Bart Barnes (obituary date 2 May 1998)

SOURCE: "Eldridge Cleaver, Author and Black Panther Leader, Dies," in Washington Post, May 2, 1998, p. D6.

[In the following obituary, Barnes provides an overview of Cleaver's life and career.]

Eldridge Cleaver, 62, the information minister of the Black Panther Party whose searing rhetoric and exhortations of insurrection made him a revolutionary cult leader of the 1960s, died May 1 in California.

Mr. Cleaver, who had served almost 12 years in prison on a variety of assault, drug and theft charges, was author of the best-selling Soul on Ice, a collection of essays about his own life and the fate of black people in the United States, written while he was in jail in California. Published in 1968, the book became the political manifesto of the Black Panther Party, which Mr. Cleaver helped organize in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.

After a gun battle with Oakland police in 1968, Mr. Cleaver fled the United States, living for the next seven years in Cuba, France and Algeria. In 1975, he returned as a born-again Christian, renounced his revolutionary views and subsequently joined the Republican Party.

Later he battled drug and alcohol addictions and in 1994 underwent emergency brain surgery after being hit on the head and knocked unconscious during a cocaine buy. After that experience, he promised to stay clean.

He died at Pomona Valley Medical Center in Pomona. Citing family requests for privacy, the hospital would not release the cause of death or provide details on Mr. Cleaver's hospitalization.

Mr. Cleaver, the son of a nightclub piano player and a schoolteacher, was born in Wabbaseka, Ark. He moved as a child to Phoenix and later to Los Angeles. In the early 1950s, he was sent to reform school for bicycle theft, released and then arrested and sent back to reform school for selling marijuana.

Only days after his second release, he was rearrested for possession of marijuana and reincarcerated for 30 months at the California State Prison at Soledad. There he completed high school, and he read voraciously, including the writings of Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Lenin and W. E. B. DuBois.

Released in 1957, he returned to the streets, where he sold marijuana and committed rape. In Soul on Ice, he would later write: "I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto … where dark and vicious deeds appear not as deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day—and when I considered myself smooth enough I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey … rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values."

A year after getting out of Soledad, Mr. Cleaver was arrested and convicted of assault with intent to murder. Sentenced to a term of two to 14 years, he was imprisoned at San Quentin and later at Folsom Prison. "After I returned to prison," he wrote, "I took a long look at myself and for the first lime in my life admitted that I was wrong, and that I had gone astray—astray not so much from the white man's law as from being human, civilized…. My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered. That is why I started to write. To save myself."

Seeking a program of self-discipline, he joined the Black Muslims, but because California prison authorities did not recognize the Nation of Islam as a legitimate religious organization, Mr. Cleaver's efforts to proselytize other prisoners were often punished with long periods in solitary confinement.

Paroled from prison in 1966, Mr. Cleaver became active almost immediately with the Black Panthers, calling for an armed insurrection to overthrow the U.S. government and for the establishment of a black socialist government in its place.

The next few years were a time of social and political turbulence in the United States, with protests over the Vietnam War escalating and demands by civil rights organizations for full participation in American society growing stronger. Several major U.S. cities had been torn by riots.

In this atmosphere, Middle America tended to view the Black Panthers as a band of gun-toting radicals, intimidating in their signature black berets and leather jackets to the law-abiding. In several cities, the Black Panthers operated free lunch programs for poor children and managed other social service efforts, but they also had periodic confrontations with police. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panthers were the nation's "greatest threat."

In April 1968, after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Cleaver and another Black Panther, Bobby Hutton, became involved in a shootout with Oakland police in which three officers were wounded and Hutton was killed when he tried to surrender. Mr. Cleaver's parole was revoked, and he was charged with assault and attempted murder.

By then, Soul on Ice had made Mr. Cleaver a public figure, and his cause was taken up around the world. A demonstration on his behalf in New York attracted the likes of writer Susan Sontag and actor Gary Merrill. In France, film director Jean-Luc Godard urged donations to Mr. Cleaver's defense fund. The Peace and Freedom Party, an organization of black and white liberals, made him its candidate in the 1968 U.S. presidential election.

