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Books by
Eldridge Cleaver
Soul on Ice /
Post-Prison Writings and
Speeches / Target
Zero; A Life in Writing /
Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver
Being Black /
Education and Revolution /
Eldridge Cleaver /
Eldridge Cleaver Is Free
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Eldridge Cleaver Speaks to Skip Gates
In this interview, conducted in the spring of 1997, Eldridge talked with Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. About the shoot out with Oakland police which led to his exile,
and looks back at the legacy of the Panthers and the civil rights movement.
On the Oakland Shoot Out
When these riots started all over the country in the
aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King -- I think he got killed on
the fourth of April. This shootout that we had took place on the sixth and the
seventh of April. So we saw it coming while the police were acting so we decided
to get down first. So we started the fight. There were fourteen of us.
We went down
into the area of Oakland where the violence was the worst a few blocks away from
where Huey Newton had killed that cop so we dealt with them when they came upon
us. We were well armed, and we had a shootout that lasted an hour and a half. I
will tell anybody that that was the first experience of freedom that I had. I
was free for an hour and a half because during that time the repressive forces
couldn't put their hand on me because we were shooting it out with them for an
hour and a half. Three police officers got wounded. None of them got killed; I
got wounded. Another Panther got wounded.
On The Death of Bobby Hutton
Bobby Hutton didn't get wounded during the shootout, but they
murdered him after we were in custody.
That is why I am sitting here today
because the police offers to whom we surrendered -- when I came back from my
exile and was going to court on those charges. I was facing charges that would
give me 82 years in prison. This police officer came to court one day, and the
district attorney said, "Eldridge, there is somebody that wants to meet
you. Would you mind talking to him?" I said, "well, I will meet
anybody, Ben. Bring them on. Who is it?" He said, "it's Lieutenant
Hilliard ."
I knew his name from the grand jury transcript. This was the
guy that we surrendered to. He told me -- he said, "Eldridge, remember that
night? Remember when you came out of the building and you looked up and there
was a police officer in the window and you had a pistol in your face about three
feet from your face?" I said, "I sure do remember that." He said,
"you know I was already squeezing the trigger. I was going to blow your
head off because three officers had gotten wounded. All that shooting had
everybody on edge.
So I was pulling the trigger to blow your head off, and
something told me not to do it." I said, "praise the Lord." He
said, "praise the Lord." He told me, "I am no longer a police
officer." He said, "I have my own private security firm now." He
said, "the reason that they have not been rushing you to court is because
of my testimony and the testimony of thirteen other police officers who were that
night who do not agree with what the police did in the way they killed Bobby
Hutton."
He said, "they murdered Bobby. They murdered my
prisoner." That's what he said. Then he went on to describe -- he said,
"the police have the responsibility of enforcing the law, the guardians of
the law. But what they did that night was worse than what you did." He
said, "if you are going to court, I am going to testify against you because
what you did was wrong.
But I'm also going to testify against them because what
they did was worse. There is no statute of limitation on murder. What they did
was first degree murder." This is w hat he said.
They just took Bobby and pushed him. They pushed him, and he
only went about five feet. He was stumbling and almost falling. They shot him 12
times, man. Murdered him right there on the spot. He fell down.
On How He Escaped Being Murdered
I'm down there, they got shotguns and
pistols in my face, man. I figured they going to shoot us. I could not imagine
living through that. But this other cop, he started complaining about what they
had just done, and that was the last of that and then they took me and put me in
that van and I knew from Huey Newton's trial that all of the police calls are
tape recorded automatically so whoever was talking to these cops asked them who
you got, who's in there?
So they were saying we don't know who he is. So I said
it's Eldridge Cleaver. I wanted to get that on that tape, see, and so then they
took me down a little side street. Two of them suckers got in there, they
started beating me and I have no doubt that they meant to kill me, but then it
came over the radio that this cop who was driving was telling "a couple
officers in the back slapping this guy up" and so the squawk box told them
to stop it.
And so they kept on and he told them your order is to stop that, and
so they wouldn't stop. And so he told them they won't stop. So that guy said
something, like in some kind of code -- that was the second time I heard that
code -- and whatever that code meant, boy, it froze them right in their -- they
stopped right then, man, and they took me on in.
