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Born Again Black Panther: Race, Christian Conservatism, and the Remaking of Eldridge Cleaver
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2021
Abstract
When Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther Party Minister of Information, returned to the United States in November 1975, he claimed to have surrendered his life to Christ and conservatism. Utilizing the Eldridge Cleaver Papers housed at the Bancroft Library, this article recounts the transformation of Eldridge Cleaver from radical Black Panther to born-again Christian and anticommunist crusader. Cleaver's story of transformation demonstrates the pervasive power of the twentieth-century crusade against communism and the manner in which American conservatism created distinct categories of race that were written on the mind, body, religious belief, and practice of Eldridge Cleaver. This article highlights how conservatives enacted a program of racial respectability, remaking Eldridge in the image of conservative, capitalist, Christian whiteness. Cleaver was stripped of his “blackness,” a conservative effort to distance him from the “volatile black figures” of the mid-twentieth century. If Cleaver held on to any vestige of his old life—his leather jacket, “regional euphemisms,” liberationist ideology, and even his Afro hairstyle—his new life would be useless to conservatives. This article illustrates how Cleaver participated in a global crusade that sought to maintain and extend the unifying commitments of twentieth-century religious conservatism. Those commitments included (1) the commercial, economic, and political interests that produced, funded, and policed conservatism; (2) traditional white, middle-class family values; and (3) political, racial, gendered, and religious understandings of the citizen subject. Eldridge Cleaver and his anticommunist crusade are windows into the distinct categories of religion, politics, and race—Christianity, conservatism, and white respectability—constructed and enacted by American conservatives in the twentieth century.
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- Copyright © 2021 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
1 “1 Killed, 4 Shot in Oakland: 2 Policemen Hit in Ambush,” San Francisco Examiner, April 7, 1968, 1; “One Killed, 4 Shot in Gun Battle Here,” Oakland Tribune, April 7, 1968. Cleaver, Eldridge, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968)Google Scholar, was first serialized in Ramparts magazine and then published as a Ramparts book by McGraw-Hill.
2 Eldridge Cleaver, Ramparts, cited in Oliver, John A., Eldridge Cleaver: Reborn (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1977), 139Google Scholar.
3 Cleaver, Ramparts, cited in Oliver, Eldridge Cleaver, 140–43.
4 Cleaver was on parole after serving nine years in prison on a rape charge, chronicled in his Soul on Ice.
5 Oliver, Eldridge Cleaver: Reborn, 183–85. While coordinating the operations of the Black Panther Party's international branch in Algeria, Cleaver spent a significant amount of time in cooperation with various liberation groups seeking asylum and support from the Algerian government.
6 Eldridge recalled one encounter in Algeria where he received a mysterious phone call. Picking up the phone, Cleaver heard silence on the other end of the line. Breaking the silence, the voice on the other end said, “Hi, Eldridge just didn't want you to think that we had forgotten you.” Cleaver, Eldridge, Soul on Fire (Waco, TX: Word, 1978), 99Google Scholar.
7 While Cleaver was coordinating international liberation, the FBI was militarizing to disrupt, discredit, and neutralize black liberation movements. The FBI, in cooperation with local law enforcement across the country, no longer identified communism as the greatest enemy of America but zeroed in on African Americans. Black Panther Bobby Seale exposed this effort in 1967, reading aloud a statement written by Cleaver that “racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of the black people. . . . The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” See Ed Salzman, “Armed Foray in Assembly Stirs Wrath,” Oakland Tribune, May 3, 1967, 5. Not only did Cleaver routinely speak on the state as a mechanism of destruction of the black body, but he also recognized that the United States intelligence community targeted political enemies, more specifically, the “Negro Rebellion,” which posed an ideological threat to their vision of a thoroughly Christian American empire. “The attempts and slander of police powers to paint us as urban gangsters never made sense,” Cleaver wrote in regard to global efforts on the part of the American intelligence community to discredit the Black Panthers at home and abroad. In December 1970, J. Edgar Hoover told the congressional Byrd Committee that the FBI needed at least $14.1 million in additional funds to hire one thousand extra agents and 702 clerical workers to be assigned to the organized crime prevention division and to gather intelligence on radical activities. Cleaver felt that the gun of American empire was pointed directly at him. Drawing inspiration from Mao's Little Red Book, Cleaver argued that “to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to pick up the gun.” The American surveillance machine employed their full arsenal of resources to destroy efforts at black liberation. “J. Edgar Hoover certainly believed that he had every reason to put us underground, forever,” Eldridge told white middle-class audiences in 1978. For seven years, Cleaver planned to burn the white American vision to the ground. See Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 96.
