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Eldridge Cleaver

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver (31 August 1935-1 May 1998) was an American black nationalist leader who served as a leader of the Black Panther Party, co-founded the Black Liberation Army, and later became a Mormon and a conservative Republican. Cleaver was a staunch advocate of armed struggle against the United States government, idolized the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung, was expelled from the Black Panthers for his extremist views, and later became a new religious movement leader and a drug addict, dying in 1998 at the age of 62.

Biography

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was born in Wabbaseka, Arkansas on 31 August 1935, and he was raised in Phoenix, Arizona and Los Angeles, California. He was a petty criminal as a teenager and was sent to Soledad prison in 1953 for a drug charge and to Folsom and San Quentin prisons for rape and assault in 1958. While in prison, he became a communist, and he was released on parole on 12 December 1966. Cleaver became a writer for the Ramparts magazine, and he became Minister of Information (spokesman) of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, supporting armed struggle. In 1968, he ran for President of the United States as the Peace and Freedom Party candidate, winning 36,571 votes (.05%). On 6 April 1968, he took part in the ambush of Oakland police officers which resulted in Bobby Hutton's death, and he was charged with murder. Cleaver jumped bail and fled to Cuba in late 1968, and he received a luxurious treatment by Fidel Castro's government until Castro discovered that the CIA had infiltrated the Panthers. Cleaver then fled to Algeria, setting up an international office for the Black Panthers there. In 1969, he and the Black Panther Party began to publish North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung's writings, making two visits to North Korea in 1969 and 1970, and coming to believe that North Korea was a "crime-free society" with "guaranteed food, employment, and housing for all, and which had no economic or social inequalities." He later killed his wife's lover Clinton Rober Smith Jr. on his return to Algeria. Cleaver would go on to fall out with Huey P. Newton because Newton believed that Cleaver's internationalist and pro-North Korean outlook distracted him from the Black Power struggle and from the African-American fight for freedom back in the USA. Newton also believed that the Black Power movement should give up armed struggle to stop alienating the Black community, but Cleaver supported the escalation of armed struggle and co-founded the Black Liberation Army, leading to his expulsion from the BPP in 1971. In 1972, Cleaver moved to Paris, France, where he became a born-again Christian and a fashion designer. He became interested in virility and led his own "Eldridge Cleaver Crusades" revivalist organization which propagated "Christlam" (a synthesis of Christianity and Islam) and had an auxiliary called "Guardians of the Sperm". On 11 December 1983, Cleaver was baptized into the LDS Church, and he also became a conservative Republican who ran for the Berkeley City Council in 1984 and for the US Senate in 1986 as a Republican primary candidate. In 1988, 1992, and 1994, he was arrested for burglary, cocaine, and crack usage, and he died in Pomona, California in 1998 at the age of 62.

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