 Welcome, everyone, to the 18th annual John Howard Burst, Jr. Memorial Lecture. I'm Betsy Peckler, the Dean of University Libraries here, and I'd like to thank you all so much for coming today. It was a great turnout. This evening's Memorial Lecture, along with the exhibition that's currently mounted in the library's exhibit cases, make up the University Libraries' John Howard Burst, Jr. program. The program celebrates a milestone anniversary of the publication of an important work of literature. This year's selection, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, is celebrating its 50th year and was selected by the Burst Committee, a group of Roger Williams University faculty, staff, and students chaired by Professor Adam Braver, our library program director. I'd like to especially thank Jennifer Murphy, whose father, Robert Blaze, made a gift to the university 18 years ago to establish the annual Burst Lecture, Exhibition, and Book Fund. Can you stand, Jennifer? Just give it wave. The donation supports this evening's keynote speaker, Kathleen Cleaver, who you'll meet in a minute, and Professor Adam Braver will introduce her after me. The donation also supports travel for Christine Fagan, the collection management librarian who's right here, and she's also curator of the exhibition, along with two Burst student fellows to the library that holds the archival collections of the book that is chosen. And finally, the Burst donation supports the purchase of books for the library related to the book that we are celebrating. The University Honors Program partners with the committee to identify the two student fellows and helps to support their travel as well. Christine traveled with Burst fellows Brett Lauder and Sam Munhall. Are they here? Raise your hands. Yep. To the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley. For those of you who have not yet seen the exhibition, Brett and Sam will be standing there after this lecture and please avail yourself of the exhibition and ask them any questions that you like about they were assistance to Christine in putting the exhibition together. And now I'd like to introduce Professor Adam Braver who will introduce our speaker. Coming out. The key purpose of the Burst Memorial Program is to honor and engage with a book that is, has been, considered to be an important work. But what makes an important work? Is it name recognition? Once having been part of the cultural sphere? A totem of sorts? In fact I'll submit what gives a book its import are the ideas contained between the covers and perhaps most importantly ideas that challenge, question, confuse and engage all without necessarily providing the definitive answer but maybe providing an answer and at that an ever changing answer that is relative to time and place and individual. In other words, a work of lasting significance is one that continues to challenge our thinking and prompts us to reevaluate our beliefs and revisit our understandings sometimes ultimately confirming them and more often than not completely throwing us into disarray. This year's book is no exception. 50 years after its publication, Solan Ice continues to provoke, to prod, to question, to enrage, to demand and to incite. And why? Because looking back 50 years later, for many it seems as though they've walked a long circle only to end up with the same starting point. But I of course speak from a distance. For Kathleen Cleaver it is not a history and not a theory and not a case study. For Kathleen Cleaver this was and is her life in her early 20s, a student at Barnard and in some respects following in her father's footsteps. She found herself at the center of a movement, one that not only sought to write over two centuries of injustice, but part of a movement that believed it would write over two centuries of injustice. Married to Eldridge Cleaver, at the center of the Black Panthers and the Black Power Movement, Kathleen's life forever changed, placing her among some of the great minds of the civil rights struggle and as witness and participant to the highs and lows of the struggle, which she will talk about today. In her 30s, after years of exile in Algeria and France and then re-entry into the US, Kathleen went to Yale to finish her degree and subsequently got her law degree at Yale. She currently teaches in the law school at Emory. In choosing Solon Ice for this year's selection, the Burst Committee understood it was waiting into areas that sparked debate and controversy and reaction and discussion. A book the committee thought perfect for a university environment where difficult and complex topics can be engaged in through reason, logic, evidence and a little helping of passion. We are pleased to have Kathleen Cleaver here to help us understand her perspective and experience of those times and perhaps to help us better understand our own times. Thank you, Kathleen. Thank you so much. I had a little pause. I'm discussing this complex technology of trying to show photographs. I selected them out of a huge, huge collection of photographs I have. I mean, probably there's a thousand. And I have an archivist archival project going on and one of the photographers, I asked him to come to my house and I said I want some pictures and I picked out the pictures and he took photographs of them and made something so I can show them to you but I really don't know how it works properly. In fact, I lost the flash drive for a minute. This particular picture is the earliest so maybe I can stop it because you've seen this. This is a picture of my father being sworn in. That's the U.S. flag and LBJ was president and that's him and we're in Washington and he's being sworn in for the next position that he's going to take in the United States Foreign Service and I don't really know what that is but I'm about 18. So that means I'm just now starting college and I think they went to live somewhere in West Africa. I had lived with my family in West Africa and then it was time for me to stop traveling and go to college and so I think this is about 1960, well whatever. But the other thing I want to mention and this is my little snarky sense of humor, there's a photograph there of LBJ and I was a visiting faculty one semester at the University of Texas. So I took that picture with me and put it in my office because that's a little picture of LBJ. It was a very big guy in Texas. Anyway, so we don't need to keep looking at this one. If we click something we'll go away and we can do the next one. Okay, but I don't want the next picture. I just want a blank screen and I want to bring up the pictures later. Okay, well you have to look at this for a while. Okay. I'm trying to talk, what I would like to talk about is modeling the world that we want to live in. That's what we saw. I didn't even know what modeling meant when I was out there and we wanted to change the world. But we had visions as teenagers, as activists. I was in high school when the Albany students, the students, the high school girls on Albany challenged segregation, got arrested and I saw a picture of them in the Philadelphia Inquirer and they were in the back of a paddy wagon singing and they were being hauled off