8 Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 212.
9 To quote Kim Phillips-Fein's “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” recent work has “explored a variety of different reasons for the growing power of the Right, ranging from anticommunism to civil rights opposition to the reaction against labor unions to discomfort with changing sexual norms.” Phillips-Fein, Kim, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (December 2011): 723–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The historiography tends to focus on “movement history” and the points of coalescence that produce American conservatism or evangelicalism (these points of coalescence may be understood as events or themes, such as business, electoral politics, the family, anticommunism, free market capitalism, racism, etc.). While these points of coalescence often include valuable contributions to the discussion of race, understanding how race functions as a category is not a central piece in these arguments. See Grem, Darren E., The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Steven P., The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Phillips-Fein, Kim, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009)Google Scholar; Stephens, Hilde Løvdal, Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family's Crusade for the Christian Home (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019)Google Scholar; Tisby, Jemar, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church's Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019)Google Scholar; and Williams, Daniel K., God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. This article investigates the manner in which race is weaponized within white American religious conservatism. This emphasis builds on the long tradition of black conservatism and black religious conservatism yet places a central emphasis on how race as a construct is used within white American religious conservatism. See Mathews, Mary Beth Swetnam, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017)Google Scholar; and Rigueur, Leah Wright, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Instead of utilizing Cleaver's story to demonstrate the presence of people of color in evangelicalism, this article illustrates how Eldridge Cleaver's racial and religious identity was shaped by the networks of American religious conservatism. As a result, Cleaver provides a model for understanding the racial politics of conversion and identity formation in American religious conservatism.
10 Charles W. Colson, “Letter to Eldridge Cleaver,” April 6, 1978, carton 7, folder 41, Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley, Special Collections, Eldridge Cleaver Papers, 1964–1988 (hereafter, Cleaver Papers).
11 Eldridge Cleaver, “Untitled, On Return from Exile to U.S.,” n.d., 18, carton 2, folder 85, Cleaver Papers.
12 Cleaver, “Untitled, On Return from Exile to U.S.,” 18.
13 Cleaver, “Untitled, On Return from Exile to U.S.,” 18; Eldridge Cleaver, “Interfaith Ministries Milwaukee,” September 1977, carton 9, folder 58, Cleaver Papers; Eldridge Cleaver, “Iona College (New Rochelle, NY),” May 11, 1978, carton 9, folder 59, Cleaver Papers.
14 Kathleen Cleaver, “Press Conference Agenda” (Eldridge Cleaver Defense Fund, July 16, 1976), carton 6, folder 21, Cleaver Papers.
15 Williams, quoted in Kathleen Cleaver, “Press Conference Agenda” (Eldridge Cleaver Defense Fund, July 16, 1976), carton 6, folder 21, Cleaver Papers; Jim Jones, “Statement of Rev. Jim Jones Re: Plight of Eldridge Cleaver,” July 22, 1976, carton 6, folder 21, Cleaver Papers. Cleaver's attorney requested “that Cleaver be released from jail and be permanently discharged from parole on a 1958 conviction for which he has already served two years and seven months in excess of the time mandated by law.” Cleaver, “Press Conference Agenda.”
16 Cleaver, Eldridge and Cleaver, Kathleen, Target Zero: A Life in Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 275–76Google Scholar.
17 Cleaver, Eldridge, “The Golden Shower: Testimony of Eldridge Cleaver” (Eldridge Cleaver, 1977)Google Scholar, carton 2, folder 83, Cleaver Papers; Kathleen Cleaver, “Plea for Support in the Release of Eldridge Cleaver” (International Committee to Release Eldridge Cleaver, Undated), carton 6, folder 10, Cleaver Papers; Alex Poinsett, “Where Are the Revolutionaries?” Ebony, February 1976, 84; “Eldridge Cleaver Designs Pants ‘For Men Only,’” Jet, September 21, 1978, 22.
18 A horse room is a gambling establishment that provided horse racing information and betting opportunities.
19 David Van Biema, “Who Are Those Guys?” Time, August 1, 1999, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,28859-1,00.html.
20 Eldridge Cleaver, “The Prodigal Returns Home,” Faith at Work, June 1978, 7, carton 2, folder 21, Cleaver Papers; Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 225; Cleaver, “The Prodigal Returns Home,” 7. In Soul on Ice (1978), Cleaver wrote that DeMoss opened correspondence via letter writing (225). In Cleaver's 1978 article in the publication “Faith at Work,” he claims that DeMoss visited him at the Alameda County Jail unannounced (5).
21 Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 236.
22 Charles E. Colson, “Letter to Arthur S. DeMoss,” March 14, 1978, carton 7, folder 41, Cleaver Papers; DeMoss quoted in Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 236.
