GATES: Eldridge, now, thirty years later, the smoke has cleared, bodies are buried, people have moved on. Was it worth it? I mean was the Panther movement worth it? Was it a good thing?
CLEAVER: It was a good thing and like all things, there was good and bad, but nothing like what this nitwit, Horowitz, is talking about because that is not where we were coming from. And I regret the way that the Party was repressed because it left a lot of unfinished business because we had planned to make a transition to the political arena and we would have been able to transmute that violence and that legacy into legitimate and peaceful channels. As it was they chopped off the head and left the body there armed. That’s why all these young bloods out there now, they’ve got the rhetoric but without the political direction and they’ve got the guns. A man told me in Berkeley, said– ‘Eldridge,the two most dangerous demographics in the Bay Area right now are young black men with guns and middle-aged white women with Volvos.’
GATES: You’re crazy.
CLEAVER: They’re taking out more people than anything else.
GATES: Will history judge you and your contemporaries from the ’60s — Karenga, Rap, Stokely, Angela, the whole gang, Julian Bond — favorably, do you think?
CLEAVER: I think they will. I think they will give us Fs where we deserve them and they’ll give us As where we deserve them and they’re going to give Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver an A plus.
Article First Appeared @ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/ecleaver.html