Biography
Kathleen Neal Cleaver joined the Black Panther Party in late 1967 and became its Communications Secretary, the first woman on the party's central decision-making body. After her husband Eldridge Cleaver was charged following a 1968 Oakland police shootout and jumped bail, she joined him abroad in 1969 in Algeria, where the couple ran the BPP's International Section, living in political exile for several years before relocating to France and returning to the United States in the mid-1970s. She was never criminally imprisoned herself; her qualification rests on her years as a political exile. She later earned degrees from Yale and became a law professor at Emory University.
