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SOUL ON ICE by Eldridge Cleaver. 210 pages. A Ramparts Book. McGraw-Hill...
Prisons are traditional finishing schools of writers and revolutionaries. Eldridge Cleaver is a product of both the black ghettos and the California penal system. Convicted of a marijuana charge at 18 and of assault with intent to kill at 22, Cleaver spent most of the twelve years between 1954 and 1966 in Soledad, Folsom, and San Quentin state prisons. And now, at 32, he is a Ramparts staff writer and a "fulltime revolutionary in the struggle for black liberation in America...
Large Hatred. It is Cleaver's thesis-as it is James Baldwin's, among others-that the root cause of racial prejudice in America is sexual. He argues that as a result of the Negro's years of servility, the black male has been systematically robbed of his masculinity. Thus "castrated," the Negro also has been denied his development as a positive intellectual and social force. There is nothing really very new in Cleaver's analysis or black militant ideology. There is the familiar castigating of white liberals, the spewing forth of raw and undigested hate...
Indeed, for all his rage, Cleaver himself cannot help noting that the Negro male spirit is inexorably and literally shaking loose in the twist and the "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!" of the Beatles-a musical style that was hijacked, he says, from Ray Charles. The Beatles, argues Cleaver, constitute a "soul by proxy"; they are the middlemen between the white mind and the Negro body. In oversimplified terms, this suggests that the more the white man learns to shake his body and loosen up, the more he will penetrate and come to understand the Negro psyche. An interesting thought-but will...
...meat cleaver of sudden death on Broadway hit Oliver Hailey in 1966 when his play, First One Asleep, Whistle, a lumpy porridge of marriage and adultery, closed on its opening night. Hailey, 35, does not believe he could have survived the blow to his playwriting morale except that he had already completed Who's Happy Now?, over which he had brooded for ten years. His father had been a butcher, who frequently moved the family from one small Texas town to another-"those Panhandle towns where the main street goes on and on and on, and there...