Leroy Eldridge Cleaver

CLEAVER, LEROY ELDRIDGE

Eldridge Cleaver rose to prominence in the late 1960s as a leading African American intellectual and political revolutionary. As minister of information for the BLACK PANTHER PARTY during tumultuous years of social upheaval, Cleaver
became a symbol of rebellion, freedom, and elo-
quence for those seeking political and social
change.His 1968 best-selling book of essays Soul
on Ice served as a kind of guidebook for radicals
in the New Left, student, and CIVIL RIGHTS
movements of the day. Cleaver was involved
with the U.S. legal system as a convict, social
critic, political activist, political candidate, fugi-
tive, and business owner.

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was born August 3,
1935, in Wabbaseka, Arkansas.When he was still
young, the family moved to Phoenix, and then
to the Watts section of Los Angeles.While in Los
Angeles during his teenage years, Cleaver was
arrested for bicycle theft and for selling mari-
juana, and was sent to two different reformato-
ries. In 1954, he was again arrested for dealing
marijuana and was sentenced to two-and-a-half
years at the California State Prison at Soledad.
Unreformed by his first prison stay, Cleaver
resumed dealing drugs and embarked on a series
of rapes, directed first at black women, then at
white women. He later came to see the reckless-
ness and inhumanity of these crimes as both a
product of his own misguided choices and a
reaction to the racism of U.S. society. In Soul on
Ice, he described the delight he felt at “defying
and trampling upon the white man’s law”
through these actions. He also claimed that his
motivation in the rapes was to get “revenge” for
“the historical fact of how the white man has
used the black woman.”
In 1958, roughly a year after his release from
the Soledad prison, Cleaver was arrested again,
this time for armed assault when he attempted
to rape a nurse in a parking lot. During his sub-
sequent eight-year stay in the San Quentin and
Folsom prisons, Cleaver read widely and became
a member and minister of the NATION OF ISLAM,
often called the Black Muslims. He also became
an admirer of MALCOLM X, a Nation of Islam
leader. When Malcolm X broke from the group in 1963, Cleaver followed his example.
Cleaver was released from prison for the second
time in 1965—the same year that Malcolm
X was assassinated, allegedly by Nation of Islam
members—with the help of Beverly Axelrod, a
white San Francisco lawyer.Correspondence and
a brief love affair between Axelrod and Cleaver
had led to Axelrod’s help in getting several essays
by Cleaver published in Ramparts, an influential
left-wing magazine. These essays, in turn, had
built support for Cleaver’s cause among members
of the U.S. intellectual community, including
writer Norman Mailer. The support of such
intellectuals helped persuade the PAROLE board
to release Cleaver from prison.
After his parole Cleaver began writing for
Ramparts. In 1967, while living in the San Francisco
Bay area, Cleaver married Kathleen Neal,
who had been an activist with the STUDENT
NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE
(SNCC). In that same year, he befriended HUEY
P. NEWTON and BOBBY SEALE, cofounders of the
Black Panthers, and he soon became that group’s
minister of information. The Black Panthers was
an African American political organization that
sought to defend the African American community
from police intimidation and violence. As
part of their SELF-DEFENSE actions, Black Panthers
carried guns and law books, followed
police cars, and observed police encounters with
African Americans.
As a spokesperson for the Panthers, Cleaver
explained the group’s goals and ideas to the rest
of the world. In media interviews, for example,
he described how “Pig Power” or “the Gestapo
power of the police” contributed to many of the
problems in the African American community.
In February 1968, Cleaver published Soul on
Ice, the book that made him a celebrity. It
quickly became a best-seller and was named
Book of the Year by the New York Times. The
book begins with the observation that Cleaver’s
first year in prison, 1954, coincided with that of
the landmark Supreme Court case BROWN V.
BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS, 347
U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873, the first significant
legal victory African Americans
achieved in the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT. The
book explores, among its many topics, Cleaver’s
relationship to Malcolm X, Cleaver’s rejection of
U.S. capitalism, the solidarity between African
Americans and citizens of third-world countries,
the relationship between sexuality and race
in the United States, and Cleaver’s admiration of
the student movement of the 1960s. The book
also deals with themes that came to dominate
African American political activism of the time:
racial pride, rejection of white standards of
beauty, and acceptance of violence as a necessary
part of political struggle.
In his essay “Domestic Law and International
Order,” Cleaver reflected on the situation
of African Americans in light of the VIETNAM
WAR and of the suppression of the Watts riots of
1965 by the NATIONAL GUARD. For Cleaver, both
these events were examples of U.S. imperialism,
with the U.S. army in Vietnam and the police in
Watts acting as essentially identical agents of
state coercion over colonized peoples:
The police do on the domestic level what the
