Eldridge Cleaver

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) was an African-American writer and political organizer who served as Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party and whose prison memoir became a central document of Black radical thought in the late 1960s. Born in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, he moved with his family to Phoenix and then Los Angeles, where he was first incarcerated as a teenager.

While serving time at Folsom and San Quentin for assault, he educated himself, joined the Nation of Islam, and began writing the essays that would appear as Soul on Ice in 1968. The book combined autobiography, political analysis, and confessional reckoning, including a renunciation of his earlier rapes, and reached a broad readership across the civil rights and antiwar left.

Released on parole in 1966, Cleaver joined Huey Newton and Bobby Seale's Black Panther Party in Oakland and edited its newspaper. After a 1968 shootout with Oakland police that left Panther treasurer Bobby Hutton dead, he jumped bail and spent years in exile in Cuba, Algeria, and France, where he organized the Panthers' international section.

He returned to the United States in 1975, pleaded to assault charges, and shifted publicly toward conservative Christianity and Republican politics in his later years. His earlier writings remained anchors of Black studies syllabi, read against the trajectory of his subsequent political turn.

The given name Eldridge derives from an English place-name and surname combining the Old English personal name Æthelric, meaning noble ruler, with later place-name elements. The surname Cleaver is an English occupational name from the Middle English clevere, a splitter of wood. He carried both as an American family inheritance.