to jail and I said, what kind of people? Look at them. They're teenagers. They were high school girls. So was I. They were in Albany, Georgia and if you know anything about Albany, Georgia, it is a racist stronghold. I mean, it still is in a way. And so I was so impressed and I was enthralled expect by them. And so one of my friends, I was at a boarding school in Georgetown, called George School in Pennsylvania because my parents were in Africa and the first time they went to Africa I took correspondence course classes and the second time I didn't take any classes. I thought that was wonderful. But they said you need to go back to school. So I was in boarding school while they were in Africa and the Albany movement broke out and it actually probably stimulated my involvement in the civil rights movement because one student named Wanda said oh, we should support the students in Albany who are in jail and we should have a sympathy fast in support of them. And then another student who I didn't particularly like that well, he put up a note and he said that's not a good idea. We should find something more co-operative to do. I said what? I was livid. First of all, I admired the girls who risked their life. What I didn't know, I knew they were arrested. What I didn't know is they took them out to a former prisoner of war camp out in the woods and left them there. I mean that's yes, yes. And I read the story about that when I was in my 50s or 60s. So people didn't know that. This is atrocious abuse. And I met one of the women who actually in the Civil Rights Gathering many years later who had actually been in that camp. And so these are survivors of essentially torture. But so I was someone who wanted to, as I was growing up, my parents were, had been activists. My mother was in some organization called Southern Negro Youth Congress. My father was in movement to put an end to the all-white primary in Texas. And what people might not understand is these are life, you're threatening your life if you're trying to put an end to all-white primaries in Texas. And my mother was in something called Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was infiltrated, as I said, by communists. And she had friends who were communists. In fact, one of her men that she grew up with in Richmond, Virginia, some of you who are communists, if you're a communist, you've heard of James Jackson. How many people know who James Jackson is? One. Well, you're not a communist, but he was. He was. Because you got a tie and you teach here. Oh, it's a cover. I'm sorry. But I don't know. But so my mother was an organization called Southern Negro Youth Congress and her neighbor and close friend who was mad in love with her was James Jackson, who if you know anything about the Communist Party, he's an American Communist Party member. Well, her father was a Baptist preacher and there was no way in the world she was going to marry a communist. So James Jackson found another lady who kind of looked like my mother who married her and my mother married somebody else. But James, he was always like an uncle. He was always around. They grew up together. So in my life, this movement of activism, communists, radicals, my father was during rural community development. His first job, I think, was in Tennessee in the TVA program to improve the Tennessee Valley. And so I was in this environment where people devoted their time, devoted their intelligence to social justice and social change. And I just recently started talking about this. But my mother was actually brilliant. She had a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan at the age of 16. So I had been hearing this story and I said, maybe they made it up. Let me check. So I went into the records of the University of Michigan for the year that she got that degree and there was her name. Do you have Johnson? Math says, it's true, it's true. So I have brilliant parents. So I guess I'd be better than many because of the way I was brought up. And the fact that I became an only child. My parents had two children, me and my brother, but my brother died when he was about 11 of childhood leukemia. They didn't know what it was. And so I became an only child. So I became the focus of my parents' attention. And so I got to do a lot of things and say things that probably I might not have if they had more attention. Like, I don't want to go back to college. I want to go in the movement. Why don't you send me the money you pay Barnard? And I'll get a real education. My father said, I'll do it for a year. So when I was in college, my father agreed that I could go into the Student Run Violent Court and came ready and work. And they had no money because of Socly Carmichael and Black Power and Lorat Brown and all those wonderful activists who I admired and those Southerners hated. And it was dangerous. It was dangerous. But so I would say I have devoted many, many years and countless hours to mobilizations, to movements and other programs that have modeled and ways that we want to change and how we could create the world we want to live in. My generation and my parents' generation wanted to live in. What I see as needed is we had to seize the moment and we need now the light of all this long legacy and history that's going back to the 1930s and bringing up to now we need to refresh our commitments. When I say we, that's people who want to see social justice, who want to see fundamental change and who are willing to invest in it. Everybody doesn't have to do it but everybody can help even if you're not on the front line because the people on the front line want to be there. Nobody can force them there. Just somebody like John Lewis. Nobody forced him to be on the front line but that's where he wanted to be and he's lucky to be alive because everybody that worked in the Selma movement didn't make it. So I think what is needed is we have to be able to refresh the commitments we have to resist the cultural and political and economic oppression that's going on within our communities and resume active struggle. Now that's a tall order but there's lots and lots of 18 and 19 and 20 year olds in this country and they're the ones that have the energy to do it. What they might not have is the inspiration but that's what we had. We had the inspiration and we had an era in which people were dying on a regular basis. This is Vietnam. People were saying hell no I won't go. That was I think Stokely Carmichael's contribution to the anti-war movement because we said we want to and many young black men said well if I've got to die I don't want to go die in some rice paddy in Vietnam I might as well stay here and fight. So that was the era that I was a part of in the civil rights movement. Now I'm a grandmother. My oldest grandchild is 21. She is actually a Sudanese American her mother's Sudanese my father is her my son is her father and she's a college student studying Chinese anatomy and quite a few other things I'm very impressed. So maybe she's like my mother maybe she's on the brilliant spectrum. I sure I couldn't do either Chinese or anatomy. I have witnessed a wealth and participated in a wealth of challenges and experiences and joys