ABSTRACT
On 3 January 1999, the New York Times Magazine devoted an issue to obituaries for the notable deceased of 1998. One article, written by novelist Charles Johnson, took stock of Eldridge Cleaver’s life just over thirty years after his introduction to the American public, in 1967, through his controversial book Soul on Ice.1 Johnson wrote about Cleaver’s founding of Black House, a cultural center in San Francisco, and his role as Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party. He recalled his leadership and rhetorical, oratorical gifts in the campaign to “Free Huey” Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, from incarceration. But the hook to the piece was an extended quotation containing Cleaver’s most famous and controversial statement, in the first chapter of Soul on Ice, about raping black women as “practice,” and then raping white women as an “insurrectionary act” against “the white man’s law” (Johnson, 16). Johnson represented Cleaver’s life as emblematic of black radicalism in the sixties era; the essay’s title was, tellingly, “The Lives They Lived: Eldridge Cleaver; A Soul’s Jagged Arc” (16, emphasis mine).
