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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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An Eldridge Cleaver Bio-Chronology
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[In]
the 60s, for a time, everything was possible; that this period,
in other words, was a moment of universal liberation, a global
unbinding of energies.
--Fredric
Jameson, 1984
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1935 (August 31) -- Born in Wabbaseka, Arkansas.
His family moved first to Phoenix and then to Los Angeles. Grew up in Watts
section.
His father was a dining car waiter; his mother a maid. Ran into trouble with the
law and finally arrested for theft and
selling marijuana.
1954 to 1957 -- Imprisoned at eighteen for possession of a bag of
marijuana
1957 -- Arrested for rape and attempted murder. Convicted of assault with intent to murder and
sent to California's tough San Quentin and Folsom prisons. Received two to
fourteen year sentence.
Immersed himself in the writings of various revolutionary authors (Marx, Tom
Paine, Lenin, Bakunin, et al.), black American writers (Richard Wright, James
Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois), and counter-cultural writers (Norman Mailer, Allen
Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs).
Began to write and
through his lawyer,
Beverly Axlerod, came to the notice of various literary figures, including
Norman Mailer, who petitioned the authorities for his parole.
1966 -- Released from prison. Helped
found the Black Panthers, a militant, leftist, anti-establishment black
nationalist group based in Oakland, California. Became its information
minister, or spokesman.
1967 to1971 -- Minister of
Information for the Black Panther Party
1968 -- Initially published in Ramparts
magazine, his writings were published as the book Soul on Ice.
Written almost entirely while he was in Folsom Prison, the book is a loosely
knit series of letters and essays about race issues in America, prison life,
Baldwin, and other black literary figures, revolutionary violence and his sexual obsessions, especially his obsession with white women.
1968 (April)-- Wounded after a shootout
between Black Panthers and police in Oakland. Arrested. Many New York radicals
demonstrated for his release. Two months later, released when a judge ruled that he was
held as a political prisoner.
Fall 1968, taught an experimental course at the University of
California Berkeley. Then
Governor Ronald Reagan was outraged: "If Eldridge Cleaver
is allowed to teach our children, they may come home one night and slit our
throats?"
1968 -- Ran for U.S. president on the
ticket of the Peace and Freedom Party, Cleaver. A higher court overturned
the June 1968 ruling that released Cleaver. Faced a long prison term on charges of assault and attempted
murder. Jumped bail, and fled the United States for a life of exile.
Stopped first in Cuba, then in Algeria.
Traveled widely. Given a warm welcome in the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Kim II Sung's Korea.
1971 -- Broke with Panthers and moved to Paris, France. While in France, had a mystical
vision in which the faces of Marx, Engels, Mao, Castro, and others appeared in
the moon, followed by the face of Christ. This tale created the foundation for
his Christian conversion.
1975 -- Returned to U.S. and began a remarkable political
transformation. Renounced the Black Panthers and stated he believed he would be treated fairly by the American judicial system.
Murder charges were dropped. Placed
on probation for assault. Sentenced to twelve-hundred hours of community service.
Became a born-again Christian, a follower of the Rev.
Sun Myung Moon, a Mormon. Embraced anti-communism. Made an unsuccessful run for the GOP nomination for a Senate seat in
California.
1982
-- Booed by Yale's Afro-American student society for supporting Reagan
1980s (mid) -- Became addicted to crack
cocaine, which led to new brushes with the law.
1986 -- Explained in interview his many life transformations. "Everybody changes, not just me," he said. "I
was pulled over in my car with my secretary for a traffic thing, and one of the
officers walked up to the car and saw me sitting inside. He took off his hat and
said, 'Hey, Eldridge, remember me?'" "He used to be a Panther," Cleaver said. "It
was hard to believe."
1988 -- Placed on probation after convictions for burglary and cocaine
possession
1992 -- Arrested again for cocaine possession, but a judge threw out the charges after
determining Cleaver was improperly arrested.
1994 -- Berkeley police found him
staggering about with a severe head wound and crack in his pocket. Almost died from
the blow to the head
administered by a fellow addict. With the help of his family, he got off drugs
and again immersed himself in evangelical Christianity.
