Eldridge Cleaver, leading member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) during the 1960s, came to fame because of his ability to organize black Americans and garner national attention for his radical views promoting a black socialist government. He was convicted on rape and drug possession charges as a teenager in 1957 and spent time in jail where he read the works of Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, Lenin and William Du Bois. Only one year after his release from jail, he once again found himself on the wrong side of the law and spent his second incarceration studying civil rights and the writings of Malcolm X. His personal pursuit of "the truth" set the stage for a radical national movement.

During his second incarceration he wrote a memoir, later published in 1968, called Soul on Ice. In his book he admits to raping black women, which were only "practice," before he moved on to raping white women, which was "an insurrectionary act." This book established him as one of the most significant political figures amongst the radical African American community, and the New York Times claimed his book "had a tremendous impact on an intellectual community radicalized by the civil rights movement, urban riots, the war in Vietnam and campus rebellions," and further hailed this work "as an authentic voice of black rage in a white-ruled world."

Maxwell Geismar, a radical writer who wrote the foreword to Soul On Ice explains Cleaver as a man who dissected "the deepest and most cherished notions of our personal and social behavior" with a level of courage few had, and that this "soul of a black folk" became the best mirror for which to view white Americans.

After his release from prison, he established the Black House in San Francisco, a "cultural center" for local black radicals including Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, co-founders of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver soon became the Minister of Information for the BPP, an organization that espoused communist and Black Nationalist ideology, participated in brutality against law enforcement and confrontational and militant practices. With the help of Cleaver, the BPP established the "Ten Point Program," a list of rules that all BPP members had to abide by. Such ideas included the notion that the black community will never enjoy freedom until they fully control all the institutions in their local communities, and that the federal government is responsible to provide every black American full employment and income, housing, free education, free health care and required the release of all black Americans from the entire penal system.

In 1967, Huey Newton killed Oakland police officer John Frey, and during the height of the BPP, reports claim 15 police officers and BPP members were killed during their conflicts. In 1968, Cleaver taught an experimental course at the University of California at Berkeley and married Kathleen Neal, who later became an American teacher as well.

After a police ambush in 1968 that killed 17-year old BPP member Bobby Hutton, Elderidge surrendered to the Oakland police and returned to prison on attempted murder charges. While on bail, he fled to Cuba and Algeria, countries that espoused the communist ideology and third world liberation ideology he spent years studying and preaching. During his triumphant tour, he broke ties with the BPP and established the Revolutionary's People Communication Network in part because he wanted the BPP to continue down a path of escalated armed resistance, whereas Newton desired more pragmatic socialistic changes that would welcome in the non-violent black community.

But after a growing conflict between the Algerian government and Cleaver's entourage, Cleaver later wrote, "I had heard so much rhetoric about their glorious leaders and their incredible revolutionary spirit that even to this very angry and disgruntled American, it was absurd and unreal." He left Algeria and moved his family to France where he claims he converted to Christianity. In 1977, he returned to America and surrendered to the FBI, pleading guilty to assault charges from the shootout with police that killed Hutton.

After his return to America, Cleaver led a colorful life: a "born again" Christian, a professed Mormon and LDS church member, a business owner (inventing the "Cleaver sleeve" for men's dress pants), further run-ins with the law for cocaine possession, Bible school teacher, a Republican Party member, self-avowed conservative and an unsuccessful candidate for a California senate seat. Once a hero to radicals, he became a joke and an afterthought to the advancing socialist organizations of the 1980s.

Late in his life during a Berkeley City Council meeting, he demanded that the group recite the Pledge of Allegiance, a practice abandoned years prior by the council.

"Shut up, Eldridge," Mayor Gus Newport snapped, "or we'll have you removed."

Eldridge Cleaver died in 1988, reportedly due to a losing battle with diabetes and prostate cancer.

The left wants to portray his political conversion something akin to a hallucinogenic breakdown. The right wants to portray his transformation as the prodigal son returning to American principles. I believe he fell somewhere in between, but whether his transformation was genuine or not eclipses the larger point. He tested his years of political intellectualism in the real world, and he chose to return to America. Somewhere overseas he decided he would rather be a prisoner in America than continue a prisoner of communist rule.

Cleaver once stated, "You're either part of the problem or part of the solution." He represented both. And the brilliance of American citizenship is the right to be both. Years of communist promulgation underneath the protections of the constitution eventually led Eldridge Cleaver to return to the basic principles often taken for granted and overshadowed by "enlightened" thinking. He realized, as I hope the rest of us will, that we got it right the first time.