armed forces do on the international level:
protect the way of life of those in power. The
police patrol the city, cordon off communities,
blockade neighborhoods, invade homes,
search for that which is hidden. The armed
forces patrol the world, invade countries and
continents, cordon off nations, blockade
islands and whole peoples. . .. The policeman
and the soldier will have the last word.
Accordingly, Cleaver called for African
Americans, “who in this land of private property
have all private and no property,” to oppose this
system and fight for power and property.
The success of Soul on Ice, combined with a
vacuum in African American leadership caused
by the assassinations of MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. and Malcolm X, and the imprisonment of
other leaders such as Newton,made Cleaver seem
for a brief time to be an important African American
leader. In the spring of 1968, he was nominated
for the presidency of the United States by
the white radical Peace and Freedom party. During
his candidacy he spoke out for a revolutionary
movement that involved both blacks and
whites. He received 30,000 votes nationally.
Cleaver’s time in the spotlight was cut short
as a result of violence that erupted between the
police and the Panthers. On April 6, 1968,—two
days after the assassination of King—Cleaver
was involved in a shoot-out with the police in
which one Black Panther was killed. Cleaver was
arrested, but two months later was released on a
writ of HABEAS CORPUS (release from unlawful
imprisonment). A higher court later reversed his
release and scheduled him for reincarceration in
November 1968. Cleaver chose to become a fugitive
from the law and fled to Cuba.
Cleaver’s exile overseas was accompanied by
a rapid decline in his influence as both a political
and intellectual leader.His short stay in Cuba
was followed by stints in Algeria, North Korea,
and Paris. He continued to speak out as a revolutionary
during his time overseas. Sometimes
his revolutionary efforts were in the sartorial
rather than political sphere, as in 1975 when he
attempted to publicize his design for Cleavers, a
new type of pants that featured a codpiece
intended to display the male sexual organ. The
new pants would, he theorized, revolutionize
sexual attitudes in a way that would ultimately
eliminate such crimes as rape. They would also,
Cleaver said, “abolish . . . the crime of indecent
exposure” and replace it with “decent exposure.”
After he had lived for several years in communist
countries, Cleaver’s political radicalism
began to wane and he became more conservative
in his beliefs. Eventually, he could no longer
abide life away from the United States, and by
the mid-1970s Cleaver began to voice a different
view of his native country. In 1975 he returned
to the States where he was immediately put in
prison. “I’d rather be in jail in America than free
anywhere else,” Cleaver commented after his
return.
Cleaver’s subsequent career in the United
States was marked by a series of unsuccessful
ventures as he has tried to regain the spotlight.
While in jail in 1976 he announced that he was a
born-again Christian and renounced the Marxism-
Leninism and atheism of his Black Panther
days. After his release on bail he began a short
career as leader of a religious revivalist movement,
the Eldridge Cleaver Crusades. In 1980, he
attempted to create a new church called “Christlam,”
a synthesis of Christianity and Islam. He
also dabbled with Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s
Unification Church and the MORMON CHURCH
becoming, for a short period, a Black Mormon.
Cleaver was a perennially unsuccessful candidate
for political office, running for a seat in the
U.S. House of Representatives in 1984 and for
the U.S. Senate in 1986. In the second race he
campaigned as a conservative Republican, the
ultimate rebuke to his earlier radicalism.
Cleaver continued to have run-ins with the
law. In 1987, he was arrested for cocaine possession
and the following year he was arrested for
theft from a residence. He was ordered to make
restitution and was placed on parole for three
years. Also in 1987, the Cleavers divorced.
Cleaver was again arrested for cocaine possession
in 1992, but the charges were dropped, and
in 1994 he was seriously injured by a blow to the
head from a fellow drug addict. In the mid-
1990s, Cleaver was owner of a recycling company
in Oakland and a lecturer.
Cleaver started work in February 1998 as a
consultant to the Coalition for Diversity at the
University of LaVerne located in southern California.
A few months later, however, on May 1,
1998, he died in Pomona, Californa.
Although his public career was a mixed success,
Cleaver’s writings and activities have
affected U.S. politics and culture. Besides Soul on
Ice, his books include Eldridge Cleaver: Post-
Prison Writings and Speeches (1969) and Soul on
Fire (1978). And despite his later rejection of
many of the Black Panther beliefs, Cleaver
viewed that group’s legacy as beneficial. “The
Black Panther Party,” he said, “played a very positive
role at a decisive moment toward the liberation
of Black people in America.”

FURTHER READINGS
Cleaver, Eldridge. 1968. Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Rout, Kathleen. 1991. Eldridge Cleaver. Boston: Twayne.
“The Two Nations of Black America.” 1998. Interview with
Eldridge Cleaver. PBS Frontline. Available online at
(accessed June 13, 2003).