On the Failures & Successes of the Civil Rights Movement
I think it was a success in terms of the goals that
it espoused. That was to break down the color barrier if public accommodations
access to the institutions and things like that. But the big failure of the
civil rights movement was that it did not have an economic plank because while
we got access to schools and to Hot Dog Stands and all that, the burning issue
right now is economic freedom and economic justice and economic democracy.
The
NAACP didn't touch that. They had no plan for that. When Martin Luther King was
turning towards the economic arena in Nashville supporting the strike of the
garbage man, he was murdered. I applaud my country for the changes that we have
undertaken in these areas of civil rights. But where the big problem still
remains is with the economic system. If you would call a meeting today to talk
about segregation, wouldn't nobody come but Louis Farrakhan and David Dukes.
But
if you call a meeting to talk about the money, it would be standing room only.
It wouldn't all be black because the money is funny for everybody, right. That's
where the rubber hits the road; that's what we've got to deal with.
The Panther Economic Program
We had a strong economic place in our program. We had
a direct challenge- the whole exploitation of the capitalist economy in our ten
points. We had a point dealing with the economy. But we were also Marxist in our
orientation, which is like totally economics. Do you see what I'm saying?
So we
understood the relationship to our freedom and our access to our economic
remuneration and not just a little job because that is whimsical. The man on top
can change that any time he wants to. That's why I was always so down on being
totally dependent on the welfare system because when the winds blow differently
in Washington, they can cut you off. But the black democrats they thought that
they were eternal. They thought that Tip O'Neil was going to be there forever to
throw them crumbs.
But it was obvious to me that this was a very dangerous
dependency; therefore, I talked about stuff that went beyond welfare. I rejected
welfare because we need to be involved not just with the federal budget but with
the private sector because the federal government gets its money from the
private sector so we have to be involved in owning and have an influence over
the productive capacity of this country or else we are going to be perpetually
dependent upon the largesse of those who rule.
On Marxism & American Democracy
I had a chance to witness Marxism up
close in action. So in my travels around the world, I saw that it wasn't
working. I saw that the dictatorship of the proletariat was the last thing I
wanted to have. That's when I began to see that with all of our problems in the
United States, we had the best formal government in the world. We had the freest
and most democratic procedure.
I'm telling you 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.
The last time I saw
them suckers, I was shooting at them; and they were shooting at me. But
regardless of what our standards are in this country, we do have some laws; we
do have some principles that to a certain degree restrain our police.
On Change & the Panther's Strategic Backbone
I think the only way we could have won is that the
American people would have revolted against the status quo. We had the anti-war
movement and the black movement coming together for a better America.
Now,
victory in those terms would have meant that we would have been able to have a
group of people who could get control of the government and administer it. But I
do not think that we had a winning scenario. We never dreamed that we would be
able to overthrow the American government. We didn't see that as our task.
We
saw that as the task of the survivors. Our job was to tear down the status quo
and leave it to other people on how to rebuild because it was not possible to
seize control of the government and install our people. That's reserved for
banana republics.
We had no illusions on that point and so victory, in our
sense, was to get the laws passed that were passed. They started passing voter
rights acts and all this kind of stuff, new civil rights bill, so we saw
ourselves as providing backbone that was missing from Dr. Martin Luther King's
nonviolent movement and we did not think that movement would be rewarded.
It's like the NAACP. NAACP used to be considered a wild eyed
radical organization until Martin Luther King came along and then they became
acceptable and Martin Luther King was the devil. So when we came along Martin
Luther King started looking better. To some people. Obviously not to all.
On the Dynastic Plan Hatched in Boston
When the killing started it was to liquidate the plan hatched here in
Boston, or I should say in Massachusetts, between the Kennedy dynasty and Martin
Luther King.
Their plan was for Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to work
together because together they could turn out the total black vote and then with
the votes that the Kennedys could deliver they would have been able to establish
a dynasty that would have ruled this country into the next century.
That was
their plan and that is why they were liquidated. The two Kennedy brothers
killed, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X killed so that plan could not come into
fruition. That was the scenario, that is why they were killed we do not
understand that. The only one that really broke it down was this guy [Theodore] Sorensen
who was the Kennedy choice for the CIA, but the establishment would not allow
him to take control. Maybe it was the FBI, he was supposed to become head of the
FBI.
He was a speech writer. And so Kennedy tried to
get him appointed head of the FBI and they wouldn't do it and so they were
murdered and so the powers that be murdered them and they made -- if you look at
all four of those assassinations they were textbook. They were murdered and the
finger was pointed at some obvious enemy in all four cases. In all four cases,
baloney.