and disappointments that I can reflect on and I've actually have been for quite some time people say have you ever finished that book? I've been working on a book for a very very long time and it's called Memories of Love and War and I've decided the first seven chapters have to go it's too far back in time so I have 21 chapters actually I have 28 I have 21 chapters and I'm coming to the end but it is, it's true that's what we remember the love and the war the passion the excitement the danger I had quite a bit of that in my life and I'm very happy and I really do think I've been under some kind of special protection I have no arrest record whatsoever. Now how did that happen? Maybe it happened because my father was connected to the State Department sometimes I wonder if that's it and it's not really angelic protection but we'll see. 50 years later then we had such a laser like focus on our goals we were the generation that said we wanted to change the world we actually believed the world could be changed we actually believed that we could go out and do things to change the world and I've watched people doing it I've watched the people going on the Freedom Riders I've watched those I've met some these are people who are to me heroic they get on a bus and drive from Alabama try to get to Mississippi and the bus gets set on fire but they were our heroes people who did this we admired them and they generated an excitement and they generated the possibility for other people to be able to think of what they could do and that works that's the way movements develop and when their leadership and the participants are genuine and they're committed and they're not out to make a buck and they're not out because they're running for office that is what gives inspiration and people are willing to join them I did and many other people did we were about changing the world we had a very gruesome and many of you here know exactly what I mean a very gruesome Vietnam war that destroyed too many people but one of the things I remember most about the war is the mothers who ran and said my son is not going I will take my son to Canada before he ever goes to Vietnam I will take my son here I will take my son there so we had this element that was running for freedom and this element that was going to Vietnam and the warfare that this country was engaged in I think it helped stimulate and inspire a level of I don't want to say extremism but intense devotion to social change that we felt because so many people were dying because the world was changing when I saw the young women in Albany demonstrating I wanted to do that I wanted to do it I was in a Quaker school because my father was in the Foreign Service and he was in Asia and Africa when he was assigned to Liberia I did my 10th grade schooling in correspondence course and then we moved on to Sierra Leone a British colony and they didn't even have a school because there were British schools that I could go to I didn't go to school at all I thought it was wonderful because Sierra Leone has gorgeous beaches and my parents had parties because they were diplomats and they said no, no you have to go back to school so I ended up going to George school when my parents were in Africa so it's kind of odd to be a child in America with parents in Africa and I was the only child because my brother had died and so I got a lot of attention and I had an excellent, excellent inspiration education in Quaker school education in Oberlin College education in Barnard College and then I went into the civil rights movement and that's where I really I told my father you give me the money you spend to Barnard and I'll get a real education he said okay I'll do it for a year and I thought that was wonderful I got a $125 check every month I could pay the rent I could buy food and I didn't know how to drive we didn't have a car and a snake but so I was supporting my little cadre of four people in Atlanta and there were three men from Alabama who I, one I grew up with and one I was a graduate student but we were like a collective the campus program and what our job was was to go to the campuses and get people who were students back into the movement bring your expertise and bring your knowledge and bring your special skills into this freedom struggle and at the end of the year he said well I've supported you for a year now you have to go back to college I said go back to college I'm in the midst of a revolution I can't go back to college he said well I can't send you any more money so I moved to California shortly after that and Eldridge Cleaver and I had met at a conference a conference about it was called Liberation Will Come from a Black Thing Snake had organized this we had sent out invitations to all the famous writers and activists that we could think of wanted them to come to our conference called Liberation Will Come from a Black Thing and guess what it was over the Easter weekend and it was a freak snowfall on the east coast nobody from the east coast could get a plane we invited Eldridge Cleaver he lived in San Francisco they didn't have snow he came and he was our only speaker so I thought he rescued our conference but when he came into the building where we were told to get off the fifth campus we had a minister who had a church there said you could use our church so I was retyping the agenda rechanging they had picked up Eldridge Cleaver at the airport and brought him to the apartment where we were restructuring our conference agenda and he looked at me and I looked up at him he's a really, really he's big like Muhammad Ali and he didn't have any expression in his face what I learned that is that's what they call a mass prisoners have a mass they mass whatever they think and feel and he'd been in prison he had gotten out of prison three months before I met him and I don't think I knew anybody actually I mean I knew people got busted they went to jail because they were protesting but I don't think I knew anybody I didn't even know what prison actually looked like well I certainly learned after he and I got together but so it was I didn't really know what kind of person that was he had no expression on his face but he basically he looked at me and he fell madly in love with me which I think makes no sense also how can you look at somebody and fall in love with me well he did it and so I was going to go back to Atlanta and he came and he was talking to me and I said well yeah I've got to go back because I have to do this and Fred Brook who's a student there he has to go to Atlanta too and get some printing done and we're going to go together and he said well how are you going to get there and he said well such a professor he has a car he'll let me drive he'll just say I have a car you can drive my car oh okay that's cool but he was on parole he had absolutely no business leaving that state because his parole allowed him to go to Nashville and return but he gave us a card Fred Brooks and wrote in the backseat Fred drove we all went down to Atlanta we got down there he was paying a lot of attention to me I don't think I've actually noticed exactly anyway I had learned how to play chess we played chess and I beat him