Kathleen cleaver autobiography of a face
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Witness to History : The time was the ‘60s. The nation was in tumult. Kathleen Neal Cleaver--diplomat’s daughter, civil rights organizer, housewife, attorney . . . revolutionary--recalls her years with Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Friends warned her about the hazards of walking alone in the pedestrian tunnels that connect the New York subway. It’s dangerous down there, they said, forgetting--if they ever knew--that for years, Kathleen Cleaver lived with threats on her life; “the fact,” she once remarked offhandedly, “that you might be killed any minute.”
Still, it came as a rude shock when a young punk--a kid no older than her son, Maceo--put a gun to her temple. Cash , he hissed. Give it to me. And that ring. The money, she handed over willingly. The ring, she paused over. As a girl her father had placed it on her right hand. When she married, her husband slipped it on her left.
Her assailant cocked his weapon. She gave him the ring
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Kathleen Neal Cleaver was born on May 13, 1945, in Dallas, Texas. Both of Kathleen’s parents had higher education; her father was a sociology professor at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas and her mother had a master’s degree in mathematics. Soon after Kathleen was born, her father, Ernest Neal, accepted a job as the direkt of the Rural Life Council of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Six years later, Ernest joined the Foreign Service. The family moved abroad, and lived in such countries such as; India, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Philippines. Kathleen returned to the United States to attend a Quaker boarding school near Philadelphia, the George School. She graduated with honors in 1963. She continued her education at Oberlin College in Ohio, and later transferred to Barnard College in New York. In 1966, she left college for a secretary job with the New York office of the lärling Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
She was in charge of organizing a student conference at sjömat
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Women, Power, and Revolution (1998)
by Kathleen Neal Cleaver
About two weeks before I joined SNCC, "Black Power" replaced "Freedom Now" as the battle cry. We, young women and young men who flocked to the front lines of the war against segregation, were contesting the remaining legacy of racial slavery. What we sought to eliminate were the legal, social, psychological, economic, and political limitations still being imposed on our human rights, and on our rights as citizens. That was the context in which we fought to remove limitations imposed by gender, clearly aware that it could not be fought as a stand-alone issue.
During that era, we hadn't developed much language to talk, about the elimination of gender discrimination. Racism and poverty, imposed by bloody terrorists backed by state power, seemed so overwhelming then, and the ghastly backdrop of the war in Vietnam kept us alert as to what was at stake. It was not that gender discrimination wasn'