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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The Fire Now

 By Eldridge Cleaver

A reassessment of national black leadership has been in order since the assassination of Malcolm X.  The assassination of Martin Luther King makes such a reassessment inevitable.  With the death of King, an entire era of leadership with a distinct style and philosophy, spanning some fifty years, draws to a final and decisive close.  A new black leadership with its own distinct style and philosophy, which has always been there, waiting in the wings and consciously kept out of the limelight, will now come into its own, to center stage.  Nothing can stop this leadership from taking over because it is based on charisma, has the allegiance and support of the black masses, is conscious of its self and its position, and is prepared to shoot its way to power if the need arises.

It is futile and suicidal for white America to greet this new leadership with a political ostrich response.  What white America had better do is find out what these leaders want for black people and then set out to discover the quickest possible way to fulfill their demands.  The alternative is war, pure and simple, and not just a race war, which in itself would destroy this country, but a guerrilla war which will amount to a second civil war, with thousands of white new-John-Browns fighting on the side of the blacks, plunging America into the depths of its most desperate nightmare, on the way to realizing the American Dream.

When the NAACP was founded in 1911, it vowed, in its preamble, that until black people were invested with full political, economic and social rights, it would never cease to assail the ears of white America with its protests.  Protest as the new posture of blacks toward white America was on its way in, and was destined to dominate the black struggle for the next fifty years.  On its way out was the era of begging and supplication, rooted in slavery and the plantation, personified in the genuflecting leadership of Booker T. Washington; chief amongst its myriad treasonous acts was giving black acquiescence to the Southern racist policy of segregation, in Booker T.’s notorious sell-out speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1896.  In the same historic breath, the U.S. Supreme Court made segregation the law of the land when it approved the Separate But Equal doctrine in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Dissenting from this confluence of racist ideology, black submission and judicial certification, W.E.B. DuBois led the protest that was institutionalized in the founding of the NAACP; this held sway until 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court, recognizing that the racist ideology no longer had the necessary allegiance of black leadership, reversed itself and declared Separate But Equal, i.e. segregation, unconstitutional.  Black protest leadership, which was born to combat segregation, did not know that when it heard, with universal jubilation throughout its ranks, Chief Justice Earl Warren pronounce the death penalty upon that institution, it was, in fact, listening to its own death knell.  There was to be, however, a period of transition between the new outmoded protest leadership and a new prevailing leadership that had not yet defined itself.

The transitional leadership was supplied by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and Malcolm X, at his death, had laid the foundation of the new leadership that would succeed both him and King.  Martin Luther King was a transitional figure, a curious mélange of protest and revolutionary activism.  He embodied the first ideological strain in its fullest flower; he contained only a smidgin of the latter.  He seemed to be saying to white America: If you don’t listen to what I am saying, then you are going to have to deal with what I am doing.  As far as the willingness of the white power structure to deal with black leadership goes, Martin Luther King, and the type of leadership he personified, held sway from the launching of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956 down to our own day, when the vestigial remains of leadership from King’s transitional era are still frantically trying to cling to power.  In reality their leadership is just as dead as that of the lieutenants of Booker T. Washington at the end of their era.

The difference between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as transitional leaders between the era of protest and our era of revolutionary activism, is that King’s leadership was based on the black bourgeoisie and Malcolm’s leadership was based on the black masses.  In the vernacular of the ghetto, King had House Nigger Power and Malcolm had Field Nigger Power.  What we have now entered, then, is an era in which Field Nigger Power and the grievances and goals of the Field Nigger—and the leadership of Field Niggers—will dominate the black movement for justice in America.

Field Niggers, Molotov Cocktails and Guns

Malcolm X used to tell a little story that points up the difference in perspective and perceived self-interest between the House Nigger and the Field Nigger.  The House Nigger was close to the slavemaster.  He ate better food, wore better clothes, and didn’t have to work as hard as the Field Nigger.  He knew that he was better off than his brothers, the Field Niggers, who were kept cooped up in the slave quarters, had only a subsistence diet this side of garbage, and had to work hard “from can’t see in the morning until can’t see at night.”  When the slavemaster’s house caught fire, the House Nigger, even more upset and concerned than the slavemaster himself, came running up to say: “Master, master our house is on fire!  What shall we do?”  On the other hand, the Field Nigger, viewing the conflagration from the distance of the slavequarters, hoped for a wind to come along and fan the flames into an all-consuming inferno.

The kernel of truth contained in that story has remained constant from the prison plantations of slavery’s South to the prison ghettos of oppression’s North, and the urban black, lacking the patience of his forefathers who prayed for a high wind, has opted in favor of the molotov cocktail.

The Black Muslims were the first organization of any significance in our history to understand and harness the volcanic passions of the molotov cocktail-tosser.  This organization, which was a transitional organization, rooted in the black masses, based on a protest philosophy with a pinch of revolutionary activism thrown in, made the major contribution of redirecting the dialogue between black leadership and the white power structure, changing it into a dialogue between black leadership and the black masses.  This was a necessary by-product of the Muslims’ bid to organize black people, because Elijah Muhammad  and Malcolm X, in order to get their points across, had to talk over the heads of protest leaders to make themselves heard by the black masses.

Standing toe to toe with the protest leaders, Malcolm and Elijah, talking over their heads, exposed these leaders for what they were, and these leaders, helping to prove the Muslims’ point by talking even louder than before, were talking over Malcolm and Elijah’s heads—but not to the black masses.  They were still chatting with Charlie, a note of desperation having slipped into their tone to be sure.  But essentially, what they were saying to Charlie now was that if Charlie didn’t listen to them, fund their picayune programs, then he was going to be faced with Malcolm and Elijah.