23 Chris Loeffer and Mike Atkinson, “Colson, Cleaver Present Their Solutions,” Church News 3, no. 4 (April 1977), carton 7, folder 41, Cleaver Papers.
24 Cleaver and Cleaver, Target Zero, 277. According to Cleaver, DeMoss requested that Cleaver keep him informed of his activities for DeMoss to best assist him in his “transition” and newfound “God-honoring” life.
25 Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 232.
26 Charles W. Colson, “Letter to Eldridge Cleaver,” June 27, 1977, carton 7, folder 41, Cleaver Papers; Charles W. Colson, “Letter to Eldridge Cleaver,” May 12, 1977, 1, carton 7, folder 41, Cleaver Papers.
27 “Philadelphia Christian Men's Club Presents Jerome Hines Eldridge Cleaver,” Philadelphia Christian Men's Club, November 14, 1977, carton 10, folder 21, Cleaver Papers; Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 231.
28 “Philadelphia Christian Men's Club Presents Jerome Hines Eldridge Cleaver.”
29 Hughes welcomed Charles Colson to a congressional prayer group just before Colson's imprisonment in 1974.
30 Pat Boone, “Letter to Eldridge Cleaver,” September 30, 1976, carton 5, folder 67, Cleaver Papers.
31 Eldridge Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver at UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, 1968, UCLA Communication Studies Archives, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfRxv_Nz4MY&t=109s.
32 Boone, “Letter to Eldridge Cleaver.”
33 Donn Downing “Ex-Panther Eldridge Cleaver: ‘I Just Wish I Could Be Born Again Every Day,’” People, October 25, 1976, accessed September 20, 2016, http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20067024,00.html. The summary of his former Black Panther views in the paragraph can be found in Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 14.
34 Cleaver, “The Golden Shower: Testimony of Eldridge Cleaver,” 12. See also Eldridge Cleaver, “National Prayer Breakfast, Washington D.C.,” February 2, 1978, carton 10, folder 9, Cleaver Papers.
35 Cleaver, “The Golden Shower: Testimony of Eldridge Cleaver,” 1–2.
36 Cleaver, “The Golden Shower: Testimony of Eldridge Cleaver,” 2; Eldridge Cleaver, “Letter to Mr. Billy Zeoli,” May 4, 1978, carton 8, folder 6, Cleaver Papers; Dan Wells, “‘I Just Wish I Could Be Born Again Everyday’: Eldridge Cleaver and the Evangelical Mentality of Displacement,” Florida State University Graduate Symposium, February 2018.
37 Cleaver, “The Golden Shower: Testimony of Eldridge Cleaver,” 2.
38 Oliver, Eldridge Cleaver: Reborn, 284.
39 Colson, “Letter to Eldridge Cleaver,” April 6, 1978.
40 Colson, “Letter to Eldridge Cleaver,” April 6, 1978; Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 155–210.
41 Mark Stillman, “Eldridge Cleaver's New Pants,” The Harvard Crimson, September 26, 1975, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1975/9/26/eldridge-cleavers-new-pants-peldridge-cleavers/; “Eldridge Cleaver Designs Pants ‘For Men Only’”; Bettijane Levine, “Cleaver's Born-Again Menswear,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1978, 66.
42 Colson, “Letter to Eldridge Cleaver,” April 6, 1978.
43 Loeffer and Atkinson, “Colson, Cleaver Present Their Solutions.”
44 Emphasis mine.
45 Cleaver, “The Golden Shower: Testimony of Eldridge Cleaver,” 1.
46 It is likely that Judith would not have agreed with Cleaver's notes about purchasing “Rum & Coke,” either. Cleaver, “Personal Notebook,” 53.
47 Examining the physical imprint of the handwriting of these entries, it appears that Cleaver was writing with a greater sense of physical writing pressure than other journal entries. Cleaver, “Personal Notebook,” 53–54.
48 Cleaver was not a pawn stripped of his will to navigate the contours of American political and religious life. According to his journal, Cleaver saw his growing circle of conservative elites as an avenue to reinvent himself while extending his own influence in the church, in Washington, and in the broader American culture.
49 Cleaver, “The Prodigal Returns Home,” 5; Eldridge Cleaver, “Third World Racism at the UN,” Boston Herald, January 15, 1976, 5, carton 2, folder 30, Cleaver Papers.
