Kathleen Cleaver | |
|---|---|
 Cleaver in 1998 | |
| Born | Kathleen Neal May 13, 1945 Dallas, Texas, U.S. |
| Occupation | Academic |
| Political party | Black Panther Party |
| Movement | Black Power Movement |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
Kathleen Neal Cleaver (born May 13, 1945) is an American law professor and activist, known for her involvement with the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party, a political and revolutionary.
Juette Kathleen Neal was born in Dallas, Texas, on May 13, 1945. Her parents were both activists and college graduates of the University of Michigan. Her father, Ernest Eugene Neal, was a sociology professor at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and her mother, Pearl Juette Johnson, earned a master's degree in mathematics. Three years after Cleaver was born, her father accepted a job as the director of the Rural Life Council of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and they moved to a predominantly segregated, middle class community. Years later, Ernest joined the Foreign Service. The family moved abroad and lived in such countries as India, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Philippines. [1] Spending time in India exposed Kathleen to different beliefs, including socialism, communism, and nationalism. The family returned to the United States after her brother died from leukaemia and the family broke apart. Cleaver attended George School, a Quaker boarding school near Philadelphia, which had just been desegregated. [1] She graduated with honors in 1963. She continued her education at Oberlin College and later transferred to Barnard College. In 1966, she left college for a secretarial job with the New York office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after her friend from childhood, Sammy Younge, had been murdered by white supremacists. The shift of the movement was characterized by the change from "Freedom Now" to "Black Power." [2] [3]
Kathleen was in charge of organizing a student conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At the conference, she met Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of information for the Black Panther Party, who was speaking at the conference. He had just gotten out of jail where he had written Soul on Ice . She moved to San Francisco in November 1967 to join the Black Panther Party, and after Christmas, Eldridge and Kathleen married. [4] She joined about three to four weeks after Huey Newton was charged for killing an Oakland policeman in a pre-dawn shootout. [5] It was in San Francisco that Kathleen became the Communications Secretary for the party and worked on organizing demonstrations, creating pamphlets, holding press conferences, designing posters, and speaking at rallies and on TV. [6] Cleaver applied everything that she learned from the SNCC to the Black Panther Party. She created the position herself, motivated by Julian Bond in SNCC. Despite the fact that over two-thirds of Black Panthers members were women, Cleaver was among a small group of women who were prominent in the Black Panther Party, which included Elaine Brown and Ericka Huggins. [7] As communications secretary, she was the first female member of the Party's decision-making body. The position combined the role of spokesperson and press secretary. Cleaver organized the national campaign to free Huey Newton.
The first major attack against the Black Panther Party was in the 1960s by Los Angeles's first SWAT team. By 1971, almost 30 of the members of the Black Panther Party had been killed. Cleaver had a difficult time healing from the passing of so many of her colleagues and was emotionally scarred. In 1968 (the same year her husband ran for president on the Peace and Freedom ticket), she ran for California's 18th state assembly district, also as a candidate of the Peace and Freedom party. Cleaver received 2,778 votes [8] for 4.7% of the total vote, finishing third in a four-candidate race. [9]
As a result of their involvement with the Black Panther Party, the Cleavers were often the target of police investigations. The Cleavers' apartment was raided in 1968 before a Panther rally by the San Francisco Tactical Squad on the suspicion of hiding guns and ammunition. Later that year, Eldridge Cleaver was said to have staged an ambush of Oakland police officers during which two police officers were injured. Cleaver was wounded and fellow Black Panther member Bobby Hutton was killed in a shootout following the initial exchange of gunfire. [10] Charged with attempted murder, he jumped bail to flee to Cuba and later went to Algeria.
