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VOLUME 17 No. 854
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TYRA: Inside & Out - 18
POET OF REBELLION
By the sting of his pen and oratory, Eldridge Cleaver, former Minister of
Information of the Black Panther Party, scared the hell out of white Americans
By Frederick Benjamin
AUGUSTA FOCUS Staff Writer
Never mind that he had sunk to an all time low,
that he had become a crack fiend, a right-wing
evangelical fanatic, and even a conservative Re
publican — anathema to his lumpen proletariat
birthin thedepths of the great American underclass
and its continuing death march —the memory of
Eldridge Cleaver occupies a cherished place in the
hearts and minds of a generation of Americans
that dared to venture to the ideological limits of
polite society and spit into the face of the fat cats
and their proud generals.
At his finest, Eldridge Cleaver was the weaver
who tied together the disparate strands of Ameri
can youth culture in the sixties to join together the
hippies in Haight-Asbury, the young white radi
cals of Ann Arbor, and the passionate followers of
Malcolm X eager to get on with the revolution.
Cleaver was pure Americana — not Ozzie and
- Harriet, but Jesse James — not Ronald Reagan,
but H. Rap Brown — not the Republican and
- Democratic Party — but the Weathermen and the
Symbionese Liberation Army — not Lawrence
Welk, but Bob Dylan and Jimmy Hendrix.
Forget his mistakes. He made a ton of them.
Cleaver was a thug who could write — and write
well. You could not bring him home to meet the
family. He had raped white women and was proud
of it. He had once said in a speech that women
could only assume one position in the movement
— and it was prone. He celebrated the cleansing
effect of violence and mayhem. -
*M'fig“l@l’t behind, Sdu%ign ce, written while he
was behind bars in the California penal system.
Young black intellectuals who had graduated
from the respectability of the civil rights move
ment, were drawn to Cleaver’s eloquent expres
sion of rage. Here was a black ex-con who had
explored the writings of Norman Mailer, Ernest
Hemingway, Allen Ginsburg, James Baldwin,John
O. Killens, Robert F. Williams, Albert Camus,
Jean Paul Sartre, Elijah Muhammad, Ernest
Hemingway, Mao Tse-tung, Ernesto Che Guevara,
Richard Wright and scores more, and yet was able
to find his own voice.
By the time he joined the Black Panther Party in
1967, its co-founders Huey Newton .and Bobby
Seale, had set the organization on its Marxist-*
Leninist path, but it was Cleaver, through his
celebrity and genius for manipulating the media,
and his contacts with adoring white radicals that
catapulted the organization from its parochial
Oakland, California base to nationwide notoriety.
When Eldridge Cleaver died on Friday, May 1,
hundredsof thousands of Cubans marched through
the streets of Havana, Cuba to the shrine of their
beloved revolutionaries — it was May Day — how
fitting.
Eldridge Cleaver wasa product of his times —no
more and no less.
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Former Black Ponther leader; Eldridge Cleaver, dlips
articles at his Berkeley, Calif., home in this 1986 photo
with his San Quentin booking mug on the wall behind -
him. Cleaver died Friday, May 1, ot age 62 in Pomona,
Calif. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, file) Inset: 1978 edition of Cleaver’s 4
prison essays, Soul on Ice. 1
Black Panthers remember Cleaver:
By Michelle Locke
OAKLAND, Colif.
Asayoung Black Panther, David
Hilliard was bowled over the first
time he was confronted with the
power and passion of Eldridge
Cleaver.
“I thought that Eldridge was the
reincarnation of Malcolm X. I have
never heard such power, such elo
quence,” he said.
A lot has happened since those
Top GM exec to deliver Paine
’OB commencement address
Roy S. Roberts has
been voted 1996 Black
Enterprise Executive
of the Year and is past
recipient of American
Success Award
AUGUSTA
'Paine College will conclude Com
mencement Week activities with
baccalaureate and commencement
ceremonies on May 9th and 10th.
Baccalaureate will be held on Sat
urday, May 9, at 11 a.m, in the
Gilbert-Lambuth ‘:Memorial
Chapel. Commencement will be
held on Sunday, May 10, at 3 p.m.
inthe chapel. Bishop Othal Lakey,
presiding bishop of the Sixth Epis
copal District of &e C.M.E.
Church, will deliver the baccalau
reate address..’ c/). oo
The 1998 commencement
speaker will be Roy(8. Roberts,
vice president of Genetal Motors
Corporation/general manage
Ponfi‘a;fm Divziofii lob;:
tors in 1977. He has held numer
MAY 7 -13,.1998
days of fire — Cleaver, who died
Friday, packed careers as convict,
revolutionary, evangelist, Repub
dican, drug addict, and, most re
*cently, environmentalist, into his
62 years.
But Hilliard remembers Cleaver
best the way he saw him first —a
man with the power to weave words
into a fabric that bound white left
ists and black radicals together.,
. “That is one of his greatest con-
See CLEAVER, page 2A
. |
: e 3
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Koy S. Roberts, vice president,
General Motors, to deliver
Paine College commencement
address :
ous positions with the company.
