At at time when racism was endemic and police brutality against black people in the United States was increasing rapidly in the 60s, there was a group of young individuals who sought to fight the injustice and malicious treatment of their own people. Young Kathleen Cleaver was among these gutsy radicals who fearlessly donned the cloak of activism and vehemently pumped their right fist in the air to evince the black power ideology at any given time.
She was an influential member of the Black Panther Party, a revolutionary black nationalist and socialist organization active in the United States in the late 60s. With a heart that mirrored that of a lion, she was a charismatic Black Panther warlord who inspired other female activists of her time to tread the path of black empowerment activism.
Kathleen Cleaver (nee Neal) was born on the 13th of May 1945 in the Southern city of Dallas, Texas. Her parents were educated as her father was a sociology professor at Wiley College and her mother held a degree in
Mathematics. With her father's work, the family spent many of her early
years abroad in Liberia, the Philippines, and Sierra Leone. Cleaver
completed high school with honors at the Georgia School in Philadelphia in 1963.
Cleaver went to Bernard College but dropped out in 1966 to work as a secretary at the New York office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was in charge of organizing a student conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At the conference, Kathleen met the Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver who recruited her to be a member of the Party. She then moved to San Francisco
in November 1967 to join the Black Panther Party and interestingly got married to Eldridge on December 27, 1967. Cleaver became the
communications secretary and the first female member of the Party’s
decision-making body. She also served as the spokesperson and press
secretary.
The Black Panther Party did not only fight for the rights of the black race in the US, they also promoted gender equality and encouraged black women to take up leadership roles in their homes and communities. At the age of 22, Kathleen Cleaver was already part of a cohort of exemplary black women who enabled the recognition of black women as strong, powerful and intellectual. She was always at the forefront of every Black Panther rally, protest, demonstration or self-defense situations.
In 1968, her husband, Eldridge Cleaver, was involved in a shootout with police officers and the altercation led to the death of a Black Panther leader while two police officers were injured. He later fled to Cuba in order to avoid being prosecuted for attempted murder on the police officers. Kathleen joined Eldridge in exile in Cuba, Algeria and France and the family lived abroad till their return to the States in 1975.
After her return, she graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale University in 1984, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She also bagged a Law degree at Yale Law School in 1989. She has also been a visiting faculty member at the Benjamin N. Cardozo
School of Law in New York City, the Graduate School of Yale College and
Sarah Lawrence College, where she was the Joanne Woodward Professor of
Public Policy during 1999. She has taught legal ethics, litigation,
torts, a legal history seminar entitled "The American Law of Slavery and
Anti-Slavery," and a course on Women in the Black Freedom Movement.
Currently, she is a Senior Research Associate at the Yale Law School and
executive producer of the International Black Panther Film Festival.
Cleaver has won fellowships at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe
College, the W.E.B. DuBois institute of Harvard University, and the
Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University. The Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture and the Center for Scholars and
Writers of the New York Public Library also gave her fellowships to
complete the book of memoirs that she is working on, "Memoirs of Love
and War."
In an interview she granted to Yale Daily News earlier this year, she was asked about the possibility of a re-emergence of a revolutionary movement like the Black Panther in this generation. Her response:
"The Black Panthers were a product of their time. It is hard to start a movement when everyone involved is either
imprisoned or has been assassinated. The Panthers have been demonized. I
am not sure if there are enough young people who would be aware enough
to start such an initiative. Young people today are not being educated
in public schools. The prison industrial complex is trapping them. These
things happen in waves, so we’ll just have to wait. But I’d like to end
on a positive note: I would like to see a day in which the political
climate of intimidation and repression dissolves into one rectifying
injustice and enhancing social well-being."
Black Power!!!
Adedapo Adebajo
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