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Eldridge Cleaver Table

 

 

 

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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Bio Sketch

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.  more bio

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Table

Black Panther Platform & Program

Cleaver Bio  

Cleaver Speaks to Skip Gates

Daniel Berrigan on Cleaver

Defection of Eldridge Cleaver

Eldridge Cleaver The Fire Now

Ishmael Reed's Preface

Maxwell Geismar's "Introduction"

My Friend the Devil: Memoir

Retrospective on Soul on Ice    

Tearing the Goat's Flesh    

Related files

1831 Confessions

The Acklyn Model Not Sufficient

Amin Sharif Table

Amiri Baraka Bio

Black Panther Platform & Program 

Conversations with Miriam and Wilson

Conversations Table

Corporate Colony, Civic Virtue

The Du Bois-Malcolm-King

Egalitarian Slaveowners

Empowerment Temples & Ideological Orchestrators

Fifty Influential Figures 

Fire Last Time

It's About Time BPP (website)

Love Should Deflect Contentment

Lucy Barrow 

Nathaniel Turner

Political Movements, White Issues 

Revolutionary Suicide 

Somebody Blew Up America 

Will Francis  

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Why Carl Hampton Must Be Remembered

 By Elbert “Big Man” Howard

21 July 2010

When Carl Hampton was still in his teens, he became aware of the horrific conditions that existed in the Black communities in Texas. We must remember him because he loved his people and devoted himself to changing these conditions and his young life was ended because of these facts.

On a visit to California, Carl came into contact with the Black Panther Party.

 He saw that the BPP had developed into a revolutionary, community-based organization. In 1969, he returned to Houston, Texas, determined to establish a Black Panther Party Chapter there. He was particularly impressed with the BPP concept of organizing coalitions across ethnic and color lines and wanted to do so with various groups in the Houston area, i.e. the Mexican American Youth organization (MAYO), the John Brown Revolutionary League, and the Young Patriots. These groups worked together to oppose police brutality in Houston. . . .

One day, a Black youth was stopped and harassed by two white cops while selling the BPP newspapers and Carl Hampton arrived and intervened on behalf of this youngster. Carl was armed with a pistol, which was legal at the time, and the cops became enraged at the sight of this young Black man with a weapon; they attempted to arrest Carl.

 Much like the scenes that were occurring in Oakland and other cities, guns were drawn by both the cops and People’s Party II members. It became a standoff: a large crowd of Third Ward people gathered on Dowling Street. The press later reported that as many as 2000 residents moved between the police and the People’s Party II’s headquarters. Most of these people who had witnessed the confrontation were outraged at the Houston police response. . . .

In true Texas fashion, on July 26th, 1970, Carl Hampton was ambushed, dry-gulched by hidden cowards who shot and killed this true revolutionary Black man. Police snipers had positioned themselves on the roof of St John’s Baptist Church – they laid in wait for Carl to come in response to a message that there were white men on the roof of a Black church in the Black community. Carl and his comrades went to investigate this and as they prepared to cross Dowling Street, Carl gave the order not to fire their weapons unless they were fired upon. As they then crossed the street, a shot rang out and Carl fell to the ground. He died at 2:30 AM on the next morning. Other members were arrested and prosecuted and harassed but other young men took over and the People’s Party II continued on.

Source: Jesse Muhammad Blog

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Eldridge Cleaver: My Friend the Devil

A Memoir of My Association With Eldridge Cleaver

By Marvin X

How to Order

BLACK BIRD PRESS, 11132 NELSON BAR ROAD / CHEROKEE CA 95965 / 510-472-9589,  mrvnx@yahoo.com

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Lynchsong

              By Lorraine Hansberry

I can hear Rosalee
See the eyes of Willie McGee
My mother told me about
Lynchings
My mother told me about
The dark nights
And dirt roads
And torch lights
And lynch robes

The
faces of men
Laughing white
Faces of men
Dead in the night
sorrow night
and a
sorrow night

1951

Source: AmericanLynching

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Writer Lorraine Hansberry's sober eulogy of the death of Willie McGee weighed heavy on the hearts and minds of the American Left. On May 8, 1951, a crowd of five hundred lingered outside the courthouse of Laurel, Mississippi, to witness the execution of yet another black man convicted for allegedly raping a white woman. His 1945 lightning trial resulted in a guilty conviction delivered in less than two and a half minutes by an all-white, male jury, setting off a heated five-year legal struggle that drew national headlines. Despite an aggressive appeals defense team who attempted every legal maneuver in the book, the US Supreme Court ultimately chose not to intervene. With the legal lynching of the Martinsville Seven in February, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's conviction in March, followed by the execution of McGee in May, 1951 was a bad year for Left-leaning lawyers (Parrish 1979; Rise 1995). Most discouraging, national news sources like the New York Times and Life magazine red-baited the "Save Willie McGee" campaign and—as Life reported—its "imported" lawyers (Popham 1951a; Life 1951). Few felt McGee's passing with as heavy a heart as his chief counsel, thirty-one-year-old Bella Abzug.

Before Abzug became a representative in Congress and a leader in the peace and women's movements, she confronted the Southern political and legal system at the height of the early Cold War. Retained in 1948 by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC)—a New York-headquartered Popular Front legal defense organization—the novice labor lawyer honed her civil rights . . .

Source: https://Litigation-Essentials.LexisNexis

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The Eyes of Willie McGee

 A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South

By Alex Heard

An iconic criminal case—a black man sentenced to death for raping a white woman in Mississippi in 1945—exposes the roiling tensions of the early civil rights era in this provocative study. McGee's prosecution garnered international protests—he was championed by the Communist Party and defended by a young lawyer named Bella Abzug (later a New York City congresswoman and cofounder of the National Women's Political Caucus), while luminaries from William Faulkner to Albert Einstein spoke out for him—but journalist Heard (Apocalypse Pretty Soon) finds the saga rife with enigmas. The case against McGee, hinging on a possibly coerced confession, was weak and the legal proceedings marred by racial bias and intimidation. (During one of his trials, his lawyers fled for their lives without delivering summations.) But Heard contends that McGee's story—that he and the victim, Willette Hawkins, were having an affair—is equally shaky. The author's extensive research delves into the documentation of the case, the public debate surrounding it, and the recollections of McGee and Hawkins's family members. Heard finds no easy answers, but his nuanced, evocative portrait of the passions enveloping McGee's case is plenty revealing.—Publishers Weekly

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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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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery

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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg

The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804  / January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of Haiti 

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updated 1 October 2007 / updated 25 February 2008

 

 

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