They were killed by the powers that rule this country who did not want
to see the political dynasty of the Kennedys take control and last into the next
century. They were still paranoid from how long Roosevelt was in power. Remember
they changed the laws so that he couldn't run again and he obliged them by dying
and so they were very fearful that this could be repeated, and it was on the way
to being repeated but they knocked them out because by now Martin Luther King
would have been president. That was their scenario.
On the Ambivalence of Black Progress
Our black middle class has followed an
assimilationist ethic. They have become white and they've adopted all the worst
features of America in terms of not caring about the other people. Like the
white ruling class never cared about poor white people, let alone about black
people and other minorities and these blacks who are following W.E.B. Du Bois'
formula of educating that 10% who will then come back and lift up the rest of
the people -- the argument that was had between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T.
Washington was over how we're going to manage this thing.
Booker T. said we've got to teach these people how to work,
then they'll get jobs, then they'll be able to afford education and then they
can do that. And Du Bois said no, we've got to concentrate on the intellectual
development of the people and get 10% of our people educated and then they can
help the other people, but if you just learn a trade and you don't know what's
going on, that ain't going nowhere.
I say both of them were right. We need both of what they
promised and we've got both of what they promised. But they didn't have a
unifying vision and consequently we've got an enlarged black bourgeoisie but
they have departed from the basis of the black bourgeoisie according to E.
Franklin Frazer.
This was the professional classes and that was their economic
base but the progress that has taken place has given a new economic base to the
black bourgeoisie, to the expanded black -- now their economic base is political
as well as up front economic and they still have a professional class but it has
been expanded because you have a lot of black people with a whole lot of money
coming from these other pursuits.
Add to that, the million-dollar salaries to football players,
basketball players and baseball players, not that they're doing anything
constructive with all of that money, but they have it. But they didn't bring it
back to pull the other people up and so it's like the devil take the hindmost.
That is what we're dealing with so that the black bourgeoisie is as corrupt and
immoral as the white bourgeoisie and that is the problem.
On the Ethical 1960s & the Politics of Now
A lot of people think that
we were better off [in the 1960s] because we had more integrity to our black colleges and there
were a lot of black businesses and all that, but that is like a tempest in a
teapot. We are better off [now] because we have more access, we have more mobility,
but we have a problem which is a political problem.
[When] the laws were
passed to open up the political arena for black people the most visible leaders
and the ones who were able to get those jobs were our protest leaders. So what
they did, they took our protest machinery and transformed it into their personal
political machinery to get them reelected which stripped the black community of
any kind of organizational machinery. And consequently it left us floundering and
treading water in a miserable state.
That is why the number one task that we have in the black
community is a coup d'état against our present leadership to strip them from
that machinery that controls the community so that new ideas and new people can
percolate up and then we can have a new agenda. But because of the way that it's
controlled right now, the number one task of the black politician who's got
these positions should be to politically educate the black community. But they
didn't do that because they knew that if the black community was politically
educated the first thing they would do would be to get rid of them.
So consequently the black community is devoid of any kind of
democratic process. We're under the dictatorship of the black bourgeoisie as it
has never been before. And so they have federal money now to fund their
political machines and keep any new people from moving, any new ideas from
moving. They're not any more concerned with the poorer black people than the
rich white politicians are concerned with poor white people.
On the Million Man March & Farrakhan's Lack Of Creativity
I think the Million Man March will go down in history
as the defining episode for a generation of people and I know Minister Farrakhan
personally and have known him for years. And my overall decision on Farrakhan is
that the Afro-American people are not going to follow him anywhere. And as
General Colin Powell said in his famous commencement address at Howard
University, he said that after what we've been through and after coming this far
we cannot afford to take a detour through the swamps of hatred.
And that is the
Achilles heel of Farrakhan--that the doctrine of the Nation of Islam is a
racist doctrine and the Afro-American people are not racist people. We are
anti-racist people.
We among all the people of the world have put up a valiant
struggle against racism and for emancipation from a system based on racism. And
so that is the problem with Farrakhan. He needs to be born again. He needs a new
vision. Somebody needs to talk to that guy. I tried to talk to him but he's too
slick. He won't listen, you see.
