Kathleen Cleaver has been a participant in the human rights struggle for most of her life. Kathleen Neal was born in Dallas, Texas, on 13th May, 1945. Her father, Ernest Neal, taught sociology at Wiley College before moving to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He later joined the Foreign Service and the family lived in India, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Philippines. Kathleen returned, minus her parents, stateside as a teen to attend high school. She graduated in 1963 from the George School, a Quaker boarding school located near Philadelphia. Cleaver then enrolled in Ohios Oberlin College, eventually transferring to Barnard College. By this time her interest in activism was greater than her interest in coursework. In 1966 she dropped out of college to concentrate on her involvement in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), taking a job in that organizations New York office. The following January, Cleaver was transferred to SNCCs Atlanta office to serve as secretary of the Committees Campus Program. One of her tasks for the program was to organize a black student conference to take place that spring at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. It was at this conference that she met Black Panther Party Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver, who had recently been released from Folsom State Prison. The Black Panther Party Ministers fiery rhetoric and the Panthers more radical approach to issues of race and class appealed to Cleaver. Apparently, Eldridge Cleaver appealed to her as an individual as well. The pair married on December 27, 1967, over the objections of her parents. It was a meeting of the spirit, she told People Weekly. I was becoming a revolutionary and I was impressed by his statesmanlike quality. Kathleen Cleaver left SNCC and joined her husband in San Francisco to go to work for the Black Panthers. Kathleen Cleaver became the first woman included in the Black Panther Party s Central Committee, its highest decision-making body. As Communications Secretary, her role was to write and make speeches nationwide and serve as media spokesperson. She was one of the chief organizers of the campaign to free jailed Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton in 1968. She also undertook a campaign of her own that year, running for California State Assembly on the Peace and freedom Party ticket. On 6th April, 1968 eight BPP members, including Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Hutton and David Hilliard, were traveling in two cars when they were ambushed by the Oakland police. Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Hutton ran for cover and found themselves in a basement surrounded by police. The building was fired upon for over an hour. When a tear-gas canister was thrown into the basement the two men decided to surrender. Bobby Hutton said he would go first. When Bobby Hutton left the building with his hands in the air he was shot multiple times by the police and was killed instantly. Eldridge Cleaver was arrested and charged with attempted murder. He was given bail and in November, 1968, he went into exile in Mexico with Kathleen. Later the couple moved to Cuba. They also spent time in Algeria. After sharing years of exile with Eldridge Cleaver, she returned to the United States in late 1975. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale University in 1984, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989, Kathleen Cleaver became an associate at the New York law firm of Cravath, Swain and Moore. Afterwards, she served as a clerk for the late Judge A. Leon Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. While an assistant professor of law at Emory University, she served on the Georgias Supreme Court Commission on Racial and Ethnic Bias in the Courts and became a board member of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights. Kathleen Cleaver devoted many years to the defense of Elmer Geronimo Pratt, a former Black Panther Party leader who won his habeas corps petition in 1997 after spending 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Kathleen Cleaver has been a visiting faculty member at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, the Graduate School of Yale College and Sarah Lawrence College, where she was the Joanne Woodward Professor of Public Policy during 1999. She has taught legal ethics, litigation, torts, a legal history seminar entitled The American Law of Slavery and Anti-Slavery, and a course on Women in the Black Freedom Movement. Currently, she is a Senior Research Associate at the Yale Law School and executive producer of the International Black Panther Film Festival. Kathleen Cleaver has won fellowships at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the W.E.B. DuBois institute of Harvard University, and the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University. All Power To All The People! Bobby Seale bobbyseale/ ======= #blackpanthers #blackhistory #blackpantherparty #bobbyseale #kathleencleaver ===
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 19:10:18 +0000
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