On Nov. 27, 1968, Mr. Cleaver was scheduled to return to jail. Instead, he jumped $50,000 bail and fled to Mexico City and then to Cuba, where he remained until 1969. Later, he traveled to Paris and then to Algeria, where he was greeted as a "revolutionary hero" and given a villa in Algiers by the government. The villa was intended as a haven for black American exiles and a base for recruitment of U.S. military deserters. But in fact, Mr. Cleaver spent much of his time feuding long-distance with Black Panther leader Huey Newton, who in 1971 expelled him from the party.

In time, relations between Mr. Cleaver and the Algerian government became strained, and Mr. Cleaver changed his political and religious convictions. He underwent a mystical conversion to Christianity after an experience in which he said he saw the figure of Jesus Christ on the face of the moon. He came to believe that the socialist and Marxist systems he had witnessed in other countries failed to deliver on their promises. In a 1978 book, Soul on Fire, he wrote: "I had heard so much rhetoric about their glorious leaders and their incredible revolutionary spirit that even to this very angry and disgruntled American it was absurd and unreal." He described the politics of Cuba as "voodoosocialism."

Shortly before returning to the United States, he wrote on the op-ed page of the New York Times: "With all of its faults, the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world."

On surrendering to California authorities, Mr. Cleaver pleaded guilty to assault after prosecutors dropped attempted murder charges against him in the 1968 police shootout. He was placed on probation and directed to perform 2,000 hours of community service.

In the years since then, he had designed a line of men's trousers with a strategically placed attachment called the "Cleaver sleave," worked as a tree surgeon and sold clay flowerpots. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in the 1986 California Republican primary.

His marriage to Kathleen Cleaver ended in divorce in 1985. They had two children, Maceo and Joju. He also had a son, Riley, from another relationship.

John Kifner (obituary date 2 May 1998)

SOURCE: "Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther Who Became G.O.P. Conservative, Is Dead at 62," in The New York Times, May 2, 1998, p. B8.

[In the following obituary, Kifner details Cleaver's literary career and traces the achievements and disappointments of his life.]

Eldridge Cleaver, whose searing prison memoir Soul on Ice and leadership in the Black Panther Party made him a symbol of black rebellion in the turbulent 1960's, died yesterday in Pomona, Calif., at the age of 62.

A spokesman for the Pomona Valley Hospital Center, Leslie Porras, declined to provide the cause of death or the reason Mr. Cleaver was in the hospital at the request of his family.

In the black leather coat and beret the Panthers wore as a uniform, Mr. Cleaver was a tall, bearded figure who mesmerized his radical audiences with his fierce energy, intellect and often bitter humor.

"You're either part of the problem or part of the solution," he challenged, in one of the slogans that became a byword of the era.

He became even more of a symbol when he jumped bail after a shootout between Black Panthers in Oakland, Calif., and the police and fled into exile in Cuba and Algeria, adding the causes of communism and third world liberation to his repertoire.

But after he returned to the United States in 1975, Mr. Cleaver metamorphosed into variously a born-again Christian, a Moonie, a Mormon, a crack cocaine addict, a designer of men's trousers featuring a cod piece and even, finally, a Republican.

When Soul on Ice was published in 1968, it had a tremendous impact on an intellectual community radicalized by the civil rights movement, urban riots, the war in Vietnam and campus rebellions. It was a wild, divisive time in America, and Mr. Cleaver's memoir from Folsom prison, where he was doing time for rape, was hailed as an authentic voice of black rage in a white-ruled world. The New York Times named it one of its 10 best books of the year.

"Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing," Maxwell Geismar wrote in the introduction to the McGraw-Hill book, adding:

As in Malcolm X's case, here is an "outside" critic who takes pleasure in dissecting the deepest and most cherished notions of our personal and social behavior; and it takes a certain amount of courage and a "willed objectivity" to read him. He rakes our favorite prejudices with the savage claws of his prose until our wounds are bare, our psyche is exposed, and we must either fight back or laugh with him for the service he has done us. For the "souls of black folk" in W. E. B. Du Bois's phrase, are the best mirror in which to sec the white American self in mid-20th century.

First printed in Ramparts, the quintessential radical magazine of the 60's, Mr. Cleaver's prison essays are angry, sometimes bitingly funny, often obsessed with sexuality. And they trace the development of his political thought through his prison readings of the works of Thomas Paine, Marx, Lenin, James Baldwin and, above all Malcolm X.

"I have, so to speak, washed my hands in the blood of the martyr Malcolm X," Mr. Cleaver wrote after the assassination of the onetime Black Muslim leader who had moved away from separatism, "whose retreat from the precipice of madness created new room for others to turn about in, and I am caught up in that tiny space, attempting a maneuver of my own."

But it was a difficult space to reach. In one of the book's most gripping and brutal passages, he wrote:

I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of the day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically—though looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild and completely abandoned frame of mind.

"Rape was an insurrectionary act," he wrote. "It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I fell I was getting revenge."

There was little doubt he went on, citing a LeRoi Jones poem of the time which expressed similar rage, "that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats." But he was caught, and after he returned to prison, Mr. Cleaver wrote:

I look a long look at myself and, for the first lime in my life, admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray—astray not so much from the white man's law as from being human, civilized—for I could not approve the act of rape. Even though I had some insight into my own motivations, I did not feel justified. I lost my self respect. My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered.

That is why I started to write. To save myself.

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was born in Wabbaseka, Ark., near Little Rock, in 1935, to Leroy Cleaver, a waiter and piano player in a local nightclub, and Thelma Cleaver, an elementary school teacher. When the father became a waiter on the Super Chief train the family moved to Phoenix, a stop on the train's run from Chicago to Los Angeles. Mr. Cleaver later said that his father often beat his mother and that shortly after the family moved to the Watts section of Los Angeles, the couple separated.

Mr. Cleaver had barely started Abraham Lincoln Junior High School—where his mother was working as a janitor—when he was arrested for bicycle theft and sent to reform school, where the older boys inspired loftier ambitions. Almost immediately after his release, he was sent to another reform school, this time for selling marijuana. A few days after he was released from that school, he was arrested for marijuana possession, and made the big time: 2 1/2 years at Soledad state prison.

He began reading widely and received his high school diploma at Soledad, forming, he wrote in Soul on Ice, "a concept of what it meant to be black in white America." But a year later Mr. Cleaver was arrested for his raping spree, convicted of assault with intent to murder and sent first to San Quentin, then Folsom prisons for a term of two to fourteen years.

He became first a jailhouse Black Muslim convert, then, after the split in the Nation of Islam, followed Malcolm X. In mid 1965, eight years into his term, he wrote to Beverly Axelrod, a well-known white civil liberties lawyer in San Francisco asking for help in pleading for parole.

Ms. Axelrod took his essays to Edward M. Keating, Ramparts' owner and editor. When he went before the parole board, he was a published writer with the support of literary lights like Mr. Geismar, Norman Mailer and Paul Jacobs.

Freed in December 1966, with a job reporting for Ramparts in San Francisco, Mr. Cleaver helped organize Black House, a cultural center, where he met Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the co-founders of the Black Panther party, which they called an organization for "self-defense" against the police.

The Panthers were a growing presence in Oakland, shadowing police patrols, whom they accused of brutalizing the black community, and openly displaying weapons. Mr. Cleaver quickly joined the party as minister of information—chief spokesman and propagandist.

"We shall have our manhood," Mr. Cleaver declared. "We shall have it or the earth will leveled by our attempts to gain it."

