Kathleen Cleaver was an import Black Panther Party leader and a major voice in our struggle for true liberation and freedom in the1960s and 1970s. Her life and work is a living testimony, instilling and inspiring in current and future generations the awareness that, We The People, must constantly and proactively continue to work to preserve our civil rights. As a college sophomore, Kathleen Cleaver dropped out of Barnard College in 1966 to work full-time with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee where she served in the Campus Program. From 1967 to 1971, Kathleen Cleaver was the communications secretary of the Black Panther Party, the first woman member of their Central Committee. She married Eldridge Kathleen Cleaver in 1967. After sharing years of exile with her former husband, she returned to the United States in late 1975. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale College in 1984, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Kathleen Cleaver became the Black Panther Partys National Communications Secretary and helped to organize the campaign to get Huey Newton released from prison. She was also the first woman to be appointed to the Black Panthers Central Committee. On 6th April 1968 eight Black Panther Party members, including Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Hutton and David Hilliard, were traveling in two cars when the Oakland police ambushed them. Eldridge Cleaver and Hutton ran for cover and found them 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. Eldridge Cleaver was wounded in the leg and so Hutton said he would go first. When he left the building with his hands in the air he was shot twelve 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 fled to Mexico with Kathleen. Later the couple moved to Cuba. They also spent time in Algeria. After sharing years of exile with her former husband, she returned to the United States in late 1975. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale College 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. She has devoted many years to the defense of Elmer Geronimo Pratt, a former Black Panther Party leader who won his habeas corpus 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. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library also gave her fellowships to complete the book of memoirs that she is working on, Memoirs of Love and War. Her writing has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including Ramparts, The Black Panther, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe and Transition. She has contributed essays to several books, including Critical Race Feminism, Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, The Promise of Multiculturalism: Education and Autonomy in the 21st Century: A New Political Science Reader and The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Kathleen Cleaver has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. All Power To All The People! Bobby Seale bobbyseale/ === #blackpanthers #blackhistory #blackpantherparty #bobbyseale #kathleencleaver ===
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 02:04:09 +0000
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