Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of information for the militant African American organization the Black Panthers, ran for president in 1968 as the nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party. Addressing that party’s founding convention in March of that year, Cleaver summed up his perspective on the plight of African Americans with a “basic definition that black people in America are a colonized people in every sense of the term and that white America is an organized Imperialist force holding black people in colonial bondage. From this definition,” he continued, “what we need is a revolution.”1 In a self-published essay Cleaver more specifically declared, “In order to bring this situation about, black men know that they must pick up the gun, they must arm black people to the teeth, they must organize an army to confront the mother country with a most drastic consequence if she attempts to assert police power over the colony.”2 During that same presidential campaign the New York Times reported, “Cleaver hesitated to describe himself as a revolutionary.”3
His hesitation is baffling. And understandable—since never before in the history of colonial independence movements did anyone among the subjugated people seek to be elected president or prime minister of the nation whose rule they sought to overthrow. In the preface to her biography of Cleaver, Kathleen Rout explains that she sought “to understand Cleaver by reading between the lines.” Yet even in her extremely well-researched and revealing study of the man, Rout ultimately had to concede, “The enigma of Cleaver as a personality remains intriguing.”4 The significance of his presidential candidacy, however, does not reside in resolving the man’s riddles but in seeing how those riddles provide us with a particularly clear view of riddles in the nation’s political landscape in 1968.
Part of the reason the Peace and Freedom Party, predominantly composed of left-wing whites, nominated Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver for president was his fame as the author of Soul on Ice, a critically acclaimed and widely read collection of essays, written while in prison, in which Cleaver examined his violent past and the future he foresaw for his race. More significant, however, all of the pro-Cleaver elements were youthful: the Black Panthers had been formed only two years earlier; the Peace and Freedom Party was newly born; Soul on Ice had been published just that year; and Cleaver, barely a year out of prison, was two years too young to be president. Youth ruled—or so thought the World War II baby boom generation, not yet old enough to know better.
Yet for all the youthful exuberance and excess of Cleaver’s campaign, his candidacy clung to the cusp between third party and fringe. To the extent that it was widely ridiculed, which it was, it was fringe. But to the extent his presidential bid was viewed as impossible but not laughable, it was third party—to which should be added 36,571 Americans who voted for him.5
By calling upon African Americans to arm themselves for mass resistance to the white establishment, Cleaver does not come off as a guy with a sense of humor. Particularly in regard to whites. Yet after his nomination he urged the Peace and Freedom Party to select Jerry Rubin as his running mate. This white, Jewish, radical antiwar activist first gained national fame when, having been subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he testified wearing the costume of a Revolutionary War soldier. The committee members were not amused—but the news media was.6 Amused as well, apparently, was Cleaver. And unamused as well was the majority of the Peace and Freedom Party, which rejected his suggestion.7
To ridicule an African American candidate for president without appearing to be (or demonstrating that one is) a racist is tricky business. One way ridicule was heaped on Cleaver’s campaign was through his wanting Rubin for a running mate. Approximately 90 percent fewer newspapers reported Cleaver’s announcement that he intended to run for president than those that reported his choice of Rubin.8
Most often, ridicule and belittlement of his candidacy were tucked into the tone of news reports and related remarks. The sentence “Eldridge Cleaver—black protagonist, white antagonist—moved through a large, loitering crowd in the Tides Bookstore in Sausalito last night, sat down and signed autographs” was deemed an appropriate opening to a front-page article under the far more newsworthy headline “Black Panther Author Tells Views on Weapons, ‘Pigs.’” Also deemed newsworthy in the article was that Cleaver’s wife was “lean” and “comely.”9 Another newspaper, reporting on California’s Peace and Freedom delegation selecting Cleaver as its choice for the upcoming national nominating convention, told readers the meeting “resembled a picnic or love-in.”10 The television commentator and syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick dismissed Cleaver’s candidacy as ridiculous when he wrote briefly of “the ‘Peace and Freedom Party,’ whatever that is.”11
The ridicule that came closest to overt racism was aimed at Cleaver’s giving a series of lectures at the University of California–Berkeley during his presidential campaign. The Republican vice presidential nominee, Spiro Agnew, declared, “Trying to learn from such criminals is like trying to clean up by taking a bath in a sewer.”12 More subtle, and more profoundly ridiculing, were news articles on Cleaver’s scholarly lectures, the ridicule residing in the quotation marks around the word scholarly. One wire service that employed such quotation marks in its report of the talk nevertheless conceded, “Cleaver confined his remarks directly to his topic, ‘The Roots of Racism,’” and the report went on to quote one of students who attended describing it as “a real surprise—it was extremely scholarly.” As to the lecture’s actual content, the report barely concealed its smirk when quoting Cleaver telling the students, “Black is a connotation of evil,” and his going on in this vein when it reported, “Cleaver said that whereas the white dress of a bride symbolizes purity, black is for a funeral, a black beard means a pirate, a black cat means bad luck.”13
This is scholarly?
