Fire on Ice : Ex-Panther Assailed for Subdued Views at CSUN

NORTHRIDGE —  The panther no longer roars. Thirty years after shadowing the Oakland Police Department with shotguns and becoming an icon for black Americans disenchanted with peaceful protests, Eldridge Cleaver is a bit grayer and considerably more subdued. Having long ago abandoned his eye-for-an-eye mantra, the former Black Panther leader now champions, at age 61, a bootstrap-centered philosophy closer to that of black conservatives.

But even the neo-Cleaver still possesses the power to rouse and enrage, as he did Thursday at Cal State Northridge. Only this time it was African Americans he infuriated, not whites, and his armor was a conventional pair of slacks and a blazer rather than a militant’s beret and leather jacket.

Invited to discuss the history of activism in the United States, Cleaver faced a mostly hostile twentysomething crowd that at times openly challenged his new slant toward multiculturalism instead of black nationalism.

“What made you dilute your approach to black empowerment?” Nannette Atuahene, a 23-year-old CSUN senior, demanded of Cleaver during a question-and-answer session.

“I now know more than I did back then. I studied communism up close,” responded Cleaver, who spent time in Algeria, China and Cuba as a fugitive from American police. “And I’ve concluded that our form of government is better than any of the alternatives out there.”

Tamara Benefield, a 20-year-old philosophy major and the treasurer of the campus’ Black Student Union, turned red and shook her finger at Cleaver when he suggested that blacks “exchange their hate for love” and forgive whites for being slave owners. Benefield became so emotional at one point that security guards escorted her into a hallway of the Student Union to help her calm down.

Earlier, Benefield asked Cleaver whether black students of the ‘90s should arm themselves, as he and his fellow Panthers once did, to ensure their civil rights.

“We don’t need to form any armed parties to deal with our problems,” Cleaver told her. “Because the problems black people have now are problems all Americans share.”

Benefield wasn’t the only member of the audience who seemed unsure whether to revere Cleaver, who became a fundamentalist Christian in 1975, as a former revolutionary or shrug him off as a religious do-gooder.

“Twenty-nine years ago I stood with ‘Soul on Ice’ as my bible,” Ron Daniels, a CSUN professor of Pan-African studies, said afterward as Cleaver autographed copies of his most famous book. “But so many leaders from then have become inconsistent.”

A onetime Black Panther Party member in Long Beach, Daniels said Cleaver seemed more interested in boosting his speaking fees than improving the lives of African Americans. He also flatly accused Cleaver of “intellectual Uncle Toming.”

Leslie Carroll, who was a 17-year-old in Kansas City, Mo., when the Panthers were the rage and came close to joining them, said he didn’t buy all of Cleaver’s points but agreed that the struggle of all people is more important than organizing causes based solely on race.

“What Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and all those guys were talking about was apropos for that time in history,” said Carroll, a therapist for the Mid-Valley Youth Center. “But the times have changed.”

Cleaver certainly has.

Nowadays the man who once had former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon on his political hit list works in Fontana as an assistant facilitator at the Spiritual Awareness Learning Center. He is putting the finishing touches on “The Eldridge Cleaver Reader,” a collection of old and new writings. He recently denounced ebonics as a “pathetic attempt to institutionalize dysfunction.”

Those intellectual turnabouts are but the latest twists and turns in Cleaver’s own roller-coaster ride of a life. He spent his teenage years in a boys’ home in Los Angeles, served nine years in San Quentin and Soledad prisons for assault and then became the minister of information for the Black Panther Party. Like Malcolm X, he used his nine years on lock-down to cram his brain with books on philosophy, religion and history. The result was his 1968 classic, “Soul on Ice,” a well-received collection of ghetto ululations that were smuggled out of prison by his publishers.

The book became a battle cry for black teenagers but shocked many white Americans with its unrelenting call for black independence by any means necessary, including violence. Years after the book was published, Cleaver became an international fugitive after a shootout with the Oakland Police Department that left Panther member Bobby Hutton dead.

A religious epiphany he experienced in France converted the avowed Communist into a born-again Christian and later into a Republican candidate for Senate.

But though Cleaver no longer advocates the use of violence or espouses black nationalism, he still called Thursday for fundamental changes in society. During his speech--which often strayed from its main topic either to call for a woman president in 2000 or to discuss his past drug use--Cleaver said he has come to the conclusion that poverty, racism and other social ills can only be solved by “reshaping the whole system.”

“Instead of looking at how bad things are all the time,” the tempered Cleaver said, “we need to take pride in how much we have overcome and deal with things the way they are.”