SOURCE: "A Fiery Soul Set Free," in Newsweek, Vol. CXXXI, No. 19, May 11, 1998, p. 72.

[In the following obituary, the critic summarizes Cleaver's career.]

He glared balefully from his wanted poster, signed by J. Edgar Hoover in 1968, the year he both ran for president and fled to Cuba. Even in the 1960s, nobody projected menace as effectively as Eldridge Cleaver, the "Minister of Information" of the Black Panther Party, whose idea of a campaign speech was to urge a group of California lawyers to "take your guns and shoot judges." Of all the ends that might have been forecast for him, the unlikeliest overtook him last week: to die at the age of 62 in a hospital bed in Pomona, Calif., a few miles from where he grew up in Watts. At the request of his family, the hospital did not disclose his illness.

He was a thief, a drug dealer...