Actually, yes. Though Cleaver was ahead of his time in this regard, connotations of whiteness and blackness would become a subject of considerable academic research in the years to come.14
As for Cleaver, he could dish out ridicule pretty well himself. In response to California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, strenuously objecting to Cleaver’s being permitted to speak at Berkeley, Cleaver challenged the governor to “a duel to the death” with whatever weapon Reagan wanted. “I will beat him to death with a marshmallow,” he told a rally of some five thousand people.15 Though it was perceived by few at the time, Cleaver did not lack a sense of humor—as also seen in his admiration of the radical prankster Rubin.
Just as there is ambiguity in challenging someone to a duel to the death with weaponry ranging from knives to marshmallows, ambiguity accompanied the threats and actual violence that were a hallmark of Cleaver’s campaign for the presidency. “When I write,” he declared, “I want to drive a spear into the heart of America,” attaching ambiguity to that spear by using it metaphorically.16 Nevertheless other violence surrounding his campaign was not metaphorical. Less than a month after Cleaver announced his intention to run for president, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, triggering the most widespread and destructive of the riots that increasingly had been flaring in American cities. During that turmoil a shootout erupted at a house in Oakland, California, in which there were several Black Panthers, including Cleaver. Ambiguity still surrounds the cause of the gunfire. The police claimed they were fired upon after questioning the occupants of some parked cars. The Panthers maintained the police instigated the attack, pointing to the almost immediate arrival of a squadron of police vehicles with floodlights and machine guns. Ambiguity also left questions regarding an unarmed twenty-two-year-old, shot dead by police as he ran toward them from the house. Cleaver was wounded, charged with attempted murder, and returned to prison for violating parole.17
Being in the clink would put a crimp in anyone’s campaign, but Cleaver wasn’t behind bars for long. Since he had not yet been convicted of this recent charge, a California judge ruled that it had not yet been proven that he had violated parole. The prosecution appealed the ruling, thereby creating a legal cloud that hovered over Cleaver for the duration of his presidential campaign.
“Dumbfounding Ruling by a Court” headlined an editorial in one newspaper that went on to express what many Americans thought: “At lay levels far below the Olympian heights of the bench, the ordinary citizen is impelled to wonder by this judicial action . . . [given] the fact that a paroled convict has been indicted for taking part in a fight with firearms. . . . Is [the judge] saying it is permissible to advance political views with a gun in hand?”18
Some might argue that it was not the judge but the Second Amendment to the Constitution that renders it permissible to advance pretty much any way one wants with a gun in hand. Indeed, as previously mentioned, gun control was already a hot topic in 1967 and 1968, with legislation pending in Congress. One realm in which the right to bear arms was soon to be proscribed was in legislative bodies—in no small part because an armed cadre of Black Panthers had entered California’s Legislative Assembly in May 1967, among whom was the not-yet-famous Eldridge Cleaver. The authorities charged them with all the law allowed at the time: “conspiracy to forcibly enter the chambers of the state legislature.”19 When asked during his presidential campaign for his view on gun control, Cleaver answered, “They are always trying to take guns from the black people.” But ambiguity attached when he added the proviso, “Disarm the pigs first.”20
Cleaver’s use of pigs for police and his frequent profanity conveyed unbridled rage, a fearsome thing. But it resonated with many at the time—and not just angry ghetto dwellers and white radicals. “Eldridge Cleaver is not the only angry black man in the State of California,” the psychiatrist Price Cobbs declared. Dr. Cobbs had authored a study of rage. And was African American.21 Cleaver’s rage, however, was not unbridled. He could ratchet his use of vitriol and profanity up, down, or out. All the news reports of his first lecture at Berkeley noted the absence of profanity—language that today is widely used even on network TV. Not so, however, in 1968, and Cleaver’s ability to control its flow reveals that profanity functioned for him as the verbal spears he described, thrusting them to get attention and arouse fear among whites—but also to subvert prevailing views of propriety, since propriety extended not only to language but to limiting the acceptable range of racial views.
Ambiguity attached itself even to Cleaver’s rage when, days before the election, he endorsed Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman’s Yippie Party nominee for president, Pigasus, in a speech at a Pre–Erection Day rally sponsored by that group. And ambiguity attached to that endorsement, as Cleaver was admittedly high on pot when he spoke.22
Two weeks after the election Cleaver’s legal battles came to a head when the California Supreme Court ordered him back to prison. Instead he fled the country, taking refuge in Cuba, Algeria, and finally Paris, where, in 1972, he became a born-again Christian and began manufacturing a line of men’s wear. He returned to the United States and to prison in 1977, but through the assistance of his new comrades in the evangelical community, he was released on bail in 1978 and was able to complete his sentence with community service.
Looking back, the rage, ambiguities, and violence that surrounded Cleaver’s campaign for president, along with some genuinely scholarly analysis, bursts of humor, and the terrible damage inflicted by verbal spears and actual bullets, provide us with an extraordinary view of the many nuances in race relations in 1968. Most important, however, we can see that the price we pay for free speech is less than the dividends we earn in becoming a more equal nation.