Missions Resources - Bibliography
Target Zero: A Life in Writing
Authors: Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver (ed.)
ISBN: 1403962375
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Number of pages: 368
Type of cover: Hard Cover
Summary:
reviewed by Paul Grant
In the end, the man of the sword outlived the man of peace by thirty years. But Eldridge Cleaver, a leader in the Black Panther Party, ultimately came to feel that Martin Luther King was the real visionary. Dr. King was right all along.
A new collection of Eldridge Cleaver’s work provides a wonderful look at a man in progress. After an adolescence marked by run-ins with the law, Cleaver landed in prison, where his worldview began to take shape. Upon his release he demonstrated an incredible gift for words and an acute mind. He joined the Black Panthers and became their chief spokesman.
In the mid-sixties, he wrote his most famous book, Soul on Ice, which delineated his philosophy of empowerment through violence. Soul on Ice remains stingingly potent to this day, in part because of his recommendation of raping white women as a means of insurrection against white men. Never mind that he later retracted these opinions: Cleaver’s post-conversion book Soul on Fire (1978) has sold a fraction of the copies of Soul on Ice.
But Cleaver was never a really a petty crook, and was never a racist. He was, however, a brilliant man boiling with rage, and a misguided Marxist revolutionary. In 1998, the year of his death, he retold the story of his encounter with Martin Luther King:
… in his sermon Dr. King said, “If there’s going to be any blood, let it be our blood!” I jumped straight up—and said, “Man, you are insane. You’re talking about integration, if we’re going to integrate anything, let’s integrate this bloodshed.” But he said, “That’s not what we’re trying to do. We want to get rid of it, this bloodshed” (p. 307).
In 1968, a few days after King was gunned down, the Panthers were involved in a shootout with the Oakland police. Shortly thereafter, Cleaver jumped bail and fled the country, spending several years all over the Communist world, before returning to the US to face his sentence in 1975.
Through a remarkable sequence of events, the trial never happened, and Cleaver was set free, have been bailed out to the tune of a million dollars by a rich white businessman. Meanwhile Cleaver had abandoned Marxism, having seen it first-hand. He had had a miraculous conversion experience, with Jesus Christ speaking to him directly.
The net result was that Eldridge Cleaver was a free man, and an outspoken evangelical. He was never fully comfortable in evangelical circles, however, and often felt like he was being used to make social conservatives look good. Cleaver was never content with the status quo, even as he renounced violence. As an extension of his spiritual beliefs, he continued to develop his black empowerment philosophy. He remained a militant, because he understood the gospel as having radical implications for society:
I give credit to our ministers, because our folk in slavery were first led by ministers. People try to secularize these guys, like Nat Turner, Denmark Vessey, and Gabriel Prosser [three leaders of slave revolts –ed.], but these guys were called by God, and they stood up for freedom.
After gaining his freedom, Eldridge Cleaver had another twenty years to live. Unlike many young heroes, who get stuck in a rut somewhere along the road, singing the same song for the rest of their lives, Cleaver remained a work in progress. He came to define his mission as one of reconciliation over revolution, a mission that allowed him to talk to his former enemies, like the police.
It was like coming full circle the other day when I was talking to the Pasadena Police Department. I’ve talked to a whole lot of police in my life, but on that day we sat down and had breakfast with the chief of police. The police … realized they have a problem with how people look at them, and they wanted me to explain in from my point of view.
I explained to them how people feel that they are protecting an unfair system, and that they are there to plug the gaps in a very shaky social policy … The Pasadena police understand that, and they are trying to make a different move.
Target Zero is a collection of Eldridge Cleaver’s writings, edited by his ex-wife. Spanning his entire public life, it provides a remarkable portrait of a man who wanted to change the world, but who had the courage to retreat when he had made a few mistakes, and who had the courage to become mature in a culture where maturity is disdained. May the same be said of all of us.
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