50 Cleaver, “The Prodigal Returns Home,” 5.
51 “Gospel Films 1978 Catalog” (Gospel Films, 1978), 2, carton 8, folder 6, Cleaver Papers. The 1978 Gospel Films “collectable catalog” featured The Eldridge Cleaver Story alongside more than fifty titles marketed to white conservative Protestants. Among others, the catalog highlighted two films featuring former Nixon hatchet man Chuck Colson. The New Chuck Colson and Someone Cares each recounted Colson's conversion experience and newfound interest in “born-again prison ministry.” In addition to Colson films, teen dramas, instructional videos on Bible Study Basics, How to Grow a Church, and a two-part family series Discipline in the Home and The Christian Home: Problems and Priorities, Gospel Films planned to release ten different apocalyptic films. Written, directed, and produced by apocalyptic dispensationalist Hal Lindsey, Lindsey titles advertised by Gospel Films included The Late Great Planet Earth, The Return, Revelation, The Temple, and The Occult. Rounding out Gospel Films’ 1978 offerings was Peace Child, a drama of “Jungle Treachery versus the Gospel of Christ” and “the startling reaction of stoneage [sic] people to the message of the Gospel,” featuring stereotypical portrayals of the “savages of the Southwest Pacific.”
52 James Finefrock, “Eldridge Cleaver ‘Coming Home One Way or Other,’” San Francisco Examiner, April 16, 1975, 4.
53 Cleaver, “Untitled, On Return from Exile to U.S.,” 2.
54 Finefrock, “Eldridge Cleaver ‘Coming Home One Way or Other,’” 4. Cleaver, “Untitled, On Return from Exile to U.S.,” 2.
55 Cleaver, “Personal Notebook,” 68.
56 Cleaver, “Personal Notebook,” 68, 81.
57 Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 235.
58 Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 236–37.
59 Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 237–38.
60 Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 78–79fn. Cleaver made this observation in light of issues between Elijah Muhammad's son Wallace D. Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan. Cleaver wrote that “Farrakhan upholds the message of Elijah Muhammad, which is a very powerful weapon in his struggle for supremacy inside the divided and confused ranks of the nation/world community of Islam.”
61 Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 78–79. On the targeting of black liberation efforts by the FBI, see Sylvester A. Johnson, “Communist Allegations and the Militarization of the FBI's Engagement with Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC,” American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, November 18, 2018.
62 Fay S. Joyce, “Jackson Tackles Foreign and Nuclear Issues,” New York Times, February 19, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/19/us/jackson-tackles-foreign-and-nuclear-issues.html.
63 Fay S. Joyce, “Jackson Tackles Foreign and Nuclear Issues,” New York Times, February 19, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/19/us/jackson-tackles-foreign-and-nuclear-issues.html; Eldridge Cleaver, “Open Letter to Jesse Jackson,” National Review, February 10, 1984, carton 2, folder 17, Cleaver Papers.
64 Cleaver, “Open Letter to Jesse Jackson.”
65 Cleaver's story is unique in this fashion. Because of his controversial status, incendiary rhetoric, and surprising conversion, Cleaver occupies a different space than other African Americans who interacted with white religious conservatives, such as Andraé Crouch, Larnelle Harris, or Rosey Grier. These figures were, however, often cast as acceptable to white evangelical audiences because of their respectability, proximity to white evangelical personalities, or affirmation of conservative politics.
66 Notebooks 1977–1981, undated, Eldridge Cleaver Papers, BANC MSS 91/213 c, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
67 Cleaver for Congress 1973–1984, Eldridge Cleaver Papers, BANC MSS 91/213 c, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
68 General Legal Files 1957–1987, Eldridge Cleaver Papers, BANC MSS 91/213 c, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
69 Don Hewitt, 60 Minutes, CBS, February 1, 1998.
70 Margaret Ramirez, “Voicing His Faith,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2000, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-feb-19-me-439-story.html.
71 Sanders, Deion and Black, Jim Nelson, Power, Money and Sex: How Success Almost Ruined My Life (Nashville: Word, 1999), 59Google Scholar.
72 See Malaika Jabali, “Kanye West Is Spreading the Gospel of White Evangelicals,” The Guardian Weekly, November 15, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/15/kanye-west-christian-conservative-prosperity-gospel; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “I'm Not Black, I'm Kanye,” The Atlantic, May 7, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im-not-black-im-kanye/559763/; and Morgan Lee, “Kanye West's Long, Complicated Relationship with Christianity,” Christianity Today, October 30, 2019, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/october-web-only/kanye-west-conversion-jesus-is-king.html.
73 Questions of religious and racial authenticity that surrounded Cleaver, MC Hammer, Deion Sanders, and Kanye West serve as boundary markers of social identity. As the religious and racial commitments of these individuals is questioned, boundaries of religious and racial identities are policed and maintained by those inside and outside white religious conservatism.
74 Hewitt, 60 Minutes.