Eldridge Cleaver Critical Essay | Eldridge Cleaver

Obituary by Bart Barnes

SOURCE: "Eldridge Cleaver, Author and Black Panther Leader, Dies," in Washington Post, May 2, 1998, p. D6.

[In the following obituary, Barnes provides an overview of Cleaver's life and career.]

Eldridge Cleaver, 62, the information minister of the Black Panther Party whose searing rhetoric and exhortations of insurrection made him a revolutionary cult leader of the 1960s, died May 1 in California.

Mr. Cleaver, who had served almost 12 years in prison on a variety of assault, drug and theft charges, was author of the best-selling Soul on Ice, a collection of essays about his own life and the fate of black people in the United States, written while he was in jail in California. Published in 1968, the book became the political manifesto of the Black Panther Party, which Mr. Cleaver helped organize in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.

After a gun battle...
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