Roberts received his bachelor’s
degree in business administration
from Western Michigan Univer
sity.. He has also done graduate
work at Western Michigan and
Are blacks
t‘umed off
by MCG?
The Medical College of Geor
gia has a problem attracting
and retaining African-Ameri
can medical students. Many
applicants pass up invitations
to enroll. Has the school got
ten a reputation for being
unfriendly to blacks or are
their other reasons?
By Frederick Benjomin Sr.
AUGUSTA FOCUS Staff Writer
AUGUSTZ
If the recent past is any indication, the
number of African-American medical stu
dents entering the Medical College of Geor
gia in the fall of 1998 will be five or six at
best. At worst, it could be as few as one,
which is the nuinber that enrolled in 1997.
While the number of black studénts ac
cepted increased sixfold — 12 more than
st year’s two — MCG officials have no
Cochran planning to sue on hehalf
of black men shot at on turnpike
By Wendy Ruderman
ASSOCIATED PRESS Writer
CHERRY HILL, N.J.
Lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. said
Saturday he is preparing to take on the
New Jersey State Police on behalf of three
black men shot at recently by New Jersey
state troopers.
Thestar of O.J. Simpson’s “dream team”
said it seems state police, particularly in
New Jersey, Maryland and Florida, have
invented a new offense.
“It’s called D.W.8.,” Cochran said. “Driv
ing While Black.”
Cochran made the comment at the
Cherry Hill Sheraton, where he was being
honored by a south Jersey chapter of Al-
Wayne State Universities. Hecom
pleted the executive development
program at the Harvard Graduate
School of Business in 1982 and
attended the GM Advanced Inter
national General Management
Program in Switzerland in 1985.
He has also received honorary de
grees.
In 1989, Roberts was a recipient
of the American Success Award,
which waspresented by U.S. Presi
dent Georgia Bush in The White
House Rose Garden. He was
awarded the Detroit Chapter of
the American Jewish Communi
ties Human Relations Community
‘Service Award in 1996, as well as
being named executive of the year
for 1996 by Black Enterprise maga
zine and the 1997 executive of the
year by African Americans on
Wheels magazine. He is very ac
tive with many organizations.
%m 100 students will gradu
ate from Paine College. The pub
lic is invited to attend commence
ment activities. »
guarantee ithat more than a couple will
show up at the beginning of the school year.
Indeed, MCG officials have bemoaned the
fact that those who are called may not
choose to come. Is it that black students
have the impression that MCG does not
possess a nurturing atmosphere for black
students? If that is the case, MCG is not
alone.
Other institutions of higher learning,
not all of them professional schools (law
and medicine), have difficulty attracting
minority students — but the reasons vary.
Many blacks don’t want to be part of an
overwhelmingly white student body. One
high school student in Memphis, Tennes
see explains why she wouldn’t want to
attend The University of Tennessee in
Knoxville.
“I would feel like an outsider,” Tiffany
Owens, a senior at Memphis’s Central High
School, told The Tennessean. “I probably.
wouldn’t fit in like a whitestudent.” Owens
was accepted at UT but chose to attend
historically black Spelman College in At
hntfl. » E wrH Res s S
See MCG ENROLLMENT, page 3A
pha Kappa Alpha Sorority _ a national
organization of professional black women.
Wearing a silver silk scarf and a black
tuxedo, Cochran told reporters he got in¢
volved in the New Jersey cdse after several
people called his California office. .
Among them were the Rev. Al Sharpton,
the Rev. Calvin Butts of the Abyssinian
Baptist Church in New York City and David
Ironman, who is representing one of the
wounded men.
Four black men were driving in a van on
the New Jersey Turnpike in Mercer County
when two state troopers pulled them over
April 23. Police said the van was speeding.
Authorities say the driver of the van put-
See COCHRAN, page 15A
standoff examined
BWriter heard pleading for help.
LEXINGTON, Ky.
(AP) A 911 tape of acclaimed writer Gayl Jones
speaking with a dispatcher before police stormed h‘er
house shows she pleaded with the dispatcher to “call
someone who knows us.”
Ms. Jones and her husband, Bob Higgins, barri
caded themselves inside the house Feb. 20 as police
tried to serve Higgins with a 15-year-old warrant
from Michigan. Higgins fatally slit his throat when
police rushed into the house, and authorities took -
Ms. Jones to a state mental hospital. Lo
“I am Gayl Jones. I am an author. I am a writer. I -
am known all around the world. If you don't call
these damn cops away, they are going to have to kill .
me,” the 911 tape of Ms. Jones’ conversation with .
the dispatcher said. 2
In the days after the standoff, questions arose
about how the police handled the conflict. After.
reading the 911 transcript, a Lexington psychologist
said the decision to intervene and seek mental health
treatment for the rising literary star was a good one. -
““As distraught as she was I don’t think there was.-
anything else they could do,” said the psychologist, -
Marilyn Marx, who said Jones appeared to need a.
protective environment that night, based on the.
mmbymolmnmnlhmld-lader
£ .
" Over ard over, Jones told the dispatcher, “Call the
See WRITER, page 5A :
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