When I was fifteen, at the beginning of my sophomore year in high school, the faculty advisor of the Madison M News handed me a photocopied press pass and told me to report on a lecture that evening in the school auditorium. It was my very first assignment, and the sum total of my preparation consisted of brushing my hair and putting on lipstick. Lipstick is not enough when you come face to face with Eldridge Cleaver, one of the big three in the Black Panther Movement.

To this day I do not comprehend why my teacher gifted this assignment to the class peon, or why I was too stupid to ask for the name of the lecturer. Of course, even if she’d worn a sign that said, “Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers,” I would have assumed he’d blown his knee playing football, and now stumped out a living as a motivational speaker. Why else would he come to Rexburg, Idaho?

Mr. Cleaver was charming and affable, with impeccably timed jokes. He had plenty of white in his hair, which to my fifteen-year-old eyes marked him as ancient, though he would have just recently celebrated his forty-seventh birthday, younger than I am now. He talked about growing to understand the American freedoms through living abroad. I clearly remember him saying of foreign police, you can’t lock your door, “they’ll come through the wall.” The delivery was perfect, and we all laughed, but even now I remember the weight that ghosted behind the story. I also got an odd sense that the man in front of me was newer, not fully born until a different Eldridge Cleaver had fought a hard battle, and finally gone into remission. Read More