Eldridge Cleaver

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was born on the thirty-first of August 1935 at Wabbaseka, Arkansas, the son of Leroy Cleaver — a railway dining-car waiter and a pianist — and Thelma Hattie Robinson Cleaver, an elementary-school teacher. The family migrated to Phoenix in 1942 and to the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1946. He attended Junipero Serra High School at Gardena before being expelled in his junior year for fighting. He spent the years 1953 to 1966 — with brief intervals — in the California carceral system: at Soledad State Prison from 1954 to 1957, at Folsom Prison from 1957 to 1958, at San Quentin from 1958 to 1959, and from 1958 again at Folsom for serial sexual-assault convictions.

He converted at Folsom to the Nation of Islam in 1958, broke with the Nation in 1964 following the assassination of Malcolm X (placed in this archive), and during the final two years of his incarceration produced through his lawyer Beverly Axelrod the manuscript of Soul on Ice. The volume of nine essays — drawing the contemporary American racial situation, the Vietnam War, the Watts riot, and his own sexual-violence convictions — was published in 1968 to substantial critical acclaim. The book was widely reviewed and within a year of publication had sold over a million copies.

He met Huey Newton (placed in this archive) and Bobby Seale in San Francisco in February 1967 and joined the Black Panther Party on the twenty-first of February 1967 — the second anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. He was appointed Minister of Information of the Party and edited The Black Panther weekly newspaper from 1967 to 1970. He ran in 1968 as the presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party, receiving over thirty-six thousand votes.

He was wounded on the sixth of April 1968 — two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) — in a shoot-out with Oakland police at Twenty-Ninth and Magnolia in West Oakland. Bobby Hutton (placed in this archive) was killed in the same engagement. Cleaver, charged with attempted murder of a police officer, jumped bail and fled to Cuba in late 1968. He spent the years 1968 to 1975 in Cuba, Algeria, North Korea and France.

He returned to the United States in 1975, served eight months on the original 1968 charges, and across the late 1970s underwent the religious and political conversions that would across the following two decades place him within the conservative Christian movement.

He died at Pomona, California, on the first of May 1998, at sixty-two.

He is honored here as the Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party.