On Becoming By Eldridge Cleaver Folsom Prison June 25, 1965 2MRIXIIR ½JX] JSYV [LIR - [EW ]IEVW SPH MW LIPH XS FI E GVYGMEP turning point in the history of the Afro-American – for the U.S.A. as a whole – the year segregation was outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was also a crucial year for me because on June 18, 1954, I began serving a sentence in state prison for possession of marijuana. The Supreme Court decision was only one month old when I entered prison, and I do not believe that I had even the vaguest MHIE SJ MXW MQTSVXERGI SV LMWXSVMGEP WMKRM½GERGI &YX PEXIV XLI acrimonious controversy ignited by the end of the separatebut-equal doctrine was to have a profound effect on me. This controversy awakened me to my position in America and I began to form a concept of what it meant to be black in white America. Of course I’d always known that I was black, but I’d never really stopped to take stock of what I was involved in. I met life as an individual and took my chances. Prior to 1954, we lived in an atmosphere of Novocaine. Negroes found it necessary, in order to maintain whatever sanity they could, to remain somewhat aloof and detached from ‘the problem’. We accepted indignities and the mechanics of the apparatus of oppression without reacting by sitting-in or holding mass demonstrations. Nurtured by the ½VIW SJ XLI GSRXVSZIVW] SZIV WIKVIKEXMSR - [EW WSSR E¾EQI [MXL indignation over my newly discovered social status, and inwardly I turned away from America with horror, disgust, and outrage. In Soledad state prison, I fell in with a group of young blacks who, like myself, were in vociferous rebellion against what we perceived as a continuation of slavery on a higher plane. We cursed everything American – including baseball and hot dogs. All respect we may have had for politicians, preachers, lawyers, governors, Presidents, senators and congressmen was utterly destroyed as we watched them temporizing and compromising over right and wrong, over legality and illegality, over constitutionality and unconstitutionality. We knew that in the end what they were clashing over was us, what to do with the blacks, and whether or not to start treating us as human beings. I despised all of them. The segregationists were condemned out of hand, without even listening to XLIMV PSJX] ½RIP] [SZIR EVKYQIRXW The others I despised for wasting time in debates with the segregationists: why not just crush them, put them in prison – they were defying the PE[ [IVIR´X XLI]# - HI½IH XLI PE[ and they put me in prison. So why not put those dirty mothers in TVMWSR XSS# - LEH KSXXIR GEYKLX [MXL a shopping bag full of marijuana, a shopping bag full of love – I was in
At least one of Eldridge Cleaver’s contemporaries considered the black radical and author a ‘reincarnation’ of Malcolm X. But if Malcolm X was a kind of matinee idol, Eldridge Cleaver was an underground indie character actor. Cleaver’s criminal exploits and his explosive politics may not have been as cinematic as those of Malcolm X, but his life bore some interesting parallels to the black leader. Born on August 31, 1935, in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, Cleaver coasted through a dissolute adolescence, which began with petty crime and lead to his 1954 conviction for possession of marijuana. Cleaver was 18 years old the day he walked into California’s Soledad State Prison. Just a month earlier Brown vs. Board of Education had been decided in the United States Supreme Court, a decision that, until he was incarcerated, Cleaver had neither paid much attention to nor had cared much about. ‘I do not believe that I had even the vaguest idea of its importance SV LMWXSVMGEP WMKRM½GERGI ´ 'PIEZIV writes in ‘On Becoming’, an essay from his 1968 collection of essays, Soul on Ice. It was only later that the ruling and the controversy that followed ‘awakened me to my position in America and I began to form a concept of what it meant to be black in white America.’ Once awake, Cleaver was furious. He was furious because so much of white America was furious. In response to Brown vs. Board of Education,Virginia senator Harry Byrd Sr. organised the ‘Massive Resistance Movement’, which advocated and largely succeeded in closing schools rather than desegregating them. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus brought in the National Guard to prevent black students from walking into Little Rock High School, causing President Dwight Eisenhower to send in the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into their classes and to nationalise Arkansas’ National Guard.
the drouth
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