Mr. Cleaver also began teaching an experimental course at the University of California at Berkeley in fall 1968, which infuriated then-Governor Ronald Reagan who declared "if Eldridge Cleaver is allowed to teach our children they may come home one night and slit our throats." At the time, Mr. Cleaver regularly referred to Mr. Reagan as "Mickey Mouse" in his speeches. It is a measure of Mr. Cleaver's many changes that he was booed and hissed by the Yale Afro-American student society in 1982 for supporting Mr. Reagan.

As tensions between the Panthers and the authorities rose, Mr. Cleaver was caught up in a shootout in April 1968 in which a 17-year old Panther, Bobby Hutton, was killed and Mr. Cleaver and two policemen were wounded. Facing the revocation of his parole and new charges, Mr. Cleaver jumped a $50,000 bail late that year and fled into exile first to Cuba then to a home in Algeria, then a leftist haven.

Mr. Cleaver married Kathleen Neal in l967, the daughter of a Foreign Service officer who had left Barnard to join the civil rights movement. She followed him to Algeria, and they had two children, a son, Maceo, now 29, and a daughter, Joju, 28. The couple divorced in 1987, and Mrs. Cleaver is now a lawyer and teacher.

At first Mr. Cleaver toured communist countries triumphantly, hailing North Korea's Kim Il Sung, among others. But disillusionment set in, and there was increasing friction between the Algerian government and Mr. Cleaver's entourage. There was an internal struggle between Mr. Cleaver and Mr. Newton, too, and Mr. Cleaver broke with the Panthers in 1971.

"I had heard so much rhetoric about their glorious leaders and their incredible revolutionary spirit that even to this very angry and disgruntled American, it was absurd and unreal," Mr. Cleaver wrote of the period later.

The family moved to France. There, Mr. Cleaver said, contemplating suicide one night with a gun in his hand, he suddenly had a vision in which his old Marxist heroes disappeared in smoke and a blinding light led him to Christianity. In 1977, Mr. Cleaver returned to the United States and surrendered to the F.B.I. under a deal with the Government by which he plead guilty to the assault charge stemming from the shootout. Attempted murder charges were dropped, and he was sentenced to 1,200 hours of community service.

But, Mrs. Cleaver said in a 1994 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, "He came back a very unhealthy person, unhealthy mentally, and I don't think he's ever quite recovered. He became a profoundly disappointed and ultimately disoriented person."

Mr. Cleaver drifted in his enthusiasms. He opened a boutique for the trousers he created featuring what he called the Cleaver sleeve. He embraced various religions. He ran a recycling business for a while, but other recyclers accused him of stealing their garbage. He was treated for addiction to crack cocaine in 1990. A crack charge two years later was dropped because of an illegal search but in 1994 Berkeley police found him staggering about with a severe, never fully explained, head injury and a rock of crack in his pocket. He proclaimed himself a conservative and ran, unsuccessfully, for various local offices as a Republican.

His political turnabout was such that, in the 1980's, he demanded that the Berkeley City Council begin its meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance, a practice they had abandoned years before.

"Shut up, Eldridge," Mayor Gus Newport told the man who had once been the fiercest emblem of 1960's radicalism. "Shut up or we'll have you removed."

Jenifer Warren (obituary date 2 May 1998)

SOURCE: "Former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver Dies at 62," in Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1998, p. A1.

[In the following obituary, Warren recounts the "often perplexing, often tragic series of zigzags" in Cleaver's life.]

Former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who achieved prominence as a 1960s revolutionary, author and presidential candidate but spent his later years as a conservative idealist concerned with the environment, died Friday at Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center. He was 62.

A hospital spokeswoman declined to reveal the cause of death, citing a family request. But a neighbor, Peter Apanel, who was with Cleaver on Thursday night said the onetime seminal figure of black militancy had complained of what he believed was a reaction to various medications.

Apanel said Cleaver was battling prostate cancer and was taking insulin. Cleaver told Apanel he had a doctor's appointment Friday morning but it wasn't immediately clear how he became hospitalized.

