Cleaver’s Power to Provoke Lingers

The panther no longer roars.

Thirty years after shadowing the Oakland Police Department with shotguns and becoming an icon for black Americans disenchanted with peaceful protest, Leroy Eldridge Cleaver is a bit grayer and considerably more subdued. Having long ago abandoned his eye-for-an-eye mantra, the former Black Panther leader now champions, at age 61, a bootstrap-centered philosophy closer to that of black conservatives.

But even the neo-Cleaver still possesses the power to rouse and enrage, as he did recently at Cal State Northridge. Only this time it was African Americans he infuriated, not whites, and his armor was a conventional pair of slacks and a blazer rather than a militant’s beret and leather jacket.

Invited to discuss the history of activism in the United States, Cleaver faced a mostly hostile twentysomething crowd that at times openly challenged his new slant toward multiculturalism instead of black nationalism.

“What made you dilute your approach to black empowerment?” Nannette Atuahene, a 23-year-old senior, demanded of Cleaver during a question-and-answer session.

“I now know more than I did back then,” responded Cleaver, who spent time in Algeria, China and Cuba as a fugitive from American police. “I studied communism up close. And I’ve concluded that our form of government is better than any of the alternatives out there.”

Tamara Benefield, a 20-year-old philosophy major and the treasurer of the campus’ Black Student Union, turned red and shook her finger at Cleaver when he suggested that blacks “exchange their hate for love” and forgive whites for having been slave owners. Benefield became so emotional at one point that security guards escorted her from the room. .

Earlier, Benefield asked Cleaver if black students of the ‘90s should arm themselves, as he and his fellow Panthers once did, to ensure their civil rights. Panther members with weapons were known to have trailed Oakland police to make sure they didn’t harm people.

“We don’t need to form any armed parties to deal with our problems,” Cleaver told her. “Because the problems black people have now are problems all Americans share.”

Benefield wasn’t the only member of the audience who seemed unsure whether to revere Cleaver, who became a fundamentalist Christian in 1975, as a former revolutionary or shrug him off as a religious do-gooder.

“Twenty-nine years ago I stood with ‘Soul on Ice’ as my bible,” Ron Daniels, a professor of Pan African studies, said afterward as Cleaver autographed copies of his most famous book. “But so many leaders from then have become inconsistent.”

Leslie Carroll, who was a 17-year-old in Kansas City, Mo., when the Panthers were the rage and who came close to joining them, said he didn’t buy all of Cleaver’s current ideas but agreed that the struggle of all people was more important than organizing causes based solely on race.

“What Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and all those guys were talking about was apropos for that time in history,” said Carroll, a therapist at the Mid-Valley Youth Center. “But the times have changed.”

Cleaver certainly has.

Nowadays the man who once had Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon on his political hit list works in Fontana as an assistant facilitator at the Spiritual Awareness Learning Center. He is putting the finishing touches on “The Eldridge Cleaver Reader,” a collection of old and new writings. He recently denounced Ebonics as a “pathetic attempt to institutionalize dysfunction.”

Those intellectual turnabouts are but the latest twists and turns in Cleaver’s own roller coaster ride of a life. He spent his teenage years in a boys home in Los Angeles and served nine years in San Quentin and Soledad prisons for assault and rape before becoming the minister of information for the Black Panther Party. Like Malcolm X, he used his prison years to study philosophy, religion and history. The result was his 1968 classic, “Soul on Ice,” a searing collection of revolutionary reflections that were smuggled out of prison by his publishers.

The book became a battle cry for black teenagers but shocked many white Americans with its unrelenting call for black independence by any means necessary. Years after the book was published, Cleaver became an international fugitive after a shootout with Oakland police that claimed the life of 17-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton.

Now Cleaver neither advocates the use of violence nor espouses black nationalism. But he still calls for fundamental changes in society. Cleaver said he has come to the conclusion that poverty, racism and other social ills can only be solved by “reshaping the whole system.”

“Instead of looking at how bad things are all the time,” he said, “we need to take pride in how much we have overcome and deal with things the way they are.”