SOURCE: "Free at Last," in People Weekly, Vol. 45, No. 15, April 15, 1996, pp. 79-80.

[In the following essay, Hubbard and Grant profile the life and times of Cleaver, focusing on his spiritual conversion.]

On the stage at Miami Springs Senior Community School, the man is dispensing his verities. "Drugs are diabolical—that stuff will hook you," he tells 200 high school students. Holding up a dog-eared Bible, he says, "Do not be prejudiced against this book. There are some good messages in there for you."

Instead of fidgeting, the students sit rapt—but it's not just the rhetoric they're savoring. The graying, goateed speaker before them is Eldridge Cleaver—author, former radical, multiple ex-con and recovering crack addict. As he admits, in understatement, "I got some miles on me."

Twenty-eight years after Cleaver first found fame as the militant minister of information for the '60s radical activist group the Black...