Eldrdge Cleaver dies in hospital

From Reuters, 3 May 1998

POMONA, Calif. (Reuters) - Eldridge Cleaver, the 1960s Black Panther leader whose book "Soul on Ice" became a manual for the U.S. black power movement, died Friday at age 62, a hospital in this Los Angeles suburb said.

Leslie Porras, spokeswoman for the Pomona Valley Medical Center, said Cleaver died early Friday but declined to give any details on the cause of death, citing a family request for privacy.

Cleaver went through many transformations from convict to revolutionary to conservative. He ran for president of the United States as a revolutionary and once tried to win the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, running as a conservative.

He sprang to national prominence as minister of information, or spokesman, for the Black Panthers, a black nationalist group famous for its armed confrontations with police. He joined the group a few months after it was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966.

Cleaver fled the United States after a shootout with police in Oakland in 1968, living in Cuba, Algeria and France before returning to the United States after a seven-year exile.

"Soul on Ice," an autobiographical indictment of white society, was central to the black power movement of the 1960s.