An Interview with Eldridge Cleaver

Eldridge Cleaver was interviewed at his Berkeley apartment by REASON editors Bill Kauffman and Lynn Scarlett.

Lynn Scarlett & Bill Kauffman from the February 1986 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

REASON: Did the Panthers try to provoke violence? Was that part of the strategy?

Cleaver: Sure it was part of the strategy. It was using the theories of revolutionary violence. A lot of people don't like to give us credit, but in America you had some of the best-educated revolutionaries in the world—even better-educated than some successful revolutionaries in other countries. We studied the experiences of these other countries and we knew the theories of guerrilla warfare and Marxism and Leninism and people's war, and we definitely were not sitting back waiting for the authorities to attack us. We used to lie about it, because the information was a weapon also. We would go out and ambush cops, but if we got caught we would blame it on them and claim innocence. I did that personally in the case I was involved in.

REASON: The Bobby Hutton case?

Cleaver: Yes. We went after the cops that night, but when we got caught we said they came after us. We always did that. When you talk about the legacy of the '60s, that's one legacy. That's what I try to address, because it helped to distort the image of the police, but I've come to the point where I realize that our police department is necessary.

REASON: I just read Soul on Fire, your 1978 book, and the police seemed terribly abusive and violent nonetheless. I mean, even if they were. . .

Cleaver: Sure they were abusive and violent. They were murderers. And they still are. But policemen are like dogs on a leash. I'm not saying this to put them down, but you take the leash off a dog and it sics you, and that dog is going to bite if it is an obedient dog. The police function under political direction. They go after whoever they are sent after, and that's where the problem comes in.

Now we had a situation where we are dealing with a tradition—black people were moving out of their traditional position in America. Nobody knew what to do about it. The white politicians were confused, the blacks were confused. We didn't know exactly how to go about it. And the police were told to go out, stop those civil-rights marches, scare those people, terrorize them, beat them, use cattle prods, use this and that, and they went out and did that. When you talk to police now who participated in that, you find out that they were in the same position we were in—just trying to find the right formula.

REASON: So are you saying that in a sense their position vis-a-vis the Black Panthers was justified?

Cleaver: I'm not saying justified. I'm just saying that part of the attitude was traditional—"Keep these niggers in their place." They were functioning under orders, they were also humans. You can condemn the tradition, you can condemn the excesses. But when we have no axe to grind, we are just trying to understand, we are looking at human beings.

REASON: The nation's top cop, J. Edgar Hoover, seemed to be obsessed with the threat the Panthers posed to law and order. Do you understand him in the same way?

Cleaver: Sure I can understand J. Edgar Hoover, because he wasn't inaccurate. We were the most militant black organization, and we were serious in what we were going about. He said that we were the main threat. We were trying to be the main threat. We were trying to be the vanguard organization. J. Edgar Hoover was an adversary, but he had good information. We were plugged into all of the revolutionary groups in America, plus those abroad. We were working hand-in-hand with communist parties here and around the world, and he knew that. So from his position, he had to try to stop us.

REASON: A lot of the Panthers seem to be, personally, pretty strong individualists, like you, and yet you espoused revolutionary socialism, collectivism. Did you notice the inconsistencies?

Cleaver: At the time I didn't notice it. It's one thing to study Marxism on paper, living in a capitalistic country where you have individual freedoms and so forth—you don't really see the relationship between the ideology and the form of government that comes out of that ideology. Now, when I had a chance to go and live in communist countries this individualism came into conflict with the state apparatus, and that's when I recoiled against it. But when I was here I was looking at Marxism-Leninism as a weapon, as a tool, to fight against the status quo, and you know, it's just a quality of human beings that when they are trying to tear something down they don't pay enough attention.

Just like in South Africa right now They went to visit Nelson Mandela, an they asked him, "Would you prefer apartheid to communism?" And his attitude was, Communism is better than apartheid. Because apartheid has him in prison and has had him in prison for 2 years. Well, you get a guy in a communist country who has been in prison there for 20 years, and he will tell you, “I would rather live under apartheid,” because he could leave. But the truth is that any form of constraint on our freedoms is not acceptable.

REASON: There is an interesting debate going on today, with economists and social scientists like Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and Walter Williams arguing that government welfare programs actually hurt the people they're tended to help. What do you think?