Ex-Panther Is Mourned

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther Party leader and seminal figure of 1960s militancy, was remembered Saturday for his many incarnations, from convict to radical to born-again Christian and Republican.

“The man was the epitome of a revolutionary,” said former Panther colleague Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, himself now a leftist icon. He was released from prison last year after serving 27 years behind bars for a murder he says he did not commit.

From a much different perspective, Ted Prasatek, an admitted former “coward redneck” who insisted on speaking from the pulpit, said Cleaver’s discovery of Jesus had saved his life.

“I’d be sitting in the pits of hell right now if it wasn’t for this man,” the 67-year-old white retiree said, glancing toward Cleaver’s open casket.

Cleaver, 62, a native of Depression-era Arkansas who moved to Los Angeles as a boy with his family as part of a historic migration of blacks from the Jim Crow South, died May 1 at Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center. A pamphlet handed out at the service said he died of a heart attack.

In recent years, the once-charismatic Panther minister of information had lived in relative obscurity in the Pomona-Fontana area, crafting ceramic pots, speaking out on environmental issues and receiving ridicule from former admirers for his increasingly right-wing views.

The spirited two-hour funeral service at Wesley United Methodist Church included the playing of African drums and singing by the Crenshaw High School Choir.

Three black nationalist flags, featuring the trademark black, green and red colors once embraced by Black Power advocates, stood by Cleaver’s open casket for a while. There was at least one chant of “Power to the People!”

Among those in attendance were Cleaver’s son, Maceo, 29, his daughter, Joju, 28, and his ex-wife, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, a diplomat’s daughter and lawyer who worked with Cleaver at the Panther party and who accompanied him in exile to Algeria. More than 200 people attended the service.

The church is not far from the site of a notorious 1969 shootout between Los Angeles police and the Panthers that involved thousands of rounds of ammunition and injured three officers and six Panthers. On Saturday, the LAPD provided a motorcycle escort to the cemetery.

Several speakers defended Cleaver’s professed conversion to the teachings of Jesus and his embrace of conservative causes and politicians, including Ronald Reagan, whom he had regularly referred to as Mickey Mouse during his Panther days. Critics say Cleaver was opportunistically courting the political right. But friends and relatives saw the change as a question of personal and spiritual evolution.

“Many revolutionaries have found God along the way,” said the Rev. M. Andrew Robinson-Gaither, a family friend. “He never gave up the struggle. He just saw it in a different context when he came to know God.”

Bobby Seale, the former Black Panther chairman who split with Cleaver for many years, sent a message lauding the man once referred to by comrades as “Poppa” or “the Rage”--the latter for the burning sense of anger so evident in his classic prison memoir, “Soul on Ice.” In recent years, Seale said, he and Cleaver had revived a “very close friendship,” often bumping into each other on the college lecture circuit and communicating via electronic mail--”two damn-near senior citizens” struggling with the challenges of new technology.

“A lot of people who didn’t know Eldridge may say negative things about him,” Seale said. “But I knew him.”

Perhaps the most emotional moments were provided by Pratt, a powerful, baldish figure in aviator glasses, multi-pocketed khakis and high-top walking boots who seemed to have stepped right out of the ‘60s.

In his rambling, often angry address, Pratt bemoaned the tide of drugs and crime that have overtaken so many communities during his more than quarter-century in custody. Among other themes, Pratt sought to demystify the Panthers, urged people to eat well and exercise regularly, warned the young of the dangers of drugs, including alcohol, and stressed multiracial thinking in an ongoing process to “liberate” humanity.

“Eldridge was not just about African liberation,” Pratt said. “We were for all people’s liberation.”

The former Panther chief in Los Angeles mused on the spectacle of a proper funeral for Cleaver: He and other Panthers had often assumed that their bodies would be thrown into the streets, perhaps as a message for other revolutionaries. Cleaver, he confided, had once urged him to “smoke a joint at my funeral,” but Pratt said he had decided not to--though he added that he did not consider marijuana to be “dope.”

After the service, Cleaver’s remains were taken away in a powder blue-and-black hearse for interment at the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena.

Family members said Cleaver asked that his tombstone bear this epitaph: “A Loving Heart, An Open Hand.”