Interview with Eldridge Cleaver

GATES: What did you do?

 

CLEAVER: [UNINTEL]. I’m down there, they got shotguns and pistols in my face, man. I figured they going to shoot us. I could not imagine living through that. But this other cop, he started complaining about what they had just done, and that was the last of that and then they took me and put me in that van and I knew from Huey Newton’s trial that all of the police calls are tape recorded automatically so whoever was talking to these cops asked them who you got, who’s in there? So they were saying we don’t know who he is. So I said it’s Eldridge Cleaver. I wanted to get that on that tape, see, and so then they took me down a little side street. Two of them suckers got in there, they started beating me and I have no doubt that they meant to kill me, but then it came over the radio that this cop who was driving was telling “a couple officers in the back slapping this guy up” and so the squawk box told them to stop it. And so they kept on and he told them your order is to stop that, and so they wouldn’t stop. And so he told them they won’t stop. So that guy said something, like in some kind of code — that was the second time I heard that code — and whatever that code meant, boy, it froze them right in their — they stopped right then, man, and they took me on in.

 

GATES: Otherwise you’d be dead?

 

CLEAVER: Yeah, I’d be dead.

GATES: Wow.

 

GATES: Was the civil rights movement a success?

 

CLEAVER: I think it was a success it terms of the goals that it espoused. That was to break down the color barrier if public accommodations access to the institutions and things like that. But the big failure of the civil rights movement was that it did not have an economic plank because while we got access to schools and to Hot Dog Stands and all that, the burning issue right now is economic freedom and economic justice and economic democracy. The NAACP didn’t touch that. They had no plan for that. When Martin Luther King was turning towards the economic arena in Nashville supporting the strike of the garbage man, he was murdered. I applaud my country for the changes that we have undertaken in these areas of civil rights. But where the big problem still remains is with the economic system. If you would call a meeting today to talk about segregation, wouldn’t nobody come but Louis Farrakhan and David Dukes. But if you call a meeting to talk about the money, it would be standing room only. It wouldn’t all be black because the money is funny for everybody, right. That’s where the rubber hits the road; that’s what we’ve got to deal with.

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