Eldridge Cleaver Quotes
I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.
Eldridge Cleaver, 1935-1998, Community Organizer and Civil Rights Leader, Founder, Black Panther Party, Quoted in Time, June 14, 1999
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He was not only an atheist himself, but he was a major opponent of organized religion which he regarded as one or the major initiators and drivers of slavery, segregation and discrimination. For this reason he was critical of Martin Luther King—{583307}. His irreligiosity had always prevented his gaining much support from his fellow African Americans even though a great writer like H. L. Menken considered Schuyler, "the best writer in America".
This phrase was also to be used over 100 years later by Malcolm X. See {624101} and {38291}.
His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.
Booth was the younger son of a very prominent Northern family of actors. His older brother was considered the greatest American actor, and the rest of the family were abolitionists and vehement Union supporters. They found young John’s views reprehensible.
His solution was not to change the prejudice or improve the opportunity for Blacks but to have complete separation of the races. See {625687}.
He was criticizing the other major Black leader of the time, Booker T. Washington. See {625803} for the kind of position that angered Du Bois.
He was elected to Parliament while in jail and never took his seat as he died of a hunger strike in jail.
Parker and other escaped slaves in Christiana fought off slave catchers and killed the slave owner leading them. Charged with treason, he escaped to Canada with his family and lived there the rest of his life. While not a polished writer, after he himself had escaped and went to Christiana and leaned to read and write. He wrote this narrative of his life as a slave—one of the few written works we have from slaves.
Christian had just briefed the President about the riots in many cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Christian had expressed surprise that the Blacks were so violent.
In the 1930s African Americans who traveled were subject to countless humiliations whenever the sought hotels, rooming houses, restaurants and other accommodations. Gas stations would not allow them to use bathrooms and they were reduced to using open fields. Traveling and vacationing was, for Blacks, humiliating. Wikipedia: “Green reviewed hotels and restaurants that did business with African Americans during the time of Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the United States. He printed 15,000 copies each year. In the 1930s, Green began his work by compiling data on stores in the New York area that accepted black travelers, and published his first guide in 1936. Similar guides had been published for Jewish travelers, who sometimes faced discrimination. Green's guide was so popular that he immediately began to expand its coverage the next year to other US destinations, adding hotel and restaurants as well.”
Scott was then the Special Advisor on Negro Affairs to the Secretary of War in the Woodrrow Wilson administration. Wilaon hs commited U. S. Troops to fight oversease to "make the world safe for democracy", but many blacks and whites also saw gross hypocricy in asking Negores to fight for a Jim Crow, segregated America. See the related quotation 644805. Scott was also the major aide to Booker T, Washington, one of the leading Negro educators but a very pliable man on equal rights for the Blacks. The problem for the administration was much greater than that of WWII where the president was seen as very sympathetic to Blacks while Wilson was himself a racist. And in WWII the fight against the Nazis was a fight agaisnt racial supremacy. So this quotation and Scott's role was very important to the administration.
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party.
