Eldridge Cleaver
In 1986,Reason magazine interviewed this man. If you don't know who he is, you might be like me, a mid-30's white man.
"Cleaver burst upon the national scene in 1968 with the publication of Soul on Ice, a collection of his prison writings. Hip, revolutionary, and teeming with hatred for "everything American—including baseball and hot dogs, " Soul on Ice became the Bible of Black Power and Eldridge Cleaver the intellectuals' favorite black radical.
The Black Panthers' early rhetoric had been decentralist, but the organization soon degenerated into Maoist politics and senseless violence. On April 6, 1968, Cleaver participated in a shootout with Oakland police—'60s legend has it that three carloads of Panthers were ambushed while Cleaver was urinating in a side street—in which 17-year-old Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed. (Cleaver offers a different version of these events below.)
To avoid being sent back to prison for his part in the Hutton shootout, Cleaver skipped the country, taking refuge in Cuba. He spent the next seven years wandering through the communist world, with sojourns in Algeria, North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union before finally settling in France. But in 1975, homesick and deeply disillusioned with revolutionary politics, Eldridge Cleaver came home. "Pig power in America was infuriating," he wrote upon his return. "But pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable."
The repatriated Cleaver was denounced by his former comrades as an apostate, a turncoat, even an FBI informer. His conversion to Christianity and anticommunist pronouncements combined to give him a right-wing reputation—a reputation, as this interview makes clear, that is a far cry from the truth. Eldridge Cleaver lives today in a modest apartment in Berkeley, California, where he is hard at work writing a history of the '60s. A large American flag flies from his front porch. His wife, Kathleen, his partner in exile, is a student at Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, where she lives with the couple's children, Jodu and Maceo."
i hope you are enticed to read the rest of the interview.
he died in 1998, CNN obit, "Cleaver became a born-again Christian, embraced anti-communism and made an unsuccessful run for the GOP nomination for a Senate seat in California. He said his "red fighting" was born from his experiences in communist countries during his years on the run.
"I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die," Cleaver told interviewers during his congressional campaign.
In a 1986 interview with the Associated Press, Cleaver explained his many life transformations.
"Everybody changes, not just me," he said. "I was pulled over in my car with my secretary for a traffic thing, and one of the officers walked up to the car and saw me sitting inside. He took off his hat and said, 'Hey, Eldridge, remember me?'"
"He used to be a Panther," Cleaver said. "It was hard to believe." "
Wikipedia notes one transformation that intrigues me,
"Cleaver experienced a Christian rebirth – became "born again" during his year of isolation, while living underground...In the mid-1980s, Cleaver became addicted to crack cocaine. In 1992 he was convicted of cocaine possession and burglary. In 1994, after nearly dying in a cocaine-related assault, he kicked his addiction and returned to Christianity."
another interview at Frontline revealed to me Tupac Shakur's relationship with the Black Panthers, his parents were members. Tupac was a "cub." Cleaver says, "I regret the way that the Party was repressed because it left a lot of unfinished business because we had planned to make a transition to the political arena and we would have been able to transmute that violence and that legacy into legitimate and peaceful channels. As it was they chopped off the head and left the body there armed. That's why all these young bloods out there now, they've got the rhetoric but without the political direction and they've got the guns."
There is a brief history of the Black Panther party at the marxist.org site.
I got to this topic because i went to a lecture by Eldridge's ex-wife, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, yesterday. She spoke on the myth of Rosa Parks, which i'll have to post my notes on in a couple days.
"Cleaver burst upon the national scene in 1968 with the publication of Soul on Ice, a collection of his prison writings. Hip, revolutionary, and teeming with hatred for "everything American—including baseball and hot dogs, " Soul on Ice became the Bible of Black Power and Eldridge Cleaver the intellectuals' favorite black radical.
The Black Panthers' early rhetoric had been decentralist, but the organization soon degenerated into Maoist politics and senseless violence. On April 6, 1968, Cleaver participated in a shootout with Oakland police—'60s legend has it that three carloads of Panthers were ambushed while Cleaver was urinating in a side street—in which 17-year-old Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed. (Cleaver offers a different version of these events below.)
To avoid being sent back to prison for his part in the Hutton shootout, Cleaver skipped the country, taking refuge in Cuba. He spent the next seven years wandering through the communist world, with sojourns in Algeria, North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union before finally settling in France. But in 1975, homesick and deeply disillusioned with revolutionary politics, Eldridge Cleaver came home. "Pig power in America was infuriating," he wrote upon his return. "But pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable."
The repatriated Cleaver was denounced by his former comrades as an apostate, a turncoat, even an FBI informer. His conversion to Christianity and anticommunist pronouncements combined to give him a right-wing reputation—a reputation, as this interview makes clear, that is a far cry from the truth. Eldridge Cleaver lives today in a modest apartment in Berkeley, California, where he is hard at work writing a history of the '60s. A large American flag flies from his front porch. His wife, Kathleen, his partner in exile, is a student at Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, where she lives with the couple's children, Jodu and Maceo."
i hope you are enticed to read the rest of the interview.
he died in 1998, CNN obit, "Cleaver became a born-again Christian, embraced anti-communism and made an unsuccessful run for the GOP nomination for a Senate seat in California. He said his "red fighting" was born from his experiences in communist countries during his years on the run.
"I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die," Cleaver told interviewers during his congressional campaign.
In a 1986 interview with the Associated Press, Cleaver explained his many life transformations.
"Everybody changes, not just me," he said. "I was pulled over in my car with my secretary for a traffic thing, and one of the officers walked up to the car and saw me sitting inside. He took off his hat and said, 'Hey, Eldridge, remember me?'"
"He used to be a Panther," Cleaver said. "It was hard to believe." "
Wikipedia notes one transformation that intrigues me,
"Cleaver experienced a Christian rebirth – became "born again" during his year of isolation, while living underground...In the mid-1980s, Cleaver became addicted to crack cocaine. In 1992 he was convicted of cocaine possession and burglary. In 1994, after nearly dying in a cocaine-related assault, he kicked his addiction and returned to Christianity."
another interview at Frontline revealed to me Tupac Shakur's relationship with the Black Panthers, his parents were members. Tupac was a "cub." Cleaver says, "I regret the way that the Party was repressed because it left a lot of unfinished business because we had planned to make a transition to the political arena and we would have been able to transmute that violence and that legacy into legitimate and peaceful channels. As it was they chopped off the head and left the body there armed. That's why all these young bloods out there now, they've got the rhetoric but without the political direction and they've got the guns."
There is a brief history of the Black Panther party at the marxist.org site.
I got to this topic because i went to a lecture by Eldridge's ex-wife, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, yesterday. She spoke on the myth of Rosa Parks, which i'll have to post my notes on in a couple days.
Comments