Kathleen Neal Cleaver (born May 13, 1945) is an American law professor and activist, known for her involvement with the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party, a political and revolutionary. Juette Kathleen Neal was born in Dallas, Texas, on May 13, 1945. Her parents were both activists and college graduates of the University of Michigan. Three years after Cleaver was born, her father accepted a job as the director of the Rural Life Council of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and they moved to a predominantly years later, Ernest joined the Foreign Service. The family moved abroad and lived in such countries as India, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Philippines. Cleaver attended a Quaker boarding school near Philadelphia, George School, which had just been desegregated.[1] She graduated with honors in 1963. She continued her education at Oberlin College, and later transferred to Barnard College. In 1966, she left college for a secretarial job with the New York office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after her friend from childhood, Sammy Younge, had been murdered by white supremacists. The shift of the movement was characterized by the change from "Freedom Now" to "Black Power."[2][3] Kathleen was in charge of organizing a student conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At the conference, she met the minister of information for the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver, who was speaking at the conference. As a result of their involvement with the Black Panther Party, the Cleavers were often the target of police investigations. The Cleavers' apartment was raided in 1968 before a Panther rally by the San Francisco Tactical Squad on the suspicion of hiding guns and ammunition. Later that year, Eldridge Cleaver was said to have staged an ambush of Oakland police officers during which two police officers were injured. Cleaver was wounded and fellow Black Panther member Bobby Hutton was killed in a shootout following the initial exchange of gunfire.[10] Charged with attempted murder, he jumped bail to flee to Cuba and later went to Algeria. In 1969 Kathleen reunited with Eldridge in Algeria,[13] which was a single-party socialist regime with revolutionary Third World credentials, though also increasingly authoritarian. Cleaver gave birth to their first son, Maceo, soon after arriving in Algeria. A year later in 1970, she gave birth to their daughter Joju Younghi Cleaver, while the family was in North Korea. Kathleen Cleaver left Eldridge in 1981 and went back to university, receiving a full scholarship from Yale University. She graduated in 1984, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.[14] In 1987, she divorced Eldridge Cleaver. She had decided she wanted to become a lawyer as she watched the Watergate Hearing in the early 1970s.[5] Therefore, she continued her education by getting her J.D. degree from Yale Law School in 1989. After graduating, she worked for the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and followed this with numerous jobs including: law clerk in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia under Judge A. Higginbotham, the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta, visiting faculty member at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, the Graduate School of Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College.
In 2005, Cleaver was selected an inaugural Fletcher Foundation Fellow. She then worked as a Senior Research Associate at the Yale Law School, and a Senior Lecturer in the African American Studies department at Yale University. She is currently serving as senior lecturer at Emory University School of Law.[14] In addition to her career, she works on numerous campaigns, including freedom for death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal and habeas corpus for Geronimo Pratt. Cleaver has also worked for many years on and published a memoir titled Memories of Love and War.[15] Cleaver has had her writing appear in multiple newspapers and magazines including Ramparts, The Black Panther, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, and Transition, and she has contributed scholarly essays to the books Critical Race Feminism, Critical White Studies, The Promise of Multiculturalism, and The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. She has also helped edit essays and a writing done by Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in the Writing.[16] She and other former members of the Black Panther Party continue to meet and discuss issues.
