Cleaver, Eldridge (1935–1998)

ELDRIDGE CLEAVER became known as an African American left-radical activist and writer. In his young days, he was convicted of an assault and was paroled in 1966 after eight years of imprisonment. Cleaver joined the leftist, anti-establishment nationalist group Black Panthers Party (BPP) based in Oakland, California, and owing to his notoriety as a writer for the New Left journal Ramparts, he became the information minister, or BPP spokesman.

In late 1960s, he was the most notorious proponent of the Black Power Doctrine, according to which blacks must organize politically and militarily for dealing with white society from a position of strength. Cleaver also played a critical role in introducing, advertising, and defining the black community free social programs that the BPP launched to improve public safety, political education, and economic outreach, including protesting against police brutality and rent eviction and informing welfare recipients of their legal rights. Hundreds of black ghetto youths across the nation were attracted to the BPP and its programs, the most famous of which was armed patrolling of neighborhoods.

Cleaver's book Soul on Ice was published in 1968. It contained essays he had written earlier in jail. The author showed the cold, dark, and oppressive underside of the American dream; the hypocrisy and racism of 1960s American society have been stigmatized in the book. In one essay, Cleaver described his rape of white women (after previously raping a number of black ones for a drill) as an insurrectionary liberation act. “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law … defiling his women,” he wrote. As Cleaver was not prosecuted for rape after publishing the essay, it has remained unclear if what he described was true to fact or an account of complete fiction. There was definitely revenge in his heart, sending waves of consternation through white America. Some historians believe the rape issue was his manner of “black-machorebel” self-imaging. In this way, he also powerfully challenged James Baldwin's less reactionary model for the African American intellectual.

In 1968, the same year Cleaver ran for U.S. president on the ticket of the Peace and Freedom Party, he was wounded after a shootout between Black Panthers and police in Oakland. “That was the first experience of freedom that I had,” Cleaver said about the incident. Faced however with a murder charge, he jumped bail and fled the United States for a life of exile in Algeria, Cuba, and North Korea, where he thought he had had a chance to witness Marxism up close in action. Abroad, he gave up many of his previous political viewpoints. “After I ran into the Egyptian police and the Algerian police and the North Korean police and the Nigerian police and Idi Amin's police in Uganda, I began to miss the Oakland police,” he said.

Later, Cleaver went to France and in 1975, returned to the United States. He asserted he had experienced a “religious conversion” and styled himself as an anticommunist and born-again Christian. The murder charge was dropped and Cleaver was placed on probation for an assault. He described his conversion in his book Soul on Fire (1978). But the public took almost no notice of it. In 1986, Cleaver sought the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in California but was not successful.

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