Eldridge Cleaver
Eldridge Cleaver
Leroy Eldridge Cleaverwas an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party. His 1968 book, Soul On Ice, is a collection of essays that, at the time of its publication, was praised by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant and revealing"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth31 August 1935
CityWabbaseka, AR
CountryUnited States of America
across beat begun care dance dead dig dragging elders fact feels floor fossil good instead less mickey mouse react swing today white youth zombies
The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the ''American Way of Life'' is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.
american-activist commands given itself neither nor respect withheld
Respect commands itself and it can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.
hard
He used to be a Panther. It was hard to believe.
american-activist either solution
You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.
climb cruel hard jungle led savage valley wild wilderness
And we had thought that our hard climb out of that cruel valley led to some cool, green, and peaceful, sunlit place but it's all jungle here, a wild and savage wilderness that's overrun with ruins.
bound oppressed
The opressor has no right to which the oppressed is bound to respect.
inspirational respect given
Respect commands itself and can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.
justice people teach
You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
dream struggle usa
I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.
love kindness greatness
And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you’re a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.
love forgiveness hate
The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
earth gains manhood
We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.
life idaho black-history
You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem.
blood years land
The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is whiteblacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity.