Kathleen Cleaver is an African-American educator, lawyer, writer, and
activist. She has spent most of her life participating in the human rights
struggle. Her father was a sociology professor at Wiley College and her mother
held a degree in Mathematics. With her father's work, the family spent much of
her early years abroad in Liberia, the Philippines and Sierra Leone. Cleaver
completed high school at the Georgia School in Philadelphia in 1963.
As a college sophomore, Cleaver dropped out of Barnard College in 1966 to
work full-time with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee where she
served in the Campus Program. From 1967 to 1971, Cleaver was the communications
secretary of the Black Panther Party, the first woman member of their Central
Committee. She married Eldridge Cleaver in 1967. After sharing years of exile
with her former husband, she returned to the United States in late 1975. She
graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale College in 1984, and
was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
After receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989, Cleaver became an
associate at the New York law firm of Cravath, Swain and Moore. Afterwards, she
served as a clerk for the late Judge A. Leon Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Third Circuit. While an assistant professor of law at Emory
University, she served on the Georgia's Supreme Court Commission on Racial and
Ethnic Bias in the Courts and became a board member of the Atlanta-based
Southern Center for Human Rights. She has devoted many years to the defense of
Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a former Black Panther Party leader who won his habeas
corpus petition in 1997 after spending 27 years in prison for a murder he did
not commit.
Cleaver has been a visiting faculty member at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School
of Law in New York City, the Graduate School of Yale College and Sarah Lawrence
College, where she was the Joanne Woodward Professor of Public Policy during
1999. She has taught legal ethics, litigation, torts, a legal history seminar
entitled "The American Law of Slavery and Anti-Slavery" and a course on Women
in the Black Freedom Movement. Currently, she is a Senior Research Associate at
the Yale Law School and executive producer of the International Black Panther
Film Festival.
Cleaver has won fellowships at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College,
the W.E.B. DuBois institute of Harvard University and the Center for Historical
Analysis at Rutgers University. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture and the Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library
also gave her fellowships to complete the book of memoirs that she is working
on, Memoirs of Love and War.
Her writing has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including
Ramparts, The Black Panther, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe and
Transition. She has contributed essays to several books, including
Critical Race Feminism, Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror,
The Promise of Multiculturalism: Education and Autonomy in the 21st Century: A
New Political Science Reader and The Black Panther Party Reconsidered.
Cleaver has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Liberation,
Imagination and the Black Panther Party (Routledge, 2001).