now look this doesn't make any sense this man had been in prison nine years playing chess I just learned so but I won so I said did he do that at Brooks? would men do that? I don't know anyway shortly after that we fell madly in love so I was in Atlanta and now I was in the place and I could do things like those girls in Albany, Georgia who I saw I never got arrested but I was so impressed with them and now I'm in SNCC so I'm impressed with the people around me we had absolutely no money no salary why? because when Stokely Carmichael came in he called for black power he called for this he called for that and much of the money that was sent to support the Student on Violent Coordinating Committee the kind that John John Lewis was the chairman of was gone and so we were becoming more and more radical and more and more revolutionary the Vietnam War the inspiration we gained from that huge rise of independence in Africa particularly the one that's the most impressive to my mother's generation was Patrice Lumumba she talked about reading and hearing about the children in the Congo having their hands topped off and the brutality and here we see a black man kind of looked just like a whole lot of people in America Patrice Lumumba if he was walking down the street here you wouldn't think he was a foreigner so Patrice Lumumba becomes the president of the Congo that was mind-boggling I would think I was in ninth grade when that happened every African American that was conscious was impressed that's the president of the Congo particularly the Congo because that was one of the favorite insults I like to call some of the other names Congolese that was an insult along with a few others that you've heard of so when the Congolese becomes the president it was mind-boggling and then we saw Seiku Turei in his long white robes and Kwame Nkrumah so the African liberation and African independence was huge in that era of inspiring us to change ourselves change our expectations of ourselves and change the way we wanted people to look at us because we saw something absolutely phenomenal that our parents hadn't been able to see we've been able to see black African head of state in a white robe go to the United Nations I mean that's just mind-blowing for African Americans while I was attending college in New York my parents I dropped out of college the first year because a lot of things mainly because it was in Ohio when it was freezing cold it was a good college but it was awful it was just awful to live in Ohio in the winter where somebody had been in Sierra Leone in West Africa so I just couldn't handle it and I dropped out and my parents wanted me to go back to school and I was working in Washington doing quick backing peace corps boulders for the peace corps volunteers to take when they went out and recruit the peace corps so one of my parents' friends said I think you could do something better than that and he worked for something called the community relations service he said why don't you come over to the community relations service and be my secretary and I said okay his name was Dick Thornell and what I would do is the community relations services would go to cities where there had been what we call riots and they would observe them and they'd make reports they didn't change anything they just tell you what was happening and my job was to type up the reports so I was typing all these reports and listening and learning about things so the town that I'm from Tuskegee was one of the places very very very close to Montgomery if anybody knows where Tuskegee is it's 40 miles northeast northwest of Montgomery and the MIA Montgomery Improvement Association worked very carefully with the TIA the Tuskegee Institute Improvement Association and they collaborated and Rosa Parks who everyone's heard of her hometown is not too far from Tuskegee it's closer to Tuskegee than to Montgomery so the environment in which I was growing up and the environment my parents provided and the environment of the Quaker School all coalesced to encourage I had no there's no obstacles to me wanting to be in the revolutionary movement everything says this is right this is what you do that's what I did and I encourage other people to do it one of the students who I worked with in Atlanta was a student at the veterinary medicine school but he was also a black conscious person and he published a newspaper at Tuskegee well they didn't like that at all they kicked him out George Ware actually graduated and the three of us ended up in New York and that's where I got my real education with men who've been in the civil rights movement one was George was a chemist and Ernest was studying medicine and neither of those are subjects that I can't have any participation in whatsoever but I learned so much just listening to them they're the ones that told me let's read Ramparts and that's where I discovered who Eldridge Cleaver was because he had articles in Ramparts and George brought this message and I remember to this day the cover it was Madame Bien the wife of the president of South Vietnam just like a Michigan State cheerleader and they were talking about the relationship between Michigan State and funding and CIA etc. and the Vietnam War and so Ramparts was actually the magazine Eldridge Cleaver wrote for and that's how I found out who he was and that's how he ended up getting invited to our SNCC conference and so this is an era in which all these elements and energies and people are flowing together to encourage and elevate the struggle for social justice, civil rights, freedom it was a liberatory time and I say that because that time is gone I don't know if it's going to be reactivated I don't know if we're going to have another upsurge like that but it happens to coincide with the war in Vietnam so that's a horrible horrible way to get inspiration for social change but that is what happened and I am eternally in debt to my comrades and friends who taught me and I learned from them to listen to them what they had to say, what they did how they understood what was going on a new organization came into being during this period of my life I was in New York but out in California there were two men who had started a new organization and they called it the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and Stokely Carmichael went out to California he'd always go out there to raise money it was a great place that people would help support the civil rights struggle and he came back and he had a scroll and he said this scroll was given to him by I think he said Bobby Cio, Huey Newton anyway they said he could be the leader from the East Coast the leader of the Liberation Movement because out in the West Coast it was the Panthers but he was Mr. Black Power and so we were engaging with each other enjoying each other and I have to say that these were actually brilliant Stokely Carmichael was absolutely brilliant I even know Donaldson who I work for I'd say he was brilliant George Ware but I didn't think about it at the time I mean these were my buddies these were the activists so being inspired and working with people who are devoted, who are intelligent who are encouraging you can't