Cleaver, Eldridge

in full Leroy Eldridge Cleaver

(born 1935, Wabbaseka, near Little Rock, Ark., U.S.—died May 1, 1998, Pomona, Calif.) American black militant whose autobiographical volume Soul on Ice (1968) is a classic statement of black alienation in the United States.

Cleaver was an inmate of correctional institutions in California almost constantly from his junior high school days until 1966 for crimes ranging from possession of marijuana to assault with intent to murder. While in prison, he supplemented his incomplete education with wide reading and became a follower of the Black Muslim separatist Malcolm X. He also began writing the essays that would eventually be collected in Soul on Ice, and whose publication in Ramparts magazine helped him win parole in 1966.

After being paroled, Cleaver met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who had just founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, Calif. Cleaver soon became the party's minister of information. The publication in 1968 of Soul on Ice, a collection of angry memoirs in which Cleaver traced his political evolution while denouncing American racism, made him a leading black radical spokesman. In April 1968, however, he was involved in a shoot-out in Oakland between Black Panthers and police that left one Panther dead and Cleaver and two police officers wounded. Faced with reimprisonment after the shoot-out, Cleaver jumped bail in November 1968 and fled first to Cuba and then to Algeria.

Having broken with the Panthers in 1971 and grown disillusioned with communism, Cleaver returned voluntarily to the United States in 1975. The charges against him were dropped in 1979 when he pled guilty to assault in connection with the 1968 shoot-out and was put on five years' probation. In his later years Cleaver proclaimed himself a born-again Christian and a Republican, engaged in various business ventures, and struggled with an addiction to cocaine.