When Eldridge Cleaver returned to the United States, he stated the shootout was a deliberate ambush against police. The author who broke the news of Cleaver's claim doubted its veracity because it was in the context of an uncharacteristic speech in which Cleaver stated "we need police as heroes," and said that he denounced civilian review boards of police shootings because "it is a rubber stamp for murder." The author speculated that it could have been a payoff for the Alameda County justice system, whose judge just days earlier had granted Eldridge Cleaver probation instead of prison time. Cleaver was sentenced to community service after getting charged with three counts of assault against three Oakland police officers. [10] The PBS documentary A Huey Newton Story reported that "Bobby Hutton was shot more than twelve times after he had already surrendered and stripped down to his underwear to prove he was not armed." [11]
During Cleaver's time with the Black Panther Party, she helped feed people, provided medical care to families, and took families to visit loved ones in prison. She also “helped put together healing retreats for women who had been in the Black Panther Party, women who had been living underground, who had been tortured, who had been exiled.” [12]
In 1969, Kathleen reunited with Eldridge in Algeria. [13] Cleaver gave birth to their first son, Maceo, soon after arriving in Algeria. A year later in 1970, she gave birth to their daughter Joju Younghi Cleaver, while the family was in North Korea. Eldridge had increasingly found himself at odds with Huey Newton, one of the party's co-founders and leaders, over the direction the group should take; Newton, recently out of jail, was channeling resources into re-establishing the community outreach "survival programmes", whereas Cleaver favoured a more direct, and at times violent, approach. In 1971, this discord led to the separation of the International Branch of the Black Panther Party, as the Cleavers formed a new organisation called the Revolutionary People's Communication Network. Cleaver returned to promoting and speaking about the organization. To accomplish this, she and the children moved back to New York. The Algerian government became disgruntled with Eldridge and the new organization, and he was forced to leave the country secretly and meet with Kathleen in Paris in 1973. Kathleen left for the United States later that year to arrange Eldridge's return and raise a defence fund. In 1974, the French government granted legal residency to the Cleavers, and the family was reunited. However, after only a year, the Cleavers moved back to the United States, where Eldridge was arrested and tried for the shoot-out in 1968 and was found guilty of assault. He was sentenced to five years' probation and 2,000 hours of community service. Cleaver went to work on the Eldridge Cleaver Defense Fund, and he was freed on bail in 1976. Eldridge's legal situation was not resolved until 1980. Throughout this time, Eldridge shifted his political views to the right.
Kathleen Cleaver left Eldridge in 1981 and went back to university, receiving a full scholarship from Yale University. She graduated in 1984, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. [14] In 1987, she divorced Eldridge Cleaver. She had decided she wanted to become a lawyer as she watched the Watergate Hearings in the early 1970s. [5] Therefore, she continued her education by getting her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1989. After graduating, she worked for the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and followed this work with numerous jobs, including law clerk in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia under Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta, visiting faculty member at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, the Graduate School of Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College.
In 2005, Cleaver was selected an inaugural Fletcher Foundation Fellow. She then worked as a Senior Research Associate at the Yale Law School, and a Senior Lecturer in the African American Studies department at Yale University. She is currently serving as senior lecturer at Emory University School of Law. [14] In addition to her career, she works on numerous campaigns, including freedom for death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal and habeas corpus for Geronimo Pratt. Cleaver has worked for many years on and published a memoir titled Memories of Love and War. [15] Cleaver has had her writing appear in multiple newspapers and magazines including Ramparts, The Black Panther, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, and Transition, and she has contributed scholarly essays to the books Critical Race Feminism, Critical White Studies, The Promise of Multiculturalism, and The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. She has also helped edit essays and a writing done by Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in the Writing. [16] She and other former members of the Black Panther Party continue to meet and discuss issues.
Robert George Seale is an American political activist and author. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with fellow activist Huey P. Newton. Founded as the "Black Panther Party for Self-Defense", the Party's main practice was monitoring police activities and challenging police brutality in Black communities, first in Oakland, California, and later in cities throughout the United States.
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party.
Huey Percy Newton was an African American revolutionary and political activist who founded the Black Panther Party. He ran the party as its first leader and crafted its ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale in 1966.
Robert James Hutton, also known as "Lil' Bobby", was the treasurer and first recruit to join the Black Panther Party. Alongside Eldridge Cleaver and other Panthers, he was involved in a confrontation with Oakland police that wounded two officers. Hutton was killed by the police under disputed circumstances. Cleaver stated Hutton was shot while surrendering with his hands up, while police stated he ignored commands and tried to flee.
Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairwoman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008.