help but learn you can't help but be inspired and you kind of get a sense of what's the right word it's empowering for me it was empowering I was doing what was important I was doing what was right I was going to make a difference not just me I mean this whole collective of activists that I was in when the Black Panther Party began and this I think is important for young people to understand it had two members Huey Newton, Bobby Seal which one's going to be the chairman which one's going to be the minister of defense I said okay, you'll flip a coin Bobby became chairman Huey became the minister of defense and it went on from there the first person to join was a young man who was 16, 15 probably a high school student named Bobby Hutton and I say that only because after Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis and many of you would remember how many uprisings and riots and fires and things were going on all over the country four days and the police didn't stop it somebody gave him a this is a hands off time it showed the power and anger and hostility and love for Martin Luther King all mixed in with the hostility to racism there was about 200 uprisings around him and there was kind of a hands off they didn't arrest a whole lot of people Washington DC parts of Washington DC were just burnt 14th Street it was burnt and so that when those things happen you know just like if you know anything about the battle of Algiers which was one of our very very favorite movies which was about one little cadre of freedom fighters inside Algiers who were fighting against the French and the movie how many of you have seen the battle of Algiers two, three well the movie begins and you see the French oh they're so arrogant so determined they're going to come in and crush this uprising of people that they had nothing but contempt for and we see the women who dressed like Europeans and go put bombs in bars that soldiers frequent and they blow up and we saw this young boy and so it was just you know it's the minorities it's the weak list the people who don't have any say so that are the stars in the battle of Algiers and that movement that country became independent and I later on lived there so we had a glorious notion of Algeria based on that movie but when I got there the war had ended they were independent there was a lot of poverty and I saw all kinds of people who had who were what do you call it wounded who had suffered it was war torn there was still bullet holes in buildings we ended up Eldridge was arrested in a gun battle two days after Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis and the gun battle well there were about eight people involved at the beginning but it ended up with two caught in a house on a street in Oakland and they went into the basement to hide and they were shooting back and forth with the Oakland police who came and set up the lights and everything and it was just and I was waiting for him to come pick me up we lived in San Francisco and I didn't know how to drive and so he told me that day because King had been murdered and people were very very very distraught and angry and furious and wanted to do something and he said well you have to I didn't know how to drive and so he said well I don't want you to I can't go back to San Francisco where we live so you have to stay over here and I'll get back in touch with you so I stayed with a friend that I knew who lived in Berkeley and I'm a heavy sleeper and I slept on her sofa and the phone rang over and over and over and I never heard it there was a lawyer trying to tell me that Eldridge had been arrested in the shootout and they had taken him to the hospital in the prison but eventually I woke up and that was what I heard and when I went to the jail to see him I mean he did look like the war casualty he had bandages on his hair he was limping but I know that he was how would I put it easy as way to say he was very proud that he had engaged the police that he'd survived a battle with the older police and this was in response in response to what had happened to Martin Luther King he said we want to have this response other people there were like about a hundred rising riots in the country at that time so when you see that when you're a part of that you think the world is changing something is going on this is not normal life this is war this will come this is where liberation will come from so and it's small this is what I think people fail to understand how small the movements begin the Black Panther Party for self-defense began with two people Bobby Seale and Huey Newton they wrote out their 10-point platform their 10-point program and actually Bobby didn't even realize it the day they did it was his birthday because he went home and they had a surprise party his brother but they like Bobby was a stand-up comedian a carpenter an engineer a veteran and he was an amazing organizer and Huey was a law student they had met at Merritt College and so these are these are people whose abilities and genius and passion were poured into a social change movement a revolutionary movement and that doesn't come without a lot of suffering and sacrifices and some people go crazy a lot of them go crazy as a matter of fact I mean if you see all the Vietnam veterans that came back they were damaged and so that's something you don't think about once you commit to this movement and a lot of people will think like I I'll die for the struggle yeah but no you're gonna live and suffer you know the people who die that's short Bobby Hutton was murdered he was 17 years old he was shot 16 bullets in his body he was a teenager oh but he was the first kid to join the Black Panther Party and he was so excited to be with Eldridge and be in this gun battle because this is this is what this is life this is passion this is committing to revolutionary struggle committing to making the world the Black Panther Party captured the imagination of many young people and that we had to follow behind people who are organizing Black Panther just started we're the Black Panther Party in New York we're the Black Panther Party of San Diego wait a minute may I send somebody over to straighten these guys out because people wanted to be a part of that why? because it was liberatory because it was exciting because they had a sense that it meant something that they were gonna do something they were gonna change the world sooner or later one way or another Eldridge had another slope and he said ready or not here we come we were going through a crisis but it was a crisis that was fascinating it was passionate and it did have an impact I think bigger than those of us who were right there understand I was giving a talk in Chicago some anniversary that I was invited to give a talk for and I was talking about how we wanted to change the world we wanted to change the world and at the end of the talk a woman in the audience who came up to me and she said you did change the world I was pretty flabbergasted it seemed to me the world changed itself back but at least there were some people who thought what we did changed the world it also changed the vision of what kind of world we could have and that's something