(Now, in the wake of King’s death, chatting with Charlie has been driven to the ludicrous, asinine length of Whitney Young pleading to Henry Ford, Rockefeller and George Meany to lead a white folk’s march on Washington to prove to blacks that all white folks aren’t killers of the dream.  The only salutary result of this bankrupt, ridiculous proposal, as far as the black masses are concerned, is that in singling out these three sterling figures, Young brushed them with his Judas kiss of death, identifying for the black masses three of their most culpable oppressors in the spheres of Big Fat Industry, Big Fat Finance and Big Fat Labor.  Maybe all whites aren’t killers of the dream, as Young suggests, but his three pals are exploiters of oppressed people, both home and abroad.)

When black leaders stopped chatting with Charlie and started cutting it up with the brothers on the block, a decisive juncture had been reached, and blacks had seized control of their own destiny.  A full ideological debate ensued.  The consensus of this debate was given to the world on a Mississippi dusty road, when young Stokely Carmichael leaped from obscure anonymity and shouted, with a roar of thunder, we want black power!  How to get it was the question as far as the black people were concerned.

There have been a lot of simple answers to this question, which is by no means a simple one.  Black Power, whatever the form of its implementation, has to solve the question of massive unemployment and underemployment, massive bad housing, massive inferior education.  It must also deal with the massive problems of institutionalized white racism manifested in subtle forms of discrimination that results in blacks being denied equal access to and use of existing public accommodations and services.  From access to medical facilities through the injustices suffered by blacks in the courts, to the pervasive problem of racist, repressive police practices, Black Power has to come up with solutions.

If the experience of other colonized people is relevant, then the answers given by Huey P. Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party, have to be dealt with.  The only real power that black people in America have, argues Huey, is the power to destroy America.  We must organize this destructive potential, he goes on, then we can say to the power structure that if black people don’t get their political desires and needs satisfied, we will inflict a political consequence upon the system.  

This is a  rejection of the Chamber of Commerce’s laissez faire myth of the market place that argues to blacks that if they go out and hustle, get themselves educated, learn skills (pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, etc., etc., ad nauseam), the American Free Enterprise System will do the rest, that if you don’t become President, you are sure at least to make a million bucks.  In the age automation and cybernation, the marketplace has been abolished by the computer.  We must make a frontal attack upon the system as a whole, Huey says.  

We need a redistribution of wealth in America.  The form of ownership of the means of production is no longer functional.  It is time for the present, non-functional system to be abolished and replaced by a functional, humanistic system that can guarantee a good life for everybody.  Everyman is entitled to the best and highest standard of living that the present-day level of technological development is capable of working is entitled to a job.  

If a man is incapable of working because of a physical inability, then society is responsible for taking care of him for as long as the physical inability exists, for life if necessary.  If the businessmen who now control the economic system are incapable of fulfilling the needs of society, then the economic system must be taken out of their hands and rearranged; then the people can appoint administrators to run the economy who can deliver.  This is the eternal right of a free people.

The viability of the Black Panther Party’s approach to solving problems is testified to by the fact that it has engineered two remarkable feats which constitute the foundation for a revolutionary movement that overlooks nothing, is afraid of nothing and is able to resolve the major contradiction of our time.  On the one hand, the Black Panther Party cemented a working coalition with the predominantly white Peace and Freedom Party.  On the other hand, it effected a merger with SNCC.  

This is the key center of the eye of the storm, because whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not, neither white radicals nor black radicals are going to get very far by themselves, one without the other.  In order for a real change to be brought about in America, we have to create machinery that is capable of moving in two different directions at the same time, machinery the two wings of which are capable of communicating with each other.  

The Black Panther Party, through its coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party and its merger with SNCC, has been the vector of communication between the most important vortexes of black and white radicalism in America.  Any black leadership in our era with national ambitions has to embody this functional flexibility without sacrificing its integrity or its rock-bottom allegiance to the black masses.

Stokely Carmichael is Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party.  Rap Brown is its Minister of Justice.  James Foreman is its Minister of Foreign Affairs, and George Ware is its Field Marshal.  At the same time, Huey Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, is running for Congress on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.  

The Black Panther Party’s nomination for President of the United States, running on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, is Robert F. Williams, the black leader in exile in the People’s Republic of China.  Williams picked up the gun against white racism as far back as 1959.  If the Black Panther Party succeeds in getting the Peace and Freedom Party to see the wisdom of picking Williams as its Presidential candidate,* then a bid for the new national black leadership will begin to come into sharper focus.  

And America will be astounded by this fact: not only will this leadership bear a charismatic relationship to the black masses, but it also will exercise charismatic leadership upon the white masses as well, and it will reach down into the bowels of this nation, amongst the poor, dispossessed and alienated, and it will set aflame a revolutionary wave of change that give America a birth of freedom that it has known hitherto only in the dreams of its boldest dreamers.  And it will kill, once and for all, all the killers of the dream.

Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul On Ice (McGraw-Hill), wrote the above article from a jail cell in California.*Since this was written, the author has been selected for this office.

Source: Commonweal, 14 June 1968 / 

The FBI exploitation of ideological differences between Eldridge Cleaver and BPP Chairman Huey P. Newton eventually led to the dissolution of the organization.

Cleaver’s acclaimed 1968 book Soul on Ice—written while serving a prison term for rape—was a searing statement about his life as a black American. After his release from prison, he was indicted on charges relating to a shoot- out with Oakland, California police. He fled the U.S. and lived in exile for seven years in Algeria and France, where he was joined by his wife Kathleen Neal Cleaver. Prof. Gates first met the Cleavers in Paris during their exile there. He was then working as a stringer for TIME magazine. The Cleavers were divorced in 1984. Eldridge Cleaver also wrote Post-Prison Writings and Speeches . 

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updated 25 February 2008