[In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt appraises the insights of Post-Prison Writings and Speeches.]

Late in November, 1968, Eldridge Cleaver disappeared from the view of the American public and the prison authorities of the state of California. He left behind him a brief and dazzling career as an author, journalist and militant black leader; a lot of friends and admirers; and a number of unanswered questions. This book, Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches—while it consists of hastily written journalism and speeches that appeared in Ramparts magazine, and was pieced together in Cleaver's absence by Robert Scheer, former Ramparts editor—serves to bring Cleaver's brief career into focus and answer a good many of the questions.

Readers of Cleaver's prison notes, Soul on Ice, will know that while he was in jail he came to regard the criminal rape, for which he was serving a nine-year sentence, as "an insurrectionary act … my delight in violating what I conceived of as white men's laws, and my delight in defiling white women in revenge over the way white men have used black women" ("A combination of business and pleasure," he remarks sardonically when asked by an interviewer, Nat Hentoff, if he might not have had less ideological motives). For Cleaver, rehabilitation began with the understanding that he had displaced the object of his rebellion, that it was not the "particular women" who were at fault, but the "whole system."

It was hardly likely then that Cleaver would rest easy with that system once he was out of prison. He was disenchanted with the Black Muslims for their renunciation of Malcolm X ("The Decline of the Black Muslims" in the present book); but he had read Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and had come to believe that the healthy outlet for an oppressed colonial people was to strike out violently against the oppressor ("Psychology: The Black Bible").

And Cleaver believed from his own experience that black America was an oppressed colony. The Black Panther party, whose leaders he met and "fell in love with" in February, 1967, ("The Courage to Kill: Meeting the Panthers") provided him with what he needed. In time he would become their minister of information and in his speeches and articles enunciate their demands for the liberation of black America, their call to black arms and their vision of guerrilla warfare and revolution.

Cleaver's activities did not sit well with the state of California. As he reports it, his parole officer warned him to "cool it," which he did not for a time, but when the Panther leader Huey Newton was arrested and accused of shooting a member of the Oakland police, Cleaver sprang into action and sought to rally black and liberal communities to Newton's defense. This, Cleaver reports, led to police harassment and finally to the famous incident on the evenings of April 6, 1968, when he and a group of Panthers were caught in a gunfight with the Oakland police ("Affidavit No. 2: Oakland Shoot-out").

The incident led to Cleaver's arrest, the revocation of his parole and the hearing for which he did not appear and which led him to go into hiding. He would do so, as he explained in his "Farewell Address" in San Francisco, because he was sure he would be killed if he returned to prison and because he no longer believed in the legal system that might send him there. He had, as he put it elsewhere, "politicized his rebellion."

A powerful and persuasive book (the activists counterpart to the contemplative Soul on Ice) and a testament to the editorial skills of Robert Scheer, who has introduced the shreds and patches from which the book is sewn, with a moving appraisal of Cleaver's post-prison career. And a good deal of credit should go to Nat Hentoff, who conducted the interview (for Playboy magazine) that serves as the book's coda.

His penetrating questions duplicate all those raised in the reader's mind through out the book; they prompt Cleaver to resolve the apparent inconsistencies between his visions of violence and his fundamental faith in human rights; and they reveal him as a humane, brave and wise man, wherever he may be and whatever the justness of his cause.