that's very key for young people to have a vision of how the world could be different because if you don't see that then why would you go out and risk your life and organize and spend money and you know abandon school and anger your relatives to change this unless you think it really is fundamental and it really will happen Emory Douglas I think you may have something of Emory in your exhibit here your solo nice exhibit which is phenomenal I don't think any other place has an exhibit quite like this one I know they don't many places they don't want to they don't want to be reminded of Elder Scluver they don't want to be reminded of so they don't want to hear about this why? I'm not quite sure why I know there are a lot of people who do but is it that it's controversial or is it that that struggle never was completed and so if you bring it up well you know people oh let me let me start changing these photographs how do I do this this is the People's Republic of the Congo Brazzaville not Congo King Shasa Congo King Shasa was the one that Patrice Lumumba became the head of state and Patrice Lumumba was murdered and lackeys of the mineral industries kind of took over no it's not supposed to keep going oh well I guess it's going to no I thought you could do it one at a time this is a national committee to combat fascism in North Carolina once the Black Panther Party became so radioactive that's the West German speaking on behalf of a long time came fifth and number three of our race well we didn't know that sure we got divorced after that not after that we got up divorced because I went back to school to go I was so impressed by Charles Gary and what he did to get people out of prison I said he's a lawyer I want to be a lawyer and eventually sometime after this moment I had a college at YPL and some other schools I think Berkeley and somewhere but I really wanted to get away from California and Elders and be on my own and I accepted I was accepted to go to Yale college so I did my things I took my children and went there and when I got to law school ultimately I discovered what Charles Gary did he did not learn in law school you know he was a labor organizer before he was an Armenian who knew exactly first hand what discrimination was his brothers kept their name Garabidian no he said I have to be different I got to compete with all the Jews in law school have to be better than all of them to get a job and so he was Gary and so the what he called the mix of influences and activism and change it's very illuminating it's also very exhausting and everybody doesn't have the stomach to put up but Charles Gary was one of those major change agents who he was essentially not only was he revolutionary he didn't have any children and he kind of I got the impression that he kind of looked on U.E. Newton as a client as a son he was very devoted and very careful and very protective and he he won that case I mean when I say he's charged with murder he was convicted of much lesser offense and then he got out again and so Charles Gary transformed what happened to the Black Panther Party and I think what happened to the Black Panther Party transformed Charles Gary because when he first came to work on the Panther case and U.E. Newton's murder case he was very chic beautiful suits sleek hair I mean he had a ruminous looking you know by the end of that he carried with bent over okay it was great it took a lot out of him really did it was a murder trial but also it was his energy and fire and devotion and belief and what the Panthers were about because Gary actually was in the progressive party and he wasn't active as long before he became an attorney now let's see are we going to get any Emory work in here and how do I do this what do I do this one didn't get any more Emory but this is after Eldridge decided we were living in France four years in Algiers the Algerians told us we were going to some big I think it was celebration of independence big big huge government thing in a state and somebody walked up to us and said to probably in a couple of years we're going to resume diplomatic relations in the United States because of the oil he said something to that effect which is like letting you know you're okay now but this isn't permanent why they nationalized Elf Oil it was a French company well you know the French didn't care for that but they needed the technology to develop their oil industry who has oil development oil extracting technology who has the best Americans in fact the very first day I arrived in Algeria I had been in France and I had French supporters who helped me figure out how to get from I got from America to Britain from Britain to Paris and I was trying to figure out in Paris how to get to Algiers and Richard Wright's daughter Julia Wright became very very helpful and so the she showed me how to do this and how to get here and she could speak French and she'd been in Algeria and so she and her husband helped me get a flight to the airport I got there late why? why did I get there late? because Eldridge was in Cuba when I was trying to go to Cuba I wanted to join him and the way I could do it you couldn't fly to Cuba from America it was illegal so in order to get to Cuba what I had planned was to leave New York I went to London from London I went to Paris from Paris I found out that I could get to Algiers which is where I took flight it goes to Moscow Algiers Havana so I am about seven months pregnant I want to be where my husband is before this baby is born and so I was planning to go to Cuba and I had bought clothes and I had trunks full of summer clothes and blah blah blah and I was going to go to Havana not that I knew anything about Havana but that's where Eldridge was and I got a visit not a visit but this man named Lee Lockwood he was a photographer who had been in Cuba he wrote a he did photo books have you ever anyone ever heard of Lee Lockwood the photographer well it was a long time ago he was a well-known photographer and he was in Cuba and Eldridge met him and told him to get a message to me that when you get when I go to Algeria do not get a plane to Cuba and he was very important for him to tell me this because the Cubans and Eldridge had kind of had a parting of the ways and he was on his way to Algeria without my knowing but you can't communicate you can't talk you can't talk on the phone you can't write a letter the only way we could communicate was courier someone would go from the United States to Havana and they'd get messages or whatever and so this Lee Lockwood had talked to Eldridge in Havana he came to he called San Francisco Kathleen so I hear she went to New York he called New York oh she's not here she went to Paris he called Paris oh yes she's with my daughter Julia this is when I'm actually just packing my suitcase to go to the airport to go to Algeria so I can get a plane to Cuba and so he stops me he says I have a message he walks up to me on the street this man with curly black hair and a seersucker suit and a camera so I have to believe that he's who he says he is so I guess so I don't know I have a message for you from Eldridge and we should go sit down so we said yes okay let's go have