The former minister of information for the Black Panther
party and political exile died in a hospital in the Los Angeles
suburb of Pomona, not far from the University of La Verne where
he worked as a diversity consultant, preaching nonviolence and
the brotherhood of man.
A spokeswoman for the Pomona Medical Center, where he died,
declined to give the cause of death at the family's request.
Cleaver was 62 years old. His life included spells in prison and
years as a crack addict.
He wrote "Soul on Ice,'' an autobiographical manual of
black rage against a white-dominated society that inspired the
black power movement. It became a bestseller in 1968, the same
year Cleaver was wounded in a shootout with police that forced
him to flee the country, aided by the radical Weather
Underground.
Cleaver spent seven years in Algeria, Cuba, the Soviet
Union, North Korea and France during which time he denounced the
Panthers to support capitalism, saying "I found the systems of
dictatorships and communism to be absolutely unacceptable.''
He was a man who went through many transformations from
convict to writer to revolutionary to exile to crack addict to
born-again Christian. Along the way, he wrote a cookbook, stole
cars to pay for drugs and designed men's pants with codpieces.
Cleaver sprang to prominence as spokesman for the Panthers,
a group famous for its armed confrontations with police. He
joined shortly after the party was founded by Huey Newton and
Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966. The Panthers,
carrying guns and wearing trademark black jackets and berets,
gained followers throughout the United States during the
turbulent 1960s when dozens of cities erupted in race riots.
When Cleaver was asked to speak at the University of
California at Berkeley, then state governor Ronald Reagan, who
later became president, was outraged. "If Eldridge Cleaver is
allowed to teach our children they may come home one night and
slit our throats,'' he said.
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was born Aug. 31, 1935, in Wabbaseka,
Arkansas. His father was a dining car waiter and his mother a
teacher. His family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and later to the
poor Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Cleaver spent his teen-age years in jail. After convictions
for bicycle theft and selling marijuana, he was convicted of
assault with intent to murder in 1957 and remanded to
California's tough San Quentin and Folsom prisons.
Cleaver began to write in jail and when he was freed on
parole in November 1966, he got a job as a reporter with the
left-wing magazine Ramparts in San Francisco. On April 6, 1968,
Cleaver was wounded in a shootout with police in Oakland. Black
Panther Bobby Hutton was killed. Cleaver faced charges of
attempted murder and assault.
Allowed to go free for several months, Cleaver campaigned
for the presidency on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. Late
in 1968, a court ordered him back to jail and he fled.
While in exile, Cleaver quarreled with Newton and quit the
party. In 1975, Cleaver returned to the United States, saying he
had become a born-again Christian. Under a settlement, he
pleaded guilty to assault and was ordered to perform 2,000 hours
of community service.
Of his religious conversion, he once said, "I saw a path of
light in the sky, and I said, 'This is God, and those are my
marching orders.'''
In the mid-1980s Cleaver became addicted to crack,
developing a habit so strong that he had to recycle bottles to
pay for drugs. In 1994, he almost died from a blow to the head
from a fellow addict. With the help of his family, he quit drugs
and returned to evangelical Christianity.
Cleaver married Kathleen Neal in December 1967, and had two
children with her. The couple divorced 20 years later.
University of La Verne Vice president Alfred Clark said
Cleaver "was a very different man from the one we remember from
the 1960s, a man who talked of friendship and brotherhood
instead of conflict.''