The black power movement or black liberation movement was a branch or counterculture within the civil rights movement of the United States, reacting against its more moderate, mainstream, or incremental tendencies and motivated by a desire for safety and self-sufficiency that was not available inside redlined African American neighborhoods. Black power activists founded black-owned bookstores, food cooperatives, farms, media, printing presses, schools, clinics and ambulance services.
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story is a memoir written by Elaine Brown. The book follows her life from childhood up through her activism with the Black Panther Party. In the early chapters of the book, Brown recalls growing up on York Street in a rough neighborhood of North Philadelphia. Due to her mother's persistence, she is able to attend an experimental elementary school in a nice neighborhood and becomes friends with some Jewish girls. From that point on, Brown describes being a part of two worlds. She'd act "white" while hanging out with her school friends, and "black" when with the girls in her neighborhood.
David Hilliard is a former member of the Black Panther Party, having served as Chief of Staff. He became a visiting instructor at the University of New Mexico in 2006. He also is the founder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton foundation.
Various American fugitives in Cuba have found political asylum in Cuba after participating in militant activities in the Black power movement or the Independence movement in Puerto Rico. Other fugitives in Cuba include defected CIA agents and others. The Cuban government formed formal ties with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, and many fugitive Black Panthers would find political asylum in Cuba, but after their activism was seen being repressed in Cuba many became disillusioned. House Concurrent Resolution 254, passed in 1998, put the number at 90. One estimate, c. 2000, put the number at approximately 100.
Emory Douglas is an American graphic artist. He was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the Party disbanded in the 1980s. As a revolutionary artist and the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Douglas created iconography to represent black-American oppression.
The Black Panther Party was a Marxist–Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria. Upon its inception, the party's core practice was its open carry patrols ("copwatching") designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department. From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.
Revolutionary Suicide is an autobiography written by Huey P. Newton with assistance from J. Herman Blake originally published in 1973. Newton was a major figure in the American black liberation movement and in the wider 1960s counterculture. He was a co-founder and leader of what was then known as the Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defence with Bobby Seale. The Chief ideologue and strategist of the BPP, Newton taught himself how to read during his last year of high school, which led to his enrollment in Merrit College in Oakland in 1966; the same year he formed the BPP. The Party urged members to challenge the status quo with armed patrols of the impoverished streets of Oakland, and to form coalitions with other oppressed groups. The party spread across America and internationally as well, forming coalitions with the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cubans. This autobiography is an important work that combines political manifesto and political philosophy along with the life story of a young African American revolutionary. The book was not universally well received but has had a lasting influence on the black civil rights movement.
Michael Aloysius Tabor was an American political activist and member of the Black Panther Party who was charged and tried as part of an alleged conspiracy to bomb public buildings in New York City and kill members of the New York Police Department.
Donald Lee Cox, known as Field Marshal DC, was an early member of the leadership of the African American revolutionary leftist organization the Black Panther Party, joining the group in 1967. Cox was titled the Field Marshal of the group during the years he actively participated in its leadership, due to his familiarity with and writing about guns.
Ericka Huggins is an American activist, writer, and educator. She is a former leading member of the political organization, Black Panther Party (BPP). She was married to fellow BPP member John Huggins in 1968.
Black Panthers is a 1968 short documentary film directed by Agnès Varda.
Seize The Time: The Story of The Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton is a 1970 book by political activist Bobby Seale. It was recorded in San Francisco County Jail between November 1969 and March 1970, by Arthur Goldberg, a reporter for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. An advocacy book on the cause and principles of the Black Panther Party, Seize The Time is considered a staple in Black Power literature.
The Revolutionary People's Communication Network was an organization created in 1971 by Kathleen Cleaver and Eldridge Cleaver and their allies after the Cleavers' expulsion from the Black Panther Party while the Cleavers were living in Algeria. It included subgroups such as the Black Liberation Front.
Constance Evadine Matthews, better known as Connie Matthews, was an organizer, a part of the Black Panther Party between 1968 and 1971. A resident of Denmark, she helped co-ordinate the Black Panthers with left-wing political groups based in Europe.
About two weeks before I joined SNCC, "Black Power" replaced "Freedom Now" as the battle cry.
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