"As I sat there with the Cleavers, I thought somewhere in our history of hatred and death for one another, there must be an even greater place for courage and love.”
–Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks, Eldridge Cleaver and His Wife, Kathleen, Algiers, Algeria, 1970
Kathleen Neal Cleaver has traveled internationally since childhood. In 1967 she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and has continued to engage in human rights work to free wrongfully imprisoned activists and to advance social justice. She became an early leader in the original Black Panther Party (1967), and in 1970 collaborated with her late husband Eldridge Cleaver to establish the Black Panther’s International Section in Algeria.
Kathleen Cleaver graduated summa cum laude from Yale College in 1982, and earned a J.D. at Yale Law School in 1989. She is a member of the faculty at Emory Law School in Atlanta, Georgia. Her writings have been published in numerous books, magazines, and newspapers, including Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party (2001) which she co-edited with George Katsiaficas, and as the editor of Eldridge Cleaver’s Target Zero: A Life in Writing (2006). Kathleen Cleaver has appeared in numerous documentary films, most recently Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, directed by Stanley Nelson (2015).