Cleaver had lived most recently in the Pomona-Fontana area and at his death was a consultant to the Coalition for Diversity at the University of La Verne. In his later years, many former admirers had come to see him as an object of ridicule for the political and religious views he embraced.

But "he was a beloved and respected friend here," Apanel said, adding that many evenings he could be found reading poetry at a neighborhood coffeehouse while building up a repertoire of speeches he hoped would improve his economic situation.

He crafted ceramic pots and warned whoever would listen of his concerns about environmental pollution.

By February, he had moved his life to a point where he exchanged pleasantries at a gathering of Pasadena police officers to which he had been invited, telling them: "You'll never know how happy I am to meet you under these circumstances."

All this from a once fierce advocate of violence who shot it out with police and fled into exile from a country he had come to hale.

Cleaver, tall and broad-shouldered with the erect bearing of a soldier, was a self-educated man with a gift for language. He was perhaps best known for writing Soul on Ice, a collection of eloquent essays on prison life, interracial relationships and on being black in white America. The book, which he wrote while in Folsom State Prison for sexual assault, earned him praise as one of the most compelling black writers and social critics of the 1960s.

After his release, Cleaver joined the Black Panther Party, attracted, he once said, by its "revolutionary courage." Branded "the nation's greatest threat" by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the militant group with its trademark black berets pursued goals ranging from shadowing Oakland police with gun-toting monitors to providing free breakfasts for poor children.

Articulate and possessing a fiery oratorical style, Cleaver was appointed the Panthers' minister of information. Nicknamed "El Rage" for his tendency to explode in outrage and anger, he quickly became the era's embodiment of black militancy.

"We were like those who staged the Boston Tea Party," Cleaver once said of the Panthers. "We refused to go along with oppressive practices. We fought it as best we knew how."

In the fall of 1968, he became the focus of a cause celebre when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan tried to bar him from lecturing in a course at UC Berkeley. Student demonstrations over the action resulted in hundreds of arrests. Cleaver also ran for president that year as the candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party, getting 30,000 votes.

He had reached the peak of his prominence, but then went into exile. Facing charges of attempted murder in connection with a Panthers shootout with Oakland police, he jumped $50,000 bail and fled the country. He was 33 at the time and said he would "rather be shot down in the street" than return to prison, where he had passed so much of his young life.

Cleaver spent seven years abroad, a Marxist searching for political and racial Utopia in Cuba, Algeria, North Korea and the Soviet Union. It was a wrenching time. He missed America, became disillusioned with communism and felt that his life had evaporated into a desperate meaninglessness. "It was like watching the blood flowing out of my veins," he once told the Times.

In 1975, Cleaver returned home—a stranger to those who had known and idolized him before. As leftists looked on, incredulous, he renounced his revolutionary past, praised the United States government and declared himself a born-again Christian, saying that he had seen the face of Jesus in a full moon. The old attempted murder charge was reduced to assault, and Cleaver was sentenced to 2,000 hours of community service.

Critics called his political and religious conversion a put-on designed to help his court case, but Cleaver replied that he was merely evolving with the times. "Change," he said, "is not treason…. Change is a process of growth."

Cleaver's life from that point on became an often perplexing, often tragic series of zigzags—a search, it sometimes seemed, for his real self.

In the late 1970s, he dabbled in fashion, designing trousers with a codpiece-like pouch—called the "Cleaver sleeve"—that was meant to emphasize, rather than conceal, a man's genitals. But America apparently wasn't ready for the Cleaver sleeve, so its creator turned his energies to making decorative flowerpots, working for a San Jose tree trimming company and sampling religions.

In 1979, he founded the Cleaver Crusade for Christ and bought 40 acres in the Nevada desert, planning to use it for his ministry's headquarters. A year later, he shifted gears and formed his own religion—Christlam—along with a peculiar auxiliary he called Guardians of the Sperm. Mormonism came next.

