CLEAVER, ELDRIDGE 1935-

Minister of information, black pantherparty, 1966-1971

The author of Soul on Ice (1968), a prison autobiography that has been called second only to the Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) in its influence on young black militants, Cleaver was a leading spokesman for the Black Panther Party, notable for his willingness to recruit white radicals to the black nationalist cause.

Background

Born in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, a small town near Little Rock, Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was raised in Phoenix and the Watts section of Los Angeles. Beginning in the early 1950s he was convicted on a variety of marijuana-related charges and spent time in reformatories and prisons. In 1957 he was sentenced to two to fourteen years for attempted murder and spent the next nine years in Soledad prison.

Black Muslim

In 1958 Cleaver joined the Black Muslims and became a leader among the other Muslim prisoners. When Muslim leader Malcolm X split with Black Muslim founder Elijah Muhammad in March 1964 and moderated his views on white people, Cleaver followed Malcolm, writing later that Malcolm had drawn back "from the precipice of madness." The next year Cleaver wrote to a prominent civil-liberties attorney in San Francisco, asking her to help him get paroled. She showed some of Cleaver's prison writings to the editor of the San Francisco radical magazine Ramparts, which began publishing the essays later published in Soul on Ice. Cleaver was paroled in December 1966 and began working at Ramparts.

Black Panther

The following February he met Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. After watching Newton call the bluff of a police officer who made a move toward his gun as the heavily armed Newton stood on the steps outside the Ramparts office, Cleaver decided Newton was "the baddest motherfucker ever to step foot inside of history" and signed on as the Panthers' minister of information.

New Legal Troubles

On 6 April 1968, during a ninety-minute gun battle with the police, Cleaver and three other Panthers were wounded and Panther treasurer Bobby Hutton was killed. Cleaver's parole was rescinded, and he was charged with assault and attempted murder.

Presidential Candidate

Free on bail, Cleaver ran as the presidential candidate of the predominantly white Peace and Freedom Party, using his campaign to call on black and white radicals to work together to end racial and class repression.

Exile

Having exhausted all appeals on the revocation of his parole and due to be returned to prison, Cleaver fled to Cuba on 28 November 1968. By July 1969 he was in Algeria, where he set up the international section of the Black Panthers, which became independent from Newton's party after the two disagreed and Newton expelled Cleaver in February 1971. In November 1975, having converted to Christianity, Cleaver returned to the United States, where he worked out a plea bargain under which he was sentenced to only twelve hundred hours of community service. In the late 1970s he started a clothing boutique in Hollywood and an evangelical organization in Nevada. In the 1980s he ran for national office as a conservative.

Sources:

Eldridge Cleaver, Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, edited by Robert Sheer (New York: Random House, 1969);

Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968);

Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther; Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994);

William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Eldridge Cleaver (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.