial rather than political sphere, as in 1975 when he attempted to publicize his design for Cleavers, a new type of pants that featured a codpiece intended to display the male sexual organ. The new pants would, he theorized, revolutionize sexual attitudes in a way that would ultimately eliminate such crimes as rape. They would also, Cleaver said, "abolish … the crime of indecent exposure" and replace it with "decent exposure."

After he had lived for several years in Communist countries, Cleaver's political radicalism began to wane and he became more conservative in his beliefs. Eventually, Cleaver could no longer abide life away from the United States, and by the mid-1970s he had begun to voice a different view of his native country. In 1975 he returned to the States where he was immediately put in prison. "I'd rather be in jail in America than free anywhere else," he commented after his return.

Cleaver's subsequent career in the United States has been marked by a series of unsuccessful ventures as he has tried to regain the spotlight. While in jail in 1976 he announced that he was a born-again Christian and renounced the Marxism-Leninism and atheism of his Black Panther days. After his release on bail he began a short career as leader of a religious revivalist movement, the Eldridge Cleaver Crusades. In 1980 he attempted to create a new church called Christlam, a synthesis of Christianity and Islam. Cleaver has several times been an unsuccessful candidate for political office, running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1984 and for the U.S. Senate in 1986. In the second race he campaigned as a conservative Republican, the ultimate rebuke to his earlier radicalism.

Cleaver has continued to have run-ins with the law. In 1987 he was arrested for cocaine possession and the following year he was arrested for theft from a residence. He was ordered to make restitution and was placed on parole for three years. Also in 1987, the Cleavers divorced. Cleaver was again arrested for cocaine possession in 1992 but the charges were dropped. In the mid-1990s, Cleaver was owner of a recycling company in Oakland and a lecturer. Besides Soul on Ice, his books include Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (1969) and Soul on Fire (1978).

Although his public career has been a mixed success, Cleaver's writings and activities have affected U.S. politics and culture. And despite his later rejection of many of the Black Panther beliefs, Cleaver sees that group's legacy as a positive one. "The Black Panther Party," he said, "played a very positive role at a decisive moment toward the liberation of Black people in America."

Quotes:

"Too much agreement kills the chat."

"All the gods are dead except the god of war."

"The paper tiger hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet."

"Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four-hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt."

"In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all."

"Respect commands itself and it can neither be given nor withheld when it is due."

See more famous quotes by Eldridge Cleaver

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