Off and on, the ex-radical claimed to have "visions," about which he issued public warnings. In one, he saw California struck by a natural disaster and said that "immediate steps must be taken by the federal government to evacuate the state." In another, he warned then-Gov. Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr. of a plot to murder him before the 1980 election. Politics continued to entice Cleaver, but shedding his revolutionary past proved no guarantee of success. He ran for the Berkeley City Council in 1984, a candidacy doomed by his opposition to popular rent control laws, and two years later was a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. In that race, he condemned affirmative action—saying it promoted unqualified blacks—advocated a peacetime draft, and wore an American flag pin on his suit lapel.

By the late 1980s, Cleaver's once-resonant voice had fallen silent and he slipped into anonymity, earning a meager living scavenging bottles and broken-down chairs off the streets of Berkeley. The only time his name popped up was on the police blotter for arrests related to cocaine possession and burglary.

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was born near Little Rock, Ark., in 1935. His father was a waiter and nightclub piano player, and his mother was an elementary school teacher. When his father got a job on a railroad dining car, the family moved to Phoenix, and then to Watts, where Cleaver's parents separated when he was 13.

A year later, Cleaver had his first brush with the law when he was arrested for bicycle theft and sent to a reformatory. After his release came a series of marijuana-related offenses that ultimately landed him at Soledad State Prison in 1954.

There an interest in literature blossomed, and he consumed the works of Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Voltaire and W. E. B. Du Bois. He also formed a view of his place in the white man's world, and grew angry and bitter.

Upon his release, he returned to the drug trade and committed a new crime—rape. He was arrested again within a year on a charge of assault to commit rape, and later explored the roots of his sexual attacks in Soul on Ice.

In prison, Cleaver wrote, he "took a long look at myself and … admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray—astray not so much from the white man's law as from being human, civilized. My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered. That is why I started to write. To save myself."

He recently was interviewed by Times columnist Patt Morrison and later sent her a message he titled "Changing Times."

In it he reminisced that "the Black Panthers were neither as good or as bad as all sides say. We were fabulous. We were not just freedom talkers, we were freedom fighters."

Once married, Cleaver is survived by a son, Maceo, and a daughter, Joju.

Newsweek (obituary date 11 May 1998)

SOURCE: "A Fiery Soul Set Free," in Newsweek, Vol. CXXXI, No. 19, May 11, 1998, p. 72.

[In the following obituary, the critic summarizes Cleaver's career.]

He glared balefully from his wanted poster, signed by J. Edgar Hoover in 1968, the year he both ran for president and fled to Cuba. Even in the 1960s, nobody projected menace as effectively as Eldridge Cleaver, the "Minister of Information" of the Black Panther Party, whose idea of a campaign speech was to urge a group of California lawyers to "take your guns and shoot judges." Of all the ends that might have been forecast for him, the unlikeliest overtook him last week: to die at the age of 62 in a hospital bed in Pomona, Calif., a few miles from where he grew up in Watts. At the request of his family, the hospital did not disclose his illness.

He was a thief, a drug dealer and a rapist, as he recounted in his famous prison memoir, Soul on Ice: "I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto … and when I considered myself smooth enough I sought out white prey … Rape was an insurrectionary act." It was a measure of the times that the book was hailed as a work of genius and Cleaver, who was released from Folsom Prison in 1966 after serving nine years for assault, won renown as a cultural critic, the non-thinking man's James Baldwin.

But the Black Panther Party, which he joined soon after its founding by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, couldn't stay out of trouble with the law, and Cleaver was jailed after a gunfight with Oakland cops. Temporarily free, he fled the country for a seven-year exile in Cuba, Algeria and France before returning in 1975—remade as a born-again Christian and, in the 1980s, a staunch Reaganite. He ran for the Republican nomination for Senate and lost badly; was arrested again on cocaine charges, and pretty much dropped from sight by the 1990s. He lived too long to die a martyr, accomplished too little to qualify as a hero, but leaves behind, like a ghostly trace on a TV screen, the memory of his eloquent rage.