PERSPECTIVES
She went to Fellowship House in Philadelphia, where she had recently gone for a work camp. There she talked to a man about the Albany Movement and nonviolent protest. Back at school, she asked to speak at the next assembly. She didn’t reveal the topic. Kathleen spoke with passion and anger about the principles of nonviolent action and what was happening in Georgia. If you don’t support the protesters, she reasoned, at least you should respect them. “I was stunned by how strong the reaction to the speech was,” especially because she thought a Quaker school would support nonviolent change. “It became very controversial,” she says, realizing later that “What was controversial was that it was black people. They started calling me a radical”— a hint of what was to come. Kathleen spent a year at Oberlin College, but the civil rights movement beckoned. After a stint in Washington, she moved to New York City, where she briefly attended Barnard before starting work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC was a key player in civil rights efforts across the South, including the Albany Movement. Its leaders were her idols: intelligent, intense, and charismatic men like James Forman and Stokely Carmichael. In early 1967, Kathleen moved to Atlanta for SNCC. “I was born into a world where violence against black people is okay,” says Kathleen. In January 1966, an African American college student, veteran, and SNCC worker, Sammy Younge, Jr., was murdered in Tuskegee. It rattled the organization. By June, Stokely Carmichael used the phrase “Black Power” in a speech after James Meredith was shot. A split was forming in the movement. There were those, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, who continued to advocate nonviolent protest from a spiritual foundation, and there were new voices—pragmatic and revolutionary. “The call came out for Black Power,” describes Kathleen. “It took a more analytical look at society—not as much about peace and love, but black community solidarity and control of the community. That’s the movement that I was attracted to. It’s the one that was more tailored to northern urban people.” The goal was not to get blacks accepted into white society but to overhaul an unjust one. While organizing a conference in Nashville, Kathleen met Eldridge Cleaver. He persuaded her to visit Oakland, California, and before long the two would marry (they later divorced) and
Kathleen would join the city’s young Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Its ten-point program included wanting the “power to determine the destiny of our black community” as well as “an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.” Even more threatening to whites, the party believed in the right of blacks to arm and defend themselves. As Kathleen explains, “More people get killed in a nonviolent movement. To be armed is to prevent violence.” But violence, especially with police, ensued, and party leaders, including cofounder Huey Newton, were arrested. Kathleen became the party’s communications secretary, and the Cleavers and other party members became the target of an FBI campaign of surveillance, misinformation, and discrediting called COINTELPRO. “We were young and educated and enthusiastic,” she says. “The people who wanted to prevent us from doing this had a lot more resources.” While out on bail after an arrest, Eldridge left the country and became a fugitive. Kathleen joined him in Algeria and they started the international arm of the Black Panthers. It was a time when countries worldwide were trying to overthrow imperial powers. “We envisioned a world being completely different in a very short period of time. We were naive,” she concedes. She left the party in 1971. Kathleen returned to the United States and put herself through Yale, both undergraduate and law school. By the mid-1980s, the Cleavers’ daughter Jojuyoungi (Joju) ’88 attended a much more multicultural George School than the one Kathleen had. Joju loved it, and her mother was pleased: “The older I get, the more impressed I am with George School. It was the best educational experience I had until Yale.” Now an Emory University law professor, Kathleen admits to “diminished idealism.” “We wanted to change the world….I enjoyed every minute I was in the movement to challenge racism. I’m sure some felt too little was accomplished.” At least in this country, she goes on to say, you can vent your frustrations. Today, “I see a group of young people challenging injustice. I also see communities devastated beyond belief. I see mass imprisonment of black youth….My opinion has been for the past thirty years that the United States is the biggest and richest third-world country.” The possibility of largescale change and the elimination of racial inequality and oppression seem remote, but, “There are rays of hope. There’s always a new generation.”
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