something to you know have some tea or whatever he says when you get to Algeria do not leave Eldridge is coming there oh that's a big change I'm glad to know that 45 minutes before I get on the plane to go to Algeria I get there Emery Douglas the artist Emery Douglas is traveling with me because it doesn't make any sense for a seven month pregnant woman to travel in California all the way to North Africa by herself so Emery I asked Emery who is very good friends with Eldridge to come with me and so I missed the flight because I met Lee Lockwood so then I got a much later flight it was like a midnight flight and I get to the Algerian airport with Amy and Emery get there and you know it's a military style a type of environment the men in the airport look like soldiers they have a certain kind of uniforms but they're really relaxed because it's midnight it was like the end of the day and so my friend Julia Wright she was the daughter of Richard Wright had given me the name of a hotel so when you get to Algeria you can go to the Saint George Hotel you didn't tell me that Saint George was the most expensive hotel in Algeria and I never heard of any other hotel so that's where I went and very interesting get up in the morning go to have breakfast out on the terrace and out on this terrace there's another table who's sitting at that table Texas Oilman they're talking to each other and their accents and all that and I said this is it's weird now looking back because the American oil business was quite willing to take over from the French and once that actually occurs full fledged they're not going to be able to continue to deny diplomatic relations to the United States in fact to sign a contract for the delivery of liquefied natural gas which would be millions and millions and millions of dollars worth to the Algeria's oil industry there was no American embassy there so they needed some kind of security for the investment of the Americans and what was going to happen is that sooner or later the Americans would come back but they had no diplomatic relations and because of the Six Day War now many of you never heard of it and others have forgotten what the Six Day War was but the Six Day War was a fight in Egypt I believe and the Algerians supported the Egyptians and the Americans had supported the other side Israel and once that happened Algeria broke off all diplomatic relations in the United States so there was no one there there was no one who was going to arrest us but with the oil business coming in that was going to change and they wanted us to know that and I saw how they let us know it we were having something called Liberation in the third world they have celebrations of the day of liberation liberation this liberation that and the Cubans had a poster after American Liberation Day and so we were having an event on African American Liberation our headquarters in Algeria and we'd sent out invitations and people were coming and guess what here come the police turning people away our time had run out they're letting us know you don't have to but you can have Liberation Day and so this was the beginning of the exit later on they called everybody together by this time we had maybe 15 people families children et cetera as fugitives they went to every house where we had either our office or someone was living there and confiscated all our weapons and so that's the clue you know it's about time for you to get ready to leave why because they want to get the oil business they want to get the money in the United States is going to spend an enormous amount of money on their oil business oil development and they know it and now we see what it is and it's all smart like you can stay but we're not going to give you any money we're not going to give you any passports we're not going to help you you know so ultimately everybody figured out where to go some people went to Tanzania some people went to Zimbabwe Zambia I'm sorry some people went to Zambia a brother from New York named Sadawea Tabor that lived there his wife Connie was a British citizen so we were a multinational multiethnic group of African-Americans and freedom fighters and we had to disband and when it was time to disband Eldridge said well I've had enough of the third world I think I want to go to France I don't want to go further in Africa and he as a writer France is very romantic it has appeared so we he had to go clandestinely now he did go clandestinely he had somebody drive him across the border and hide him in a house in southern France and then he's up in in Paris walking around and somebody that was in prison with him now Eldridge Cleaver is six foot two he's got orange brown skin slanted eyes he's very tall he stands out in France okay because most French people I'm the height of a French man you know so somebody he'd been in prison where I saw him in a park in Paris and he said hey man hey Eldridge hey Eldridge Cleaver hey underground okay and eventually he couldn't take being underground and he decided and people thought he was nuts but he's out all kind of things he decided he was going to surrender so he could come home and that's after he had surrendered and after he came home and that's our son and that's our daughter and that picture is outside of his mother's house in Alterdina, California because he he said I can't just be a black bump on the French law and that's real that's what people are about about their lives their families et cetera so he'd done as much as he could as a what do you call it the French weren't going to arrest him so the Americans sent he negotiated with a man named Tom Togo West in the State Department that he could surrender so he went to the American Embassy and they were going to arrange his travel for any ID he pulled out a San Francisco library card he didn't have a passport he didn't even have a valid driver's license so I was a library card with his ID let me there may be one of those pictures this one that's a freedom demonstration in San Francisco when Huey was up for the East and real protest name I made those posters I would never sorry for the people until that has no signature but if Emory always sign it so you know if Emory if it's unsigned it's more than like me so the war protest the women's movement was expanding calls for black liberation the full fledged enjoyment of human rights all this was going on as I was growing up as I was raising a family as Eldridge was getting more and more discomfort uncomfortable being left out there and so when he came back the way he came back alienated some of the people who like to look up to him as a revolutionary without taking into consideration what does it feel like a man from California who never lived anywhere but California I think he lived in Arkansas but then he came to California that's all he knew he lived in Paris and he'd been in Eldridge he'd come to Vietnam and he'd done that was he wanted to be home and he turned himself in and he'd lost a whole lot of friends whole lot of friends but he did what he wanted to do and then he became a born again Christian and that was the end of it the radical movement said oh no you can't handle that now from the south I mean it's born