Eldridge Cleaver’s Last Gift: the Truth

Eldridge Cleaver was a man who made a significant imprint on our times and not for the best. But I mourn his passing nonetheless.

I first met Cleaver when he was Ramparts magazine’s most famous and most bloodthirsty ex-con. “I’m perfectly aware that I’m in prison, that I’m a Negro, that I’ve been a rapist,” he wrote in a notorious epistle. “My answer to all such thoughts lurking in their split-level heads, crouching behind their squinting bombardier eyes, is that the blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts.” This became an iconographic comment for the times, a ready excuse for all the destructive acts radicals like us committed.

No one doubted that Cleaver was the most articulate and colorful tribune of the Black Panther vanguard. But what he most articulated was a limitless, radical rage. It was Cleaver who accused Panther leader Huey Newton of betraying the radical cause when Newton reversed his famous summons to “pick up the gun” and begin the revolution. Cleaver split the Panthers and became spiritual godfather to the Black Liberation Army and other violent revolutionary factions.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Cleaver had a change of heart. Or rather, many changes of heart. He became a Moonie, then a Christian and a Republican. Those of us who knew him saw these various incarnations as a political street hustle, designed to secure new support systems for an extraordinary individual who lacked a moral center. Still, it took a certain courage and integrity. It meant, for example, detaching himself from the radical gravy train, which was just beginning to cash in on the criminal past. His Panther comrades David Hilliard, Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown were busily taking advantage of a national false memory syndrome that recalled the Panthers not as the street thugs they were but as heroes of a civil rights struggle they had openly despised. On campus lecture tours, in films and in a series of well-hyped books celebrated by institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post, they rewrote their own past to fit the legend.

But Cleaver chose the lonely and more honest course of admitting what he had done. His most famous encounter with the law had been a shootout that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In this episode, a teenage Panther named Bobby Hutton was killed. It quickly became a martyrdom for the New Left, a ritual occasion to attack the repressive and racist power structure that had victimized black militants. In an interview more than a decade later, however, Cleaver revealed that he had ordered Panther members to “assassinate” police as a “retaliation” for the King murder and that he himself had participated in an armed ambush that left two San Francisco police officers wounded. This was why the police were chasing Cleaver when the shooting occurred. Cleaver’s revelation took greater courage than has been shown by other New Left leaders who knew these facts but have denied them.

It was during his last televised interview on “60 Minutes” earlier this year that Cleaver won my final respect. Quiet-spoken as he had never been in his public life, sober, bespectacled and fully gray, he discussed what appeared at last to be truly felt convictions, not designed for anyone but himself. He said that when you looked at the United States government as compared with others that human beings had created, it was remarkably good to people like himself and to minorities generally, a fact that he had not appreciated when he was young. “If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s,” he said, “there would have been a holocaust in this country.”

The interviewer didn’t even notice the significance of the remark. But I did. Here is the beginning of any real understanding of what the radical left and its Black Panther vanguard were about in the ‘60s. For coming to this knowledge, Cleaver paid a profound price in being scorned by his old comrades and trivialized by the liberal press. In a world where it is so difficult to get a purchase on the truth, we should be thankful to him for providing us with one.