Word: cleaver
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...There is in James Baldwin's work the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of whites that one can find in the writings of any black American writer of note in our time." --Eldridge Cleaver from Soul...
...most famous and certainly the two most adroit writers of the sixties' movement, Eldridge Cleaver and James Baldwin, have aged in remarkably different ways. Cleaver, a former Black Panther, is now a strict conservative who bitterly renounces any kind of struggle against the establishment. Baldwin, however, continues to support the spirit of the civil rights movement from his self-improved exile in France Whereas Baldwin was attacked by some, most notably Cleaver, for his emphasis on education over activism during the 1960s, now it is Cleaver whose commitment to black equality appears tepid. And while their relative militancy has been...
...understand why these two great writers so far apart today, it helps to look at the difference in their attitudes back in the sixties. Cleaver's own radicalism seems to have burned him out and left him to fall into the secure lap of his arch-enemy, the right wing. Cleaver was always an activist first and academian second. Back then, he characterized himself as "a full time revolutionary in the struggle for black liberation in America." His posts as chairman of the Black House Council and Minister Of Information for the Panthers continually placed...
...Cleaver's objections to Baldwin, then, stem primarily from the fact that Baldwin, like Malcolm X just before his death, believed that the Black movement should concentrate on educating all races, especially young people, about suffering of Blacks and the injustices brought upon them. This focus was a direct repudiation of the factics of action groups like the Panthers that tried to overthrow society. The Fire Next Time, unlike Soul On Ice, is not concerned with history or politics but rather with how it feels to be an outsider, to be Black in a white world. Baldwin believed...
...tiger has grown tired and has decided to struggle up in front of the white man's fire. Cleaver currently writes for stodgy publications like Buckley's The National Review. He roundly criticized Jesse Jackson's Presidential campaign, calling him a "ruthless politician on the make." Last year, he ran as a conservative independent in a race for the House of the Representatives in the eight district of California, hoping to split than Black vote with the incumbent Democrat. Ronald Dellums, and allow the Republican challenger to sneak in the back door. Along with the rest of his former opinions...