again Christians every time you turn around I couldn't see that as something to be denounced but people in the west coast and people in the communist party they thought that was just over the top and he said those sets of friends were no longer part of his life and by this time I was actually trying not to be part of his life I wanted to go back to school and I found out I could apply and go in January which is really interesting because you usually have to wait for September Yale had a new program I applied to Yale I got accepted and I had to leave right away because it was January and I didn't even have time to because I secretly applied and then I said I'm leaving I'm taking my children I'm moving to New Haven and he was very sad but he had kind of gone off borderline personality disorder some of you know what that is he'd gone to the other side of that one he was no longer the no longer the dynamic exciting passionate revolution he was passive and quiet and I had no idea what happened I mean this is a disorder but I never I never saw that and I didn't know and people would call me and say Kathleen you have to leave one of my best friends from Tuskegee he said you have to leave do you understand he's going crazy he's going to harm you that's true so I went back to college and I moved to New Haven and took our children and that was the end of our relationship in person but then I went to law school and then I wanted to apply to take the bar exam and in the bar exam application you have to say your marital status I said I'm thinking this has to be true I can't say I am divorced I'm not I can't say that I'm not married because I was so I think what I did then was go meet this attorney named Elga Wasserman and I said I want to get a divorce and I want to be able to fill out the application honestly to take this exam and be a lawyer and so we kind of divorced by mail and that was an end of a certain part of my life but not really because we have children together and my daughter would go out to California and see him but he was becoming a very different kind of person more withdrawn more sullen and probably full of regrets I'm not sure because I moved to California I mean moved from California to Connecticut and I never went back to California I finished college I finished law school I worked in New York and eventually about 25 years ago I went and I was hired at Emory Law School and moved down to Atlanta and I'm there I don't regret anything really the good the bad and the ugly it's all part of what makes life happen and it's part of family it's part of struggle you don't get out here a lot you don't get out so I would say that the goals and the methods of those who were fighting in South America who were fighting against colonialism in Africa were inspiring and connected African-American black people because of that being taunted and denounced and called Congolese in this so the African Liberation struggle was something we identified with movements for social justice we identified with and the world in fact was changing I don't think I really focus so much because I was trying to change my own life but the world was changing Liberation was the term that we used a few years ago I was asked to give a talk at the University of Chicago and in my talk I mentioned how like I'm doing here how much we wanted to change the world and one lady came up after and she was I mean she was younger than me and she said you did change the world into the collective view some people actually think it was changed dare to struggle dare to win was one of our slogans and it is a era of rich histories rich legacies a lot of which is suppressed how many of you know who is Robert Williams one he's a historian probably right Robert Williams lived in Monroe, North Carolina he was a veteran and he wrote a newspaper and he was he created a rifle club in the NAACP and he was teaching young men how to shoot and I have a poster of him he's showing his wife how to shoot he knew how to shoot and he was a big guy and he walked around town he got run out of the country he went to Cuba and then he went to China and eventually he came back to live in Detroit but nobody really knew who Robert Williams was but Robert Williams had a book it was called Negros with Guns it's about that big and he talks about the struggle in Monroe, North Carolina and how he was had these gun clubs and how he was challenging the violent races in North Carolina and Eldridge was passing out these books to all the Panthers and one little small detail I'm so impressed that I discovered my mother's sister when she finished college was looking for a job teaching and someone had taken a job teaching high school I believe in Monroe, North Carolina this is in the 1930s or 40s my aunt is about five foot one very petite but there was a job and so the lady who left why did she leave because of the clan it's insane up there and my aunt went and took that job that was our first job and I said wow I didn't know that I didn't know that so we discover connections both that are political and social and family that are all about change development and power and it seems that perhaps enthusiasm for such kind of change has worn down I think we have to take into full consideration what they call the drug wars the drug wars against young black men the drug wars are imprisoning mass imprisonment of young black men that didn't begin until the 70s when we were growing up it wasn't that much difference you did this crime you go to jail but it got to the point where a whole lot of black boys are going to jail a lot of them this is after bush comes in Eldridge called it bushwhacking that's what's happening so what I'm going to conclude is that we can't return to that past but we can study it we can learn from it learn from the victories learn from the defeats successes and understand what the goals for black liberation women's liberation social justice human rights work that's what's important what were the goals what did you expect to do who did it how did they do it read the books there's so many books out there that people who are part of these movements have written but I think a lot of them are overlooked particularly if it's about Panthers I mean when the Panthers write the book I have a whole bookcase full of books about or by Panthers but that's not what you call the best seller if it's a best seller that's another quality I said that my father was a sociologist many many many times he would say that the America the way America will become a just society is when everybody is brown and that's what he thought was going to happen in the future so we're all going to be a little more brown and then we'll have a different dynamic he'd worked in the elevation of poor farmers he'd worked for the TBA Association he'd worked in the voting mics movement in Texas he became a foreign service officer in India and the Philippines and West Africa he was a real smart guy maybe he was right thank you thank you so much Kathleen yeah do you want to see them we don't really have time for questions however Kathleen's going to be here for a few minutes so if any of you have anything you'd like to ask her feel free to come up