Kathleen Neal Cleaver (born May 13, 1945) is an American law professor and activist, known for her involvement with the Black Power movement and the

Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxism-Leninism, Marxist-Leninist and Black Power movement, black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. New ...

, a political and revolutionary.

Early life

Juette Kathleen Neal was born in Dallas, Texas, on May 13, 1945. Her parents were both activists and college graduates of the University of Michigan. Her father, Ernest Eugene Neal, was a sociology professor at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and her mother, Pearl Juette Johnson, earned a master's degree in mathematics. Three years after Cleaver was born, her father accepted a job as the director of the Rural Life Council of

Tuskegee Institute Tuskegee University (Tuskegee or TU), formerly known as the Tuskegee Institute, is a private, historically black land-grant university in Tuskegee, Alabama. It was founded on Independence Day in 1881 by the state legislature. The campus was de ...

in Alabama, and they moved to a predominantly segregated, middle class community. Years later, Ernest joined the Foreign Service. The family moved abroad and lived in such countries as India, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Philippines. Spending time in India exposed Kathleen to different beliefs, including socialism, communism, and nationalism. The family returned to the United States after her brother died from leukaemia and the family broke apart. Cleaver attended

George School George School is a private Quaker (Society of Friends) boarding and day high school located on a rural campus in Middletown Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania ( Newtown postal address). It was founded at its present site in 1893, and has gro ...

, a

Quaker Quakers are people who belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of these movements ("theFriends") are generally united by a belief in each human's abili ...

boarding school near Philadelphia, which had just been desegregated. She graduated with honors in 1963. She continued her education at Oberlin College and later transferred to Barnard College. In 1966, she left college for a secretarial job with the New York office of the

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, often pronounced ) was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segreg ...

(SNCC) after her friend from childhood, Sammy Younge, had been murdered by white supremacists. The shift of the movement was characterized by the change from "Freedom Now" to " Black Power."

Black Panther Party

Kathleen was in charge of organizing a student conference at

Fisk University Fisk University is a private historically black liberal arts college in Nashville, Tennessee. It was founded in 1866 and its campus is a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1930, Fisk was the first Africa ...

in Nashville, Tennessee. At the conference, she met

Eldridge Cleaver Leroy Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 – May 1, 1998) was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party. In 1968, Cleaver wrote '' Soul on Ice'', a collection of essays that, at the time of i ...

, the minister of information for the

, who was speaking at the conference. He had just gotten out of jail where he had written '' Soul on Ice''. She moved to San Francisco in November 1967 to join the Black Panther Party, and after Christmas, Eldridge and Kathleen married. She joined about three to four weeks after

Huey Newton Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American revolutionary, notable as founder of the Black Panther Party. Newton crafted the Party's ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale in 1966. Under Newton's leadership ...

was charged for killing an Oakland policeman in a pre-drawn shootout. It was in San Francisco that Kathleen became the Communications Secretary for the party and worked on organizing demonstrations, creating pamphlets, holding press conferences, designing posters, and speaking at rallies and on TV. Cleaver applied everything that she learned from the SNCC to the Black Panther Party. She created the position herself, motivated by Julian Bond in SNCC. Despite the fact that over two-thirds of Black Panthers members were women, Cleaver was among a small group of women who were prominent in the

, which included Elaine Brown and

Ericka Huggins Ericka Huggins ( Jenkins; born January 5, 1948) is an American activist, writer, and educator. She is a former leading member of the political organization, Black Panther Party (BPP). She was married to fellow BPP member John Huggins in 1968. In ...

. As communications secretary, she was the first female member of the Party's decision-making body. The position combined the role of spokesperson and press secretary. Cleaver organized the national campaign to free

. The first major attack against the Black Panther Party was in the 1960s by Los Angeles's first

SWAT In the United States, a SWAT team (special weapons and tactics, originally special weapons assault team) is a police tactical unit that uses specialized or military equipment and tactics. Although they were first created in the 1960s to ...

team. By 1971, almost 30 of the members of the Black Panther Party had been killed. Cleaver had a difficult time healing from the passing of so many of her colleagues and was emotionally scarred. In 1968 (the same year her husband ran for president on the Peace and Freedom ticket), she ran for California's 18th state assembly district, also as a candidate of the

Peace and Freedom party The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) is a left-wing political party with affiliates and former members in more than a dozen American states, including California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana and Utah, but none now have ballot status besides C ...