1997 -- Interviewed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Cleaver
Speaks to Skip Gates
1997 (April) -- Appeared at an Earth Day conference in
Portland, Oregon. He was reported to have said that he'd " gone beyond civil rights and human rights to
creation rights."
1998 (May l) -- Died in hospital, sixty-two years old.
Family refused to disclose the cause of
death. At time of his death,
worked as a diversity
consultant for the University of La Verne, near Los Angeles.
Source:
New
Criterion, Jun 98, Vol. 16 Issue 10, p.5, 9p
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Cleaver as born again Christian said his "red fighting" was born from his experiences
in communist countries during his years on the run. "I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism
until the day I die," Cleaver told interviewers during his congressional
campaign.
"Everybody changes, not just me," Cleaver
explained. |
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Ralph Ellison
on the Redeemed
Criminal
Sure, they’re treated as though
serving time has endowed them with a mysterious, god-granted knowledge.
And, especially if they say that they’ve been to the depths of hell and
have been reborn into a new vision. Well, I’ve known a few guys who
spent time in prison and none of them underwent any such mystical
transformation. Nevertheless, for Americans—and especially
Christians—the confession of sin and the assertion of rebirth and
redemption has tremendous appeal. This is especially true of our own
people, who understandably are hungry for heroes and redeemers.
I used to collect the handbills
distributed by fly-by-night faith-healers in Harlem, and most of them
stated that after being up to their eyeballs in crime, they’d had the
scales struck from their eyes while in prison, and this had prepared
them to lead their people. During the Sixties, this myth of the redeemed
criminal had a tremendous influence on our young people, when criminals
guilty of every crime from con games, to rape, to murder exploited it by
declaring themselves political activists and Black leaders. As a result,
many sincere, dedicated leaders of an older generation were swept aside.
I’m speaking now of courageous individuals who made sacrifices in order
to master the disciplines of leadership and who created a continuity
between themselves and earlier leaders of our struggle. The kids treated
such people as if they were Uncle Toms, and I found it outrageous.
Because not only did it distort the concrete historical differences
between one period of struggle and another, it made heroes out of thugs
and self-servers out of dedicated leaders.
Worse, it gave many kids the notion
that here was no point in developing their minds; that all they had to
do was to strike a militant stance, assert their unity with the group
and stress their “Blackness.” If you didn’t accept their slogans, you
were dismissed as a “Neegro” Uncle Tom. Years ago, DuBois stressed a
leadership based upon an elite of the intellect. During the Sixties, it
appeared that for many Afro-Americans all that was required for such a
role was a history of criminality (the sleazier the better), a capacity
for irresponsible rhetoric, and the passionate assertion of the mystique
of “Blackness.” At least, that’s how it appeared to me.
Source: The Essential Ellison (Interview)—Ishmael
Reed, Quincy Troupe, Steve Cannon. Ishmael Reed’s
and Al Young’s Y’Bird • Copyright © 1977, 1978
Y’Bird Magazine
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Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory
Douglas
—The Black Panther
Party for Self Defense, formed in the aftermath
of the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965,
remains one of the most controversial movements
of the 20th-century. Founded by the charismatic
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the party
sounded a defiant cry for an end to the
institutionalized subjugation of African
Americans. The Black Panther newspaper was
founded to articulate the party's message and
artist Emory Douglas became the paper's art
director and later the party's Minister of
Culture. Douglas's artistic talents and
experience proved a powerful combination: his
striking collages of photographs and his own
drawings combined to create some of the era's
most iconic images, like that of Newton with his
signature beret and large gun set against a
background of a blood-red star, which could be
found blanketing neighborhoods during the 12
years the paper existed. This landmark book
brings together a remarkable lineup of party
insiders who detail the crafting of the party's
visual identity.
—Publisher Rizzoli
Douglas was the Norman Rockwell of the ghetto,
concentrating on the poor and oppressed.
Departing from the WPA/social realist style of
portraying poor people, which can be perceived
as voyeuristic and patronizing, Douglas’s
energetic drawings showed respect and action. He
maintained poor people’s dignity while
graphically illustrating harsh situations.—Wikipedia
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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updated 25 February 2008
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