CLEAVER, (Leroy) Eldridge

(b. 31 August 1935 in Wabbaseka, Arkansas; d. 1 May 1998 in Los Angeles, California), writer and revolutionary, who was minister of information for the Black Panther Party (1967–1971) and author of the essay collection Soul on Ice (1968).

Cleaver was one of six children of Leroy Cleaver, a waiter and piano player, and Thelma Robinson Carver, an elementary school teacher and, later, a janitress. Cleaver spent 1954 to 1966—his entire youth—in penal institutions. In 1954, he was sent to prison for selling marijuana. After being paroled, he was charged with rape, convicted of assault and attempted murder in 1957, and sent to prison for those crimes and as a parole violator in 1958. He remained there until his release in November 1966. In prison Cleaver became exposed to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad of the Chicago-based Nation of Islam and became a Black Muslim. When Malcolm X split with Muhammad in 1964, Cleaver sided with the former and left the group. In an effort to deal with his grief over Malcolm X's assassination in February 1965, Cleaver began to write. It was this work that got him the promise of a job and a chance at parole after his lawyer, Beverly Axelrod, showed it to editors at Ramparts magazine. These writings, heavily edited, became Soul on Ice.

In February 1967 Cleaver attended a community meeting and was introduced to the leaders of the fledgling Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. Cleaver joined the party and became the minister of information—that is, the major writer on the party newspaper, the Black Panther. Soul on Ice was published the following February, and Cleaver became an instant celebrity. The book was influential because of Cleaver's ability to articulate the feelings and opinions of activist youths, both black and white. What endeared him most to white liberals and radicals was his theme of interracial cooperation and future equality. At a time when Stokely Carmichael had taken the previously integrated Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in a separatist direction, Cleaver and the Black Panthers were stressing their dislike of "the oppressor," but they were not antiwhite. They followed Malcolm X's attitude toward whites following his visit to Mecca, where he realized that people of different races could pray together and get along, whereas Carmichael adhered to the antiwhite ideas of the Nation of Islam.

In a major essay, "Initial Reactions on the Assassination of Malcolm X," Cleaver expressed his admiration for Malcolm's honesty and explained why he had followed Malcolm out of the Nation of Islam in 1964. It was not the Black Muslim movement that had made Malcolm so important to African Americans, he wrote, but "the truth he uttered." Malcolm, Cleaver said, "articulated their aspirations better than any other man of our time." He, not the religion he had followed, had awakened "into self-consciousness … twenty million Negroes." Furthermore, Malcolm was a role model for those black militants who were now able to reject the "racist strait-jacket demonology of Elijah Muhammad," who taught that the white man is the "blue-eyed devil."

The essay "The White Race and Its Heroes" revealed Cleaver's understanding of young whites who wanted to break with the racist past and join with black radicals like him in creating what Cleaver sometimes referred to as "the Garden of Eden." It explores why the young whites of the day rejected past heroes of American history in favor of those who represented the exploited—"the wretched of the earth," in the phrase of the philosopher Frantz Fanon. The contradictions between the democratic principles of equality and freedom and the actual course of earlier American history, marked as it was by slavery, exploitation, and genocide, made unreflective patriotism impossible. Recognition of the need to repair this critical flaw drove students to the streets and into Freedom Rides and heroic sacrifice, as exemplified by the three civil rights workers killed in Mississippi in 1964. Just as Cleaver's hero, Malcolm X, had been able to walk away from his racism, so could Cleaver and the activist white youths of America, a generation "truly worthy of a black man's respect." He concluded, "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the heads of the children—but only if they continue in the evil deeds of the fathers." In "Convalescence" he wrote that the Supreme Court of the United States, "without benefit of any anesthetic except God and the Constitution," had performed lifesaving surgery on America in 1954 with its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared invalid the principle of "separate but equal." All that was needed, he continued, was a successful recovery from the stress of the operation.

Another major topic in Soul on Ice was the war in Vietnam. In "The Black Man's Stake in Vietnam," Cleaver stressed the importance of "intensifying the struggle" against the government while the army was busy elsewhere. In "Domestic Law and International Order," he drew a parallel between the role of the army in war and the role of the police in the ghetto, characterizing both as "muscles of control and enforcement." He stated that "the police do on the domestic level what the armed forces do on the international level: protect the way of life for those in power." Thus he created a sense of kinship with the Vietnamese, who were viewed by radicals primarily as people of color.

In its day, Soul on Ice was occasionally referred to as "the Red Book [after Chairman Mao's book on the Communist revolution in China] of the Second American Revolution," as the counterculture-antiwar-civil rights movement was sometimes labeled. In a new preface to the 1992 edition, the novelist and poet Ishmael Reed called Cleaver "a symbol of black manhood." He declared the book a "classic," because it is more than just about the 1960s: "Soul on Ice is the sixties. The smell of protest, anger, tear gas, and the sound of skull-cracking billy clubs, helicopters, and revolution is present in its pages."

In April 1968, two days after the assassination of the civil rights leader the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Cleaver and several other Black Panthers were involved in a shootout with the Oakland, California, police. Cleaver was imprisoned but released on a writ of habeas corpus. Accused of parole violation, he was ordered to return to prison on 27 November 1968, but instead he fled the country for Cuba. Between his June release from prison and his departure from the United States in late November, Cleaver was a guest lecturer in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and ran for president of the United States on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. His running mate in some states was the Yippie Jerry Rubin and in others the Yippie Abbie Hoffman, author of Woodstock Nation and Revolution for the Hell of It. (Hoffman sometimes said that Yippie referred to a member of the Youth International Party; at other times he said that Yippie was just an extraverted variation of hippie.) Cleaver's stay in Cuba was short. Within six months he took refuge in Algeria. His pregnant wife joined him there, and both of their children were born in exile. (Cleaver had married Kathleen Neal, a law professor, in March 1967; they divorced in 1987.)

During the three-year period the family spent in Algeria, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was able to drive a wedge between Cleaver and Huey Newton. Newton had killed a police officer on 27 October 1967 and was imprisoned for this act. He was released in August 1970. In February 1971, during a radio interview with Newton in a San Francisco studio and Cleaver on the telephone from Algeria, Cleaver announced that he was leaving the party and would be running the international section of the Black Panthers by himself. He tried to do this for two years, but in 1973 he gave up, left Algeria, and moved his family to Paris. Two years later he returned to the United States to face the charges against him and became a "born again" Christian, to the derision of former leftist friends, who knew him to be an opportunist. (Cleaver used the claim to obtain new sources of money and support to begin a new crusade.)

Cleaver died of a heart attack in 1998 and is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, California. He is of importance not only because of Soul on Ice but also because of his charismatic moment on the American political stage in 1968. His entire stateside public career lasted just nine months, from February 1968, when Soul on Ice was published, to November of that year, when he went into exile, but his name nonetheless is still recognized today.

The only full-length study of Cleaver is Kathleen Rout, Eldridge Cleaver (1991). Anthologies of his work that contain 1960s material are Louis Heath, The Black Panther Leaders Speak (1976) and Off the Pigs! (1976). Obituaries are in the Washington Post and the New York Times (both 2 May 1998).

Kay Kinsella Rout