. Cleaver received 2,778 votes for 4.7% of the total vote, finishing third in a four-candidate race. As a result of their involvement with the Black Panther Party, the Cleavers were often the target of police investigations. The Cleavers' apartment was raided in 1968 before a Panther rally by the San Francisco Tactical Squad on the suspicion of hiding guns and ammunition. Later that year, Eldridge Cleaver was said to have staged an ambush of Oakland police officers during which two police officers were injured. Cleaver was wounded and fellow Black Panther member

Bobby Hutton Robert James Hutton (April 21, 1950 – April 6, 1968), also known as "Lil' Bobby", was the treasurer and first recruit to join the Black Panther Party. The PBS documentary ''A Huey Newton Story'' reported that "Bobby Hutton was shot more than twelve times after he had already surrendered and stripped down to his underwear to prove he was not armed." During Cleaver's time with the Black Panther Party, she helped feed people, provided medical care to families, and took families to visit loved ones in prison. She also “helped put together healing retreats for women who had been in the Black Panther Party, women who had been living underground, who had been tortured, who had been exiled.”

Living in exile

In 1969, Kathleen reunited with Eldridge in Algeria, which was a single-party socialist regime with revolutionary Third World credentials, but also increasingly authoritarian. Cleaver gave birth to their first son, Maceo, soon after arriving in Algeria. A year later in 1970, she gave birth to their daughter Joju Younghi Cleaver, while the family was in North Korea. Eldridge had increasingly found himself at odds with

, one of the party's co-founders and leaders, over the direction the group should take; Newton, recently out of jail, was channeling resources into re-establishing the community outreach "survival programmes", whereas Cleaver favoured a more direct, and at times violent, approach. In 1971, this discord led to the separation of the International Branch of the Black Panther Party, as the Cleavers formed a new organisation called the Revolutionary People's Communication Network. Cleaver returned to promoting and speaking about the organization. To accomplish this, she and the children moved back to New York. The Algerian government became disgruntled with Eldridge and the new organization, and he was forced to leave the country secretly and meet with Kathleen in Paris in 1973. Kathleen left for the United States later that year to arrange Eldridge's return and raise a defence fund. In 1974, the French government granted legal residency to the Cleavers, and the family was reunited. However, after only a year, the Cleavers moved back to the United States, where Eldridge was arrested and tried for the shoot-out in 1968 and was found guilty of assault. He was sentenced to five years' probation and 2,000 hours of community service. Cleaver went to work on the Eldridge Cleaver Defense Fund, and he was freed on bail in 1976. Eldridge's legal situation was not resolved until 1980. Throughout this time, Eldridge shifted his political views to the right.

Later life

Kathleen Cleaver left Eldridge in 1981 and went back to university, receiving a full scholarship from Yale University. She graduated in 1984,

Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal ...

and

summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sou ...

with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. In 1987, she divorced Eldridge Cleaver. She had decided she wanted to become a lawyer as she watched the Watergate Hearing in the early 1970s. Therefore, she continued her education by getting her Juris Doctore from Yale Law School in 1989. After graduating, she worked for the law firm of

Cravath, Swaine & Moore Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP (known as Cravath) is an American white-shoe law firm with its headquarters in New York City, and an additional office in London. The firm is known for its complex and high profile litigation and mergers & acquisit ...

, and followed this wrok with numerous jobs, including law clerk in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia under Judge A. Higginbotham, the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta, visiting faculty member at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, the Graduate School of Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College. In 2005, Cleaver was selected an inaugural

Fletcher Foundation The Fletcher Foundation was a nonprofit foundation that supported civil rights, education, and environmental education. The foundation supported efforts to develop a more just society with more equal opportunities for more of the population prima ...

Fellow. She then worked as a Senior Research Associate at the Yale Law School, and a Senior Lecturer in the African American Studies department at Yale University. She is currently serving as senior lecturer at Emory University School of Law. In addition to her career, she works on numerous campaigns, including freedom for death-row inmate

Mumia Abu-Jamal Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook; April 24, 1954) is an American political activist and journalist who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. While on death ...

and habeas corpus for Geronimo Pratt. Cleaver has worked for many years on and published a memoir titled ''Memories of Love and War''. Cleaver has had her writing appear in multiple newspapers and magazines including ''Ramparts'', ''The Black Panther'', ''The Village Voice'', ''The Boston Globe'', and ''Transition'', and she has contributed scholarly essays to the books ''Critical Race Feminism'', ''Critical White Studies'', ''The Promise of Multiculturalism'', and ''The Black Panther Party Reconsidered''. She has also helped edit essays and a writing done by Eldridge Cleaver, ''Target Zero: A Life in the Writing''. She and other former members of the Black Panther Party continue to meet and discuss issues.

References

External links