James Cleaver; Former Editor of L.A. Sentinel

James H. Cleaver, former editor of the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black-owned weekly newspaper, and longtime deputy to the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, died Wednesday of cancer. He was 72.

Cleaver died at Loma Linda Community Hospital of liver cancer that had been diagnosed in November, said Brad Pye Jr., a friend and former colleague at the Sentinel and in Hahn’s office.

Cleaver, who moved to Rialto four years ago, was in the forefront of campaigns to combat drug sales at so-called street corner supermarkets, and he was an early voice in efforts to build better relations between African Americans and the Korean community.

“We are going to have to create dialogue between the two communities,” he told an inter-ethnic relations workshop at UCLA in 1984. “The problem we have is a failure to communicate.”

Cleaver had written a series for the Sentinel urging a boycott of merchants “who take advantage of us.” At UCLA, he tried to give the largely Korean American audience a sense of context for black anger.

A black man who walks into an Asian-owned store is already angry “because he doesn’t have a job or has not worked and has got a welfare check” that doesn’t provide enough support “for a family of four,” Cleaver said.

As editor of the Sentinel, he worked with police officials and local ministers in an effort to shut down street sales of PCP, the cheap drug of choice before the emergence of crack cocaine.

“We want to run the dealers out,” he told a street rally in 1981. “We want the people in the black community to say no to PCP. We don’t want it in our neighborhood.”

A hulking, gentle bear of a man who stood well over 6 feet tall and weighed more than 200 pounds, Cleaver was a friend and confidant to a broad cross-section of Angelenos, from movers and shakers to storefront preachers.

Cleaver was born in Elizabethtown, Ky., and attended public school there before serving stints in the Army and Navy, said his son James H. Cleaver III. He later moved to Detroit, where he was an early publicist for Motown Records and was later a writer and photographer for the weekly Michigan Chronicle.

He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, working in radio, television and at the Sentinel. He was a correspondent for the KCET-TV series “Los Angeles Week in Review” and hosted a five-part series, “Jim Cleaver’s Los Angeles” at KHJ-TV Channel 9, Pye said.

After leaving the Sentinel in the early 1980s to join Hahn’s staff, he continued to write editorials for the newspaper and his popular weekly column, “Kleaver’s Klippins.”

He retired earlier this year from the county Department of Children and Family Services, where he had helped launch the One Church, One Child adoption program, Pye said.

Cleaver, who earned his college degree at the age of 40, also taught journalism and African American studies at Cal State L.A.

He is survived by his wife, Carol, nine children and four grandchildren. Funeral services are pending at Grove Colonial Mortuary in San Bernardino.

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