Eldridge Cleaver - Black Panther Party

Black Panther Party

Eldridge Cleaver was released from prison in 1966, after which he joined the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, serving as Minister of Information, or spokesperson. What initially attracted Cleaver to the Panthers as opposed to other prominent groups was their commitment to armed struggle.

In 1967, Eldridge Cleaver, along with Marvin X, Ed Bullins and Ethna Wyatt, formed the Black House political/cultural center in San Francisco. Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, Sarah Webster Fabio, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Avotcja, Reginald Lockett, Emory Douglas, Samuel Napier, Bobby Hutton, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale were Black House regulars.

He was a Presidential candidate in 1968 on the ticket of the Peace and Freedom Party. Cleaver was born on August 31, 1935, and therefore would not have been the requisite 35 years of age until more than a year after Inauguration Day 1969. (Although the Constitution requires that the President be 35 years of age, it does not specify if he must have reached that age at the time of nomination, or election, or inauguration.) Courts in both Hawaii and New York held that he could be excluded from the ballot because he could not possibly meet the Constitutional criteria. Cleaver and his running mate Judith Mage received 36,571 votes (0.05%).

Also in 1968, Cleaver led an ambush of Oakland police officers, during which two officers were wounded. In the aftermath of the ambush, Cleaver was wounded and seventeen-year-old Black Panther member Bobby Hutton was killed. Charged with attempted murder, he jumped bail to flee to Cuba and later went to Algeria. Following Timothy Leary's Weather Underground assisted prison escape, Leary stayed with Cleaver in Algeria; however, Cleaver placed Leary under "revolutionary arrest" as a counter-revolutionary for promoting drug use. Cleaver later left Algeria and spent time in France.

Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton eventually fell out with each other over the necessity of armed struggle as a response to COINTELPRO and other actions by the government against the Black Panthers and other radical groups. Cleaver advocated the escalation of armed resistance into urban guerilla warfare, while Newton suggested the best way to respond to was to put down the gun, which he felt alienated the Panthers from the rest of the Black community, and focus on more pragmatic reformist activity.

Cleaver returned to the United States in 1975, became a born again Christian and subsequently renounced his ultra-radical past. With regard to the attempted murder charge stemming from the armed Panther attack on Oakland police in 1968, legal wrangling ended in Cleaver being sentenced to probation for assault. In 1980, he admitted that he had led the Panther group on a deliberate ambush of the police officers, thus provoking the shoot-out.