I remember him when he first came along, when he was nothing
but a pimp and a calypso singer and Malcolm X pulled him and let him sing his
song which was A White Man's Heaven Is A Black Man's Hell. And by singing that
song at Malcolm X's rallies every week he got to hear Malcolm X's speech 1000
times. So when Malcolm X was murdered, the show must go on. So they were looking
around for who could keep the show going.
Farrakhan was there. He knew Malcolm's
speech word for word. He has a good mind and a good memory. And he was able to do
it because he was a showman from the beginning. And so he was able to step into
that vacuum. But the boy is not creative. And he's blind sided. So consequently he
was not able to shuffle off that mortal coil which he should have done.
He should have not felt obligated to carry on the doctrine
according to Elijah Mohammed. But he did that to stay the hands of his rivals who
were willing to do that in order to get the power. So they were calling him a
revisionist for a long time. That is why he had to stick to what Elijah Mohammed
was teaching. And for that reason we cannot follow him because we don't want to
go where he's going. And where he's going is where all haters go. And that's into
the garbage can of history. And we're not going with him.
On Colin Powell's Americanism
I think Colin Powell is a magnificent American and he
is different from these other so-called leaders because he is not a protest
leader. The man is an American leader. He's an all-American leader. But because
he has this Afro-American ancestry he appeals to black people.
But he also
appeals to white people and that is the way it should be because we don't need
no narrow mentality person in the White House. We need a person who is an
all-American and this brings me closer to my agenda. I have to apologize to Vice
President Gore because he will not become president in the year 2000.
He is too little too late. In the year 2000
the American people, are going to elect the first woman president of the United
States of America. And it's not just going to be a woman. It's going to be a
mother because what is missing from our decision making process in this Old Boy
network is the heart and the concerns of a mother.
And so I, along with a lot of
other people, are going to make it happen. We don't want to specify who is our
choice right now because we have to get women to raise their self esteem and to
realize and understand that there are a lot of women in America who are
qualified to be president of the United States of America.
You would have to look up under a whole lot of rocks in
America to find a woman as unqualified as these suckers we've been sending to
Washington. And women need to understand that and deal with that because we
cannot go into a new millennium and a new century with the Old Boy network which
is racist and misogynistic. We have got to go in there with a new deal. And I
hope that we will have time to tick off a few points that I feel are extremely
important. But I want to make sure you finish your questions first on this.
On Capitalism, Scarcity & Black Poverty
I think that it is possible for the
capitalist system to have a program of full employment. But we have a spiritual
and moral problem in America. Our problem is not economic or political. It is
that we do not care about each other because we say hey look, my people, my
group, we're first class and you guys, you're second class and you guys over
there, you third class and you guys in the back right there, no ain't got no
class.
That's our attitude. But our creator never wasted his or her time creating
a second class person. He made us all first class and he provided this earth as
our home for all of us, not for the black man, the white man, the red man, the
yellow man, the brown man, but for the whole human family.
We are the ones who have created a system of scarcity. There's
enough building materials in this country, enough skilled workers, that there
should not be any homeless people. There should not be any hungry people. And so
a man wrote a poem in Berkeley, old man, in which he had an immortal line. It
was a poem on greed in which he said how much more than enough do you want?
There is enough for all of us but we don't have values that include us all. And
the black bourgeoisie suffers from that same lack of values as the white
bourgeoisie And so we need a spiritual transformation in our attitude towards
each other so that we can look upon each other as a family.
And therefore our
national economy should be based upon a family budget, not going around
preaching scarcity. There's not enough money for this. There's enough money for
everything if you stop spending it the way you're spending it. And so we need to
undertake some political reform.
Number one, I told you about the toilets, but
number two, we have got to require our politicians to write their own speeches
and when they campaign to campaign under the penalties of perjury because we
have developed a political culture of mendacity.
We all know the politicians lie. We don't expect them to tell
the truth .So we have a low expectation because they've been lying all down
through history. We've got to raise the standard. And to start with, we require
them to write their own speeches or let's vote for the speech writer.
George
Bush went in talking about let there be 1000 points of light then when he got in
the White House all the lights in the country went out. And we found out that a
woman wrote that speech. He didn't even write the speech. So when you come
before us reading your speech we want to know what you are talking about, what
you are thinking about, where you are coming from.
But you can't tell us that if
you going to read a speech some word monger wrote for you. We got to change
that, man, because we need truth in our political arena, and then we've got to
restore vision because our young people are lost, they don't see a future and to
restore -- yes, sir?
