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Those who experienced imprisonment (…)
are divided into two distinct categories, with rare intermediate shadings:
Those who remain silent and those who speak.
On the first Friday in May, indeed on the worker holiday of May Day, Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, the former Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, breathed his last in this life. It may not be popular to say this, but popularity be damned: Eldridge was my hero. It was because of his revolutionary audaciousness that I threw caution to the winds and joined the party and was assigned to the organization's Ministry of Information. He used words as weapons and scored the enemy with his acidic tongue. In an age when to be radical was normal, Eldridge was radical in extremis, and his book Soul On Ice rippled with a rage as raw as the Middle Passage. He was a revolutionary writer who didn't just write, he joined a revolutionary movement, and put his money where his mouth was, at a time of deadly and certain danger. As an ex-con, Eldridge bucked his repressive conditioning, and joined his fate with an organization that became the focus of white supremacist fury: a group of armed and conscious Blacks ( or, as they put it, "niggers with guns!). His prison and post-prison writings are a road map of a revolutionary era, and a testament to liberatory possibilities. They still shimmer with a single brilliance. They shimmer still even as his political militancy diminished during his years in Cuban, Algerian and French exile. As Mao Tse-Tung aptly noted, revolution is the work of the young, and old comrades sometimes become reactionary, And fall away. It can't be doubted that Eldridge fell away. That said, I honestly doubt that Eldridge was, as reported, a conservative, a Republican, or a Mormon, as reported, although I believe he said those things. Eldridge said those thing, I believe, because his ex-con intelligence told him that to return to prison (for the April, 1968 shoot out where Lil’ Bobby Hutton was shot to death by police in Oakland, California) meant certain and sure death. So Eldridge, who spent many years of his drug-dealing, rapist youth in prison, resolved to make a pact with the devil, where his ‘conservative’ conversion emerged. It's not pretty, but it is human, isn't it. Eldridge, who had lived in Africa, Asia and Caribbean America, who met revolutionaries from liberation movements the world over, simply could not reenter the tomb of prison. So, he, now an older man, seeing that the revolutionary party was no more, took a step in the direction of reaction, and walked out of revolutionary history. Years later, even the revered Dr. Huey P. Newton would submit that great and wondrous brilliance of his to the blood red glow in the bowl of a crack pipe. And yet, we remember the brilliance, the coldness, the tragic beauty of youth, of Black men and women who formed and fought for the Black Panther Party. Acclaimed historian C.L.R. James, in his masterpiece on the Haitian Revolution The Black Jacobins (1938) wrote of the remarkable revolutionary Toussaint Louverture’s tremendous contribution to Haitian freedom, "Yet Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint." People succeed and people fail in the fire of revolution. In the hour of need, when it is imperative to choose, where do you stand? When the party needed Eldridge’s mighty magical pen, he was there. When the Black Revolution needed soldiers he was there. It is that moment many of us remember
© 1998 Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Requiem for an Ex-revolutionary: "Papa"