Cleaver, Eldridge

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Cleaver, Eldridge

August 31, 1935
May 1, 1998

Writer and political activist Eldridge Leroy Cleaver was born in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, where he attended a junior college. From 1954 to 1957 and again from 1958 to 1966 he was incarcerated on drug and rape charges, and furthered his education while in prison. In 1965 Cleaver became the most prominent "Black Muslim" prisoner to break with Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam after Malcolm X's assassination. Just as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had begun to target the Black Panthers as the nation's "greatest threat," Cleaver became the party's minister of information in 1966, calling for an armed insurrection to overthrow the U.S. government and replace it with a black socialist government. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he also was an assistant editor and contributing writer to Ramparts magazine.

In 1968 Cleaver published Soul on Ice, which remains his primary claim to literary fame. A collection of autobiographical and political essays in the form of letters and meditations, Soul on Ice articulated the sense of alienation felt by many black nationalists who refused to work within an inherently corrupt system. Cleaver viewed his own crimes as political acts and spelled out how racism and oppression had forged his revolutionary consciousness.

Later that year, while on parole, Cleaver was involved in a shootout with Oakland police during which a seventeen-year-old Black Panther, Bobby Hutton, was killed; Cleaver and a police officer were wounded. Cleaver's parole was revoked and he was charged with assault and attempted murder. Although he received worldwide support and was chosen to run as the presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party (see Dick Gregory for discussion of another 1968 black antiwar presidential candidate), Cleaver feared for his safety if he surrendered to the authorities. He fled the country, jumping a $50,000 bail, and lived for the next seven years in Cuba, France, and Algiers. He also visited the Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam, and North Korea during these years of exile. But in 1975 he returned to the United States and struck a deal with the FBI. Although he faced up to seventy-two years in prison, he was sentenced instead to 1,200 hours of community service.

In 1978 Cleaver published Soul on Fire, a collection of essays on his newly acquired conservative politics, and in 1979 he founded the Eldridge Cleaver Crusades, an evangelical organization. In 1984 he ran as an independent candidate for Congress in the Eighth Congressional District in California. In the 1980s he lectured on religion and politics, and published his own poetry and polemical writings. In March 1994 his struggle with drugs came to national attention when he underwent brain surgery after he had been arrested in Berkeley, California, late at night with a serious head injury, in a state of drunkenness and disorientation. During this period he attended Harvard Law School, then returned to Berkeley, where he became a preacher. In his later years he spoke in prisons, schools, and churches about drug addiction and nonviolence. He was also a consultant to the Coalition for Diversity at the University of La Verne in Southern California. In the Pomona, California, area he spent many evenings giving poetry readings at local coffeehouses and in his spare time crafted ceramics.

Cleaver was a prolific writer and speaker and was seen by some in the late 1960s as a black leader capable of organizing

and leading a mass movement. Soul on Ice won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize in 1970. Most of his work consists of nonfiction writing: Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (1969), Eldridge Cleaver's Black Papers (1969), the introduction to Jerry Rubin's Do It! (1970), and contributions to The Black Panther Leaders Speak: Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Company Speak Out Through the Black Panther Party's Official Newspaper (1976) and to War Within: Violence or Nonviolence in Black Revolution (1971). He also authored and coauthored numerous pamphlets for the Black Panther Party and the People's Communication Network. Some of his work has also appeared in anthologies such as the Prize Stories of 1971: The O. Henry Awards.

Cleaver had both his critics and his followers. There are those who felt that his commitment to violence and his use of rape as a political weapon in the 1960s had no place within society. Others have questioned the sincerity and credibility of his later volte-face to right-wing politics and fundamentalist Christianity, and Cleaver often felt compelled to explain and defend himself. According to him, combined with his growing disenchantment with communism and radical politics was a mystical vision resulting in his conversion to Christianity. When accused of having mellowed with age, Cleaver replied, "That implies that your ideas have changed because of age. I've changed because of new conclusions."