Eldridge Cleaver
Biography
Eldridge Cleaver was the Black Panther Party's Minister of Information and the author of Soul on Ice (1968), one of the foundational texts of Black liberation literature. He had spent most of the previous decade in Folsom and San Quentin on convictions for assault and rape (convictions he later disavowed and which independent historians have substantially questioned); he joined the Panthers shortly after his 1966 parole. On April 6, 1968, two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he and 17-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton were involved in a shootout with Oakland police; Hutton was killed by police while attempting to surrender, and Cleaver was wounded and arrested. Facing reimprisonment as a parole violator, he jumped bail in November 1968 and fled first to Cuba, then to Algeria, then to France. He returned voluntarily to the United States in 1975 and surrendered; the original charges were eventually reduced and he served no further significant time.
