Word: cleavers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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EVERY SO OFTEN, one man writes the kind of book which grasps a thousand little threads of fact and forcefully weaves them together into a pattern so clear, that the reader wonders why he had not seen it all along. Eldridge Cleaver has done just this in Soul...
...Cleaver has a deliberate control of words which he drops on the page like little bits of acid. "The policeman and the soldier will violate your person, smoke you out with various gases. Each will shoot you, beat your head and body with sticks and clubs, with rifle butts, run you through with bayonets, shoot holes in your flesh, kill...
...Cleaver feels the white man in America made the black slaves into superstrong bodies, stripping them of their minds. In the process, according to Cleaver, white men became competent administrators and thinkers, but became alienated from their bodies and burdened with a sense of physical impotence. Such a split between mind and body arises in any class society, but can usually be overcome. In this country, however, the split has been made permanent by racial division. It is this overcoming of the racial division which holds the key to restoring the sanity so desperately needed by both white and black...
...other side of the solution involves the blacks' search to think for themselves. The desire for courses in black history, the political and economic awareness spreading in the ghetto, the black banks, local control of schools--all these, Cleaver would say, are efforts by black people to fight off a feeling of mental impotence which is just as serious as the white alienation from its body...
...Everybody says that the two problems facing our society are racism and the war. Cleaver says it. Gregory says it. The New Left says it." She paused to light a cigarette. "More and more, however, their protest is turning inward, turning from racism and the war to the society which has brought them on and sanctions them. The system itself is at stake--and the issue is the immense gap between the way people could live and the way people do live." Her voice lowered...