Abstract
When Leroy Eldridge Cleaver walked through the ominous gates of San Quentin Prison in 1958; this was not his first encounter with the California penal system. A prodigy of the criminal streets, Cleaver was first incarcerated in 1947 at the age of twelve for burglary and vandalism in Los Angeles, California. For the next six years he was less than a model citizen. Between 1949 and 1953, he spent time at the Nelles School for Boys and the Preston School of Industry as a guest of the California Youth Authority. In 1954, when the rest of black America was rejoicing in the landmark Supreme Court victory in Brown v. Board of Education, Cleaver was, yet again, sitting before a judge, facing charges for possession of a large quantity of marijuana. He claimed, he “did not believe that [he] had even the vaguest idea of [Brown’s] importance or historical significance.” But that would soon change. The controversy surrounding dismantling the separate-but-equal doctrine established by the 1896 landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, awakened him to his position in America, and he claimed he “began to form a concept of what it meant to be black in white America.”1 He was sentenced to two-and-a-half years to be served at California’s Soledad Prison.
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Notes
Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 39.
For a historiography on the Emmett Till murder, see generally Mamie Till-Mobley, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (New York: Random House, 2004);
Chris Crowe, Getting Away with Murder (New York: Dial Books, 2003);
W. James Richardson, The Ghost of Emmitt Till: Based on Real Life Events, A Civil Rights Primer (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2004);
Marilyn Nelson, A Wreath for Emmett Till (New York: Houghton Mifflin Books, 2005);
Clenora Hudson-Weems, Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006);
Simon Wright and Herb Boyd, Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010).
For greater depth in studying the rich writings on Cleaver, see Eldridge Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, edited by Robert Scheer (New York: Random House, 1969).
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Fire (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979); Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 74.
Cleaver, Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, 16–17. See also, Eldridge Cleaver, “Prisons: The Muslim’s Decline,” in Prison Life: A Study of the Explosive Conditions in America’s Prisons, edited by Frank Browning and Ramparts Editors (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 100–3.
George Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (New York: Pathfinder, 1967), p. 28.
Cited in Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 99.
Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: New Press, 2007).
Philip S. Foner, The Black Panthers Speak (New York: De Capo Press, 1995), 50.
Huey P. Newton, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” The Black Panther, May 4, 1968, also reprinted in Foner, The Black Panthers Speak, 41–45; David Hilliard and Donald Weise (eds.), The Huey P. Newton Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 142–47.
Huey P. Newton, War Against the Panther: A Study of Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 53–55.
Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 84.
Jo Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson (New York: Knopf, 1976), 197–98.
George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Coward-McCann Books, 1970).
Maximum Security: Letters from California’s Prisoners, edited by Eve Pell and the Prison Law Project (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972), 150; Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement, 163.
John Irwin, Prisons in Turmoil (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1980), 85–86; Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement, 115–19.
Fred Hiestand and Jim Smith, “Of Panthers and Prison: An Interview With Huey P. Newton,” Guild Practioner 29 (Summer 1972): 63.
Joy James, review of “The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis,” edited by Bettina Aptheker, The Black Scholar 32, no.1 (Spring 2002), 52–54.
Min S. Yee, The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison: In Which a Utopian Scheme Turns Bedlam (New York: Harper & Row Books, 1973), 152–56.
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© 2012 Donald F. Tibbs
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Tibbs, D.F. (2012). Souls on Ice. In: From Black Power to Prison Power. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_4
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