On Contracts & Newt Gingrich
It is no longer a situation where you can just deal with the
problems of black people because we now have the same problem. We've gotten rid
of the special problems. I know that there's still discrimination going on and
racism in the decision and what Newt Gingrich talked about a new contract with
the American people.
I used to carry his book around with me. And I'd jump up and
down on it and kick it off the stage. Why do we think that Newt Gingrich
going to live up to a new contract when he hasn't lived up to the old contract?
We don't need a contract. The contract that we should be going by is called the
Constitution of the United States of America and all this other stuff is just a
political scam.
[The Constitution] says that we are entitled to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. And those causes are elastic. If we have people who will
interpret that Constitution right what do we need to be happy? We need some
food, we need a house, we need some money in our pocket.
On Economic Needs & Feminine Wealth
We don't need to be
begging, asking for spare change. We don't need to be on welfare asking for a
handout from the federal government. We need money and income that we can
control. We need part of the private sector. We need property and we need
ownership so that we can not be just floundering this way and that way,
depending on who's in Washington and which way the political winds are blowing.
That is what we've got to be emancipated from and that calls
for not a communist formula and the redistribution of the wealth. We need at
least 51% of the wealth in this country shifted into the hands of women. They
are over 50% of the population. Now they are divorced into poverty. They work
with these chumps and help them get rich then they run away with the secretary
and divorce the wife into poverty. We have got to stop that. We need to shift
51% at the very least of the wealth of this country into the hands of women.
On the Need for Jobs & Full Employment
We have poor
white people, we have poor Indians . . . we have got to eliminate the
economic basis of the underclass by providing them with jobs not handouts from
the federal government. That is the failure of our economic system, that you
have economists who say that you've got to keep the people on the brink of
starvation in order to motivate them to work and hustle around.
The failure of
the capitalistic economic system is that they did not provide for full
employment. They were satisfied with a certain percentile and then they were
willing to keep a lot of people perpetually in reserve and that was to keep
wages down and all that kind of pressure.
We have got to have a policy of full employment . . . for the whole hemisphere.
There's a lot of work to be done
but we have to reorient ourselves from a system of scarcity and a belief system
in scarcity and there is no problem that we have on our agenda that we cannot
solve.
On Tupac & Unringing the Bell
Tupac is a child of Huey Newton and Malcolm X. . . . Tupac
would not have been who he was had he not been born of parents who followed Huey
Newton. Afeni Shakur and Amumu Shakur were members of the Black Panther Party.
And it was because of that experience that they were able to raise Tupac with
the mentality and the spirit that he had. So talking about going back . . . saying that Tupac would have been Huey, you cannot unring the bell.
. . . Huey was a gangster. . . I'm talking about a real gangster.
Tupac,
they were talking about gangster rap. Huey P. Newton was a gun toting gangster,
but that's not all he was. I'm saying he went through that experience as a
criminal, but the thing about Tupac was his spirit and his rebellion against
oppression. This comes from the way that he was raised and the values that were
transmitted to him.
His father died in a gun fight with the New York police
department and so Afena was a very strong stalwart of the Black Panther Party
and Tupac was raised like that. He is what we call a panther cub. And that was
what he was about.
And that is why it was such a blow, [Tupac's] liquidation, and
many people think that it was the COINTELPRO that took him out because the story
doesn't hold up because anybody who knows Las Vegas knows that after the Mike
Tyson fight there, there is no way that anybody going to drive along upside of
another car, shoot them and drive away because it's gridlock for blocks around
there, man. So that is not what happened. There is more to it than that.
On Assessing the Panther Movement
[The Black Panther Party] was a good thing and like all things, there was
good and bad, but nothing like what this nitwit, Horowitz, is talking about
because that is not where we were coming from. And I regret the way that the
Party was repressed because it left a lot of unfinished business because we had
planned to make a transition to the political arena and we would have been able
to transmute that violence and that legacy into legitimate and peaceful
channels.
As it was they chopped off the head and left the body there armed.
That's why all these young bloods out there now, they've got the rhetoric but
without the political direction and they've got the guns. A man told me in
Berkeley, said-- "Eldridge, the two most dangerous demographics in the Bay Area
right now are young black men with guns and middle-aged white women with
Volvos." They're taking out more people than anything else.
On Historians Final Assessment of the Movement
I think they will give us Fs where
we deserve them and they'll give us As where we deserve them and they're going
to give Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver an A plus.
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