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History > USA > Civil rights > Black Power > 1960s-1980s
Black Panther Party for Self Defense
Eldridge Cleaver 1935-1998
Eldridge Cleaver, the party’s minister of information and author of the best-selling prison memoir “Soul on Ice.”
Photograph: Jeffrey Blankfort Long Shot Factory [ Undated ]
Review: ‘The Black Panthers’ Captures a Militant Movement’s Soul and Swagger The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution NYT SEPT. 1, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/
The Black Panther minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, addresses an estimated 7,500 students at UCLA in 1968.
Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA's black and brown resistance G Wed 15 Apr 2020 11.00 BST Last modified on Wed 15 Apr 2020 11.02 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/
Black Power movement Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 Video Movie Trailer (2011) HD
mobilizes a treasure trove of 16mm material shot by Swedish filmmakers, after languishing in a basement of a TV station for 30 years, into an irresistible mosaic of images, music, and narration chronicling the evolution one of our nation's most indelible turning points, the Black Power movement.
Featuring candid interviews with the movement's most explosive revolutionary minds, including Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Stokely Carmichael, and Kathleen Cleaver, the film explores the community, people and radical ideas of the movement.
Music by Questlove and Om'Mas Keith, and commentary from and modern voices including Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Talib Kweli, and Melvin Van Peebles give the historical footage a fresh sound and make
THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-75 an exhilarating, unprecedented account of an American revolution. MOVIECLIPS Trailers YouTube > MOVIECLIPS Trailers 11 August 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFWHNpfjByQ
Related http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/08/black-power-mixtape-danny-glover
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/08/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/nov/08/
Eldridge Cleaver 1935-1998
Black Panther minister of information
Eldridge Cleaver ('s) searing prison memoir ''Soul on Ice'' and leadership in the Black Panther Party made him a symbol of black rebellion in the turbulent 1960's
(...)
the Panthers wore as a uniform, Mr. Cleaver was a tall, bearded figure who mesmerized his radical audiences with his fierce energy, intellect and often bitter humor.
''You're either part of the problem or part of the solution,'' he challenged, in one of the slogans that became a byword of the era.
He became even more of a symbol when he jumped bail after a shootout between Black Panthers in Oakland, Calif., and the police and fled into exile in Cuba and Algeria, adding the causes of Communism and third world liberation to his repertoire.
But after he returned to the United States in 1975, Mr. Cleaver metamorphosed into variously a born-again Christian, a follower of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a Mormon, a crack cocaine addict, a designer of men's trousers featuring a codpiece and even, finally, a Republican.
'Soul on Ice,' Memoir as Manifesto
When ''Soul on Ice,'' was published in 1968, it had a tremendous impact on an intellectual community radicalized by the civil rights movement, urban riots, the war in Vietnam and campus rebellions.
It was a wild, divisive time in the United States, and Mr. Cleaver's memoir from Folsom state prison, where he was doing time for rape, was hailed as an authentic voice of black rage in a white-ruled world.
The New York Times named it one of its 10 best books of the year.
''Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing,'' Maxwell Geismar wrote in the introduction to the McGraw-Hill book, adding:
''As in Malcolm X's case, here is an 'outside' critic who takes pleasure in dissecting the deepest and most cherished notions of our personal and social behavior; and it takes a certain amount of courage and a 'willed objectivity' to read him.
He rakes our favorite prejudices with the savage claws of his prose until our wounds are bare, our psyche is exposed, and we must either fight back or laugh with him for the service he has done us.
For the 'souls of black folk,' in W. E. B. Du Bois's phrase, are the best mirror in which to see the white American self in mid-20th century.''
First printed in Ramparts, the quintessential radical magazine of the 60's, Mr. Cleaver's prison essays are angry, sometimes bitingly funny, often obsessed with sexuality.
And they trace the development of his political thought through his prison readings of the works of Thomas Paine, Marx, Lenin, James Baldwin and, above all,
Malcolm X. washed my hands in the blood of the martyr Malcolm X,'' Mr. Cleaver wrote after the assassination of the onetime Black Muslim leader who had moved away from separatism, ''whose retreat from the precipice of madness created new room for others to turn about in, and I am caught up in that tiny space, attempting a maneuver of my own.''
But it was a difficult space to reach.
In one of the book's most gripping and brutal passages, he wrote: ''I became a rapist.
To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto -- in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of the day -- and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey.
I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodicall -- though looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild and completely abandoned frame of mind.
''Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women -- and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.''
There was little doubt he went on, citing a LeRoi Jones poem of the time which expressed similar rage, ''that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats.'' But he was caught, and after he returned to prison, Mr. Cleaver wrote:
''I took a long look at myself and, for the first time in my life, admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray -- astray not so much from the white man's law as from being human, civilized -- for I could not approve the act of rape.
Even though I had some insight into my own motivations, I did not feel justified. I lost my self respect.
My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered.
''That is why I started to write. To save myself.''
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5249192 - March 7, 2006
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/17/
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/03/
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1035082 - May 1, 1998
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/01/16/
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/11/19/
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/18/
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/03/07/
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/11/15/
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