Eldridge Cleaver

Author

• Born: August 31, 1935
• Birthplace: Wabbaseka, Arkansas
• Died: May 1, 1998
• Place of death: Pomona, California

Activist and writer

One of the most charismatic and fiery activists of the Black Power era, Cleaver was minister of information for the Black Panther Party, a presidential candidate, and the author of Soul on Ice(1968), an influential collection of essays written from prison. In his later years, Cleaver undertook a series of self-reinventions that complicated his militant legacy.

Areas of achievement: Literature; Social issues

Early Life

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was born in Depression-era Arkansas, the third of six children of Leroy and Thelma Cleaver. Cleaver’s father worked as a hotel waiter, piano player, and Pullman car porter, while his mother was a schoolteacher and janitor. When Cleaver was twelve years old, the family relocated to Arizona and then Southern California, settling in East Los Angeles and Watts.

When his parents’ volatile marriage ended in divorce, Cleaver quickly drifted into juvenile delinquency. In 1948, he was arrested for theft and vandalism, and he spent much of his teenage years in reform schools. In 1954, at the age of eighteen, he was incarcerated for two and a half years at California’s Soledad Prison for marijuana possession. Soon after his release, he was returned to prison for nine years (1958-1966) for assault with intent to rape and murder. As a young black man resentful of the injustices perpetrated against African Americans by white society, Cleaver had come to believe—wrongly, he later admitted in Soul on Ice (1968)—that raping white women was an “insurrectionary act.”

During his time in the California penal system, Cleaver undertook a regimen of self-education not unlike that of Malcolm X, another criminal-turned-revolutionary, whom Cleaver emulated. Intellectually gifted, Cleaver pored over the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Frantz Fanon, and attended and taught prison classes on African American history. While at San Quentin Prison (1958-1963), Cleaver became a leading recruiter for the Nation of Islam, a black-nationalist religious group that promoted racial solidarity; he left the group (also known as the Black Muslims), however, after Malcolm’s X’s acrimonious split from the group in 1964.

Life’s Work

It was also in prison that Cleaver began his career as a writer. Smuggling manuscripts past prison officials with the help of his white attorney, Beverly Axelrod, Cleaver published essays in Ramparts, a leading magazine of the San Francisco New Left. His acclaim as a writer helped win him parole in December, 1966, and an editorial position at Ramparts. His public profile increased dramatically in early 1968 with the publication of Soul on Ice, a best-selling collection of autobiographical prison writings and essays on race relations.

Soon after his release from prison in 1966, Cleaver joined the Black Panther Party, a revolutionary black Marxist group based in Oakland, California, and founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The Panthers advocated armed self-defense against police brutality and cultivated a tough, outlaw image, wearing black leather jackets and toting shotguns. As the Panthers’ minister of information, Cleaver railed against the police as an occupying army of “Gestapo pigs” fronting a racist-imperialist government, and in 1967-1968, led a “Free Huey” campaign to protest Newton’s arrest for the murder of a police officer. In late 1967, Cleaver also married Kathleen Neal, the Panthers’ communications secretary.

The Panthers’ embrace of Marxism and use of violence prompted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover to declare the group “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and to launch a counterintelligence operation (known as COINTELPRO) to infiltrate and destroy the Panthers. Tensions between the Panthers and the Oakland police culminated in an April 6, 1968, shoot-out in which Cleaver and several police officers were wounded, and Bobby Hutton, a seventeen-year-old Black Panther, was killed. Although Cleaver’s parole was revoked, he continued his activism throughout 1968, sparring publicly with California governor Ronald Reagan over his right to lecture at the University of California, and running for president on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.

Fearing a return to prison, however, Cleaver fled the United States in November, 1968. He absconded to Cuba and then Algeria, where he set up an “international section” of the Black Panthers. In 1973, he and his wife (who had joined him in Algeria and given birth to two children) moved to Paris. During this period, Cleaver also visited China, North Korea, and other communist countries and became increasingly disillusioned with the grim realities of life under left-wing dictatorships. His ties to the Black Panthers also deteriorated amid infighting exacerbated by the FBI’s ongoing subversion program. In 1971, Newton “purged” Cleaver and other international members of the Panthers, effectively ending Cleaver’s role in the organization.

Cleaver’s life took yet another dramatic turn in 1975, when, after seven years of exile, he abruptly declared himself a born-again Christian and returned to the United States to face charges stemming from the 1968 shoot-out. After nine months in jail, Cleaver received a sentence of probation and community service. His conversion to Christianity, detailed in his 1978 memoir Soul on Fire, was accompanied by a sharp turn toward political conservatism. During the mid-1980’s, Cleaver baffled many by endorsing Reagan for president and running unsuccessfully for a California Senate seat as a Republican. During the mid- to late 1970’s, he developed a line of men’s pants featuring the “Cleaver Sleeve,” a pouch designed to accentuate the male genitalia. These eccentric moves made Cleaver something of a laughingstock, particularly among the leftists who had once lionized him as an antiestablishment hero.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, Cleaver’s behavior seemed to grow even more erratic. He divorced wife Kathleen during the mid-1980’s; founded “Christlam,” a hybrid of Christianity and Islam, only to switch later to Mormonism; fell into crime and drug addiction and had several brushes with the law; and was hospitalized in 1994 for a severe head injury apparently sustained during a carjacking. During the 1990’s, he battled prostate cancer and diabetes, ultimately succumbing to a heart attack in 1998 in Pomona, California, at the age of sixty-two.

Significance

Despite the well-publicized personal travails of his later years, Cleaver will forever be linked to the political upheaval of the late 1960’s. His inflammatory rhetoric and commitment to revolutionary social change made him an indelible icon of militant black masculinity, even as his willingness to form coalitions with white leftists departed from the strict racial separatism of some of his Black Panther associates. Moreover, his talent as an essayist and keen insights into America’s racial and sexual tensions place him in a tradition of African American writer-intellectuals that includes Richard Wright and James Baldwin. However, Cleaver’s eccentricities at least partially overshadowed his early achievements; to many observers, his political conservatism amounted to bald opportunism, and his later life became a cautionary tale about the self-delusion, decline, and burnout of a once-formidable radical. For African American feminists and other progressive intellectuals, moreover, Cleaver’s homophobia and chauvinism made him something of a pariah in literary and cultural studies. Still, the sheer variety of Cleaver’s contradictory personas continues to make him a figure of genuine fascination.

Bibliography

Caster, Peter. “Soul on Ice, Schizoanalysis, and the Subject of Imprisonment.” In Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Caster’s chapter connects Soul on Ice to the conservative turn in American prison policy during the late 1960’s.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. 1968. Reprint. New York: Delta, 1992. Cleaver’s first and most essential collection of essays. The Delta trade paperback edition contains a spirited introduction by novelist Ishmael Reed.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Soul on Fire. Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1978. A little-read sequel to Soul on Ice, this memoir describes Cleaver’s childhood, his disillusionment with communism, and his conversion to Christianity.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Target Zero: A Life in Writing. Edited by Kathleen Cleaver. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. This invaluable collection provides an overview of Cleaver’s entire body of work, including previously unpublished material.

Cummins, Eric. “Eldridge Cleaver and the Celebration of Crime.” In The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. This chapter from Cummins’s richly researched social history critiques the white left’s embrace of Cleaver as a revolutionary outlaw hero.

Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. 1978. Reprint. New York: Verso, 1999. A classic of black feminist criticism, Wallace’s book blasts Cleaver and other male leaders of the Black Power era for their misogyny and chauvinism.