Cleaver was wounded and arrested on April 6, , in a Black Panther shootout with police. After a judge ordered him released from prison two months later, Cleaver undertook a series of lectures at the University of California at Berkeley and ran for president as the candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party.
On November 24, , three days before he was due to turn himself in, Cleaver fled and escaped to Cuba. A few months later, Cleaver was granted asylum in Algeria. His wife joined him there, where they remained until moving to Paris in While living in Paris, Cleaver converted to Christianity and became motivated to return to the United States.
After his return, Cleaver spent eight months in jail and performed community service to clear the legal obligations stemming from the shootout. In , Cleaver attempted to create a new religion, Christlam, which was a combination of Christianity and Islam.
In the early s, he joined the Republican Party and endorsed Ronald Reagan in his presidential reelection campaign. He made several runs for political office between and , including an unsuccessful candidacy for the Republican nomination in the U.
Senate race in California. Cleaver had several drug-related arrests in the late s and early s but kicked his drug habit and rededicated himself to Christianity. Yet, when I take these experiences, I have been attacked for doing so. Cleaver died on May 1, , in Pomona, California, of undisclosed causes. At the time of his death, he was employed by the University of La Verne in La Verne, California, as a diversity consultant. He is buried in Altadena, California.
For additional information: Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Fire. Waco, Texas: Word Books, Lavelle, Ashley. Manditch-Prottas, Zachary. Malloy, Sean L. The next year, Soul on Ice , a collection of Cleaver's prison writings, was released and became a bestseller. On April 6, , Cleaver was involved in a shoot-out with police that left a fellow Black Panther dead.
At first jailed, he was soon released on bail, which allowed him to continue his run for president on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. However, Cleaver was then told he would have to return to custody. Rather than go back to prison, Cleaver fled to Cuba. Cleaver also travelled to Algeria, where he set up an international office for the Black Panthers before being kicked out of the group in Cleaver next moved to France. He had a religious experience there before returning to the United States in He then proclaimed himself a born-again Christian, decried the socialist systems he had seen and wrote that "the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.
Cleaver's later years saw him shift between different beliefs. His politics changed as well. After joining the Republican party, he ran for office several times and supported Ronald Reagan — whom he had formerly denounced — as president.
Cleaver also suffered from an addiction to cocaine. This resulted in several arrests, though he did not have to return to prison. A devastating head injury in — which may have occurred in a drug-related attack — prompted him to recommit to evangelical Christianity. Cleaver died in Pomona, California on May 1, , at the age of We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Eldridge told me that it was all the staff could do to explain how senseless it was to the hundreds of people who rushed to our office clamoring for guns to vent their rage in a disorganized manner.
On Saturday, Eldridge and I met at the entrance to Sproul Plaza at Berkeley to go to the rally he was speaking at on campus. Standing on the sidewalk, I looked up at him, his black leather jacket gleaming in the sun. With his black turtleneck sweater, black pants, black boots, and black sunglasses, he seemed cloaked in death. I shuddered. The thought flashed through my mind that I would never see him again.
I pushed it away - anything might happen - but I didn't want to think about it now. A wave of tenderness swept over me, as I thought of how casually Eldridge was risking his life to keep Huey out of the gas chamber. Eldridge gave an electrifying speech. He didn't want to remain at the rally, but instead insisted on rushing back to the Panther office. Kay was a graduate student at Berkeley. She and I had been friends since we were children in Tuskegee, where her cousin Sammy Younge was murdered for his involvement in the civil rights movement.
After he was shot, I had dropped out of college and joined the movement. That evening at her house, Kay and I talked about our lives until her husband, Bill, got home.
After dinner, we all watched the late news in the living room. Scenes of local memorial rallies for Dr. King and riots breaking out around the country dominated. Kay and Bill went to bed after the news was over, and I pulled the telephone over to the coffee table that faced the sofa, wondering why Eldridge was taking so long to come pick me up.
A bulletin flashed across the screen about a shoot-out involving the Oakland police - no location or time was mentioned. I recalled my earlier premonition about Eldridge's death, then blanked out there on the sofa, waiting for the phone to ring. I slept so soundly that none of the calls stirred me until around five the next morning. I answered the ringing telephone. Alex Hoffman, one of Huey's attorneys, was saying in his low, tired voice, "I suppose you've heard by now, Kathleen, but Eldridge is in San Quentin.
Alex went on to say that Eldridge and seven other Panthers had been arrested last night after a shoot-out near David Hilliard's house, and that Bobby Hutton had been killed.
By the time I saw Alex on Sunday, Eldridge had been shuttled off to the prison in Vacaville, some fifty miles north of the Bay Area, isolating him from the rest of the jailed Panthers. Alex and I were waiting in a drab cubicle reserved for attorneys' visits when I spotted Eldridge being pushed down the hallway in a wheelchair. He looked like a captured giant, cuts and scratches on his face, the hair burned off the top of his head, his foot covered by a huge white bandage.
When the guard wheeled him into the room, I could see that Eldridge's eyes were swollen, his face puffy, and his beard matted. The sight left me too dazed to cry. Now I understood the glazed expression I'd seen in photographs of the faces of people whose homes or churches had been bombed, as if they couldn't believe what they were looking at. Anticipating or reading about terrifying violence does not prepare you to accept it.
I felt too scared of what might happen to Eldridge in that notorious prison to dwell on how close he had come to being killed the night before. Since I'd last seen him, he'd been trapped in an Oakland basement where he and Bobby Hutton had run for cover after gunshots flew between two Oakland police and several carloads of Black Panthers.
A fifty-man assault force pounded bullets into the house where they hid for ninety minutes. When a tear-gas canister that had been thrown into the basement caught fire, Eldridge and Bobby agreed to surrender.
Eldridge was not able to walk because a bullet had hit his leg. He told Bobby to take off his clothes so the police could not accuse him of hiding a weapon, but Bobby only removed his shirt.
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