GATES: Eldridge, how would the world look, how would America look, if the Panthers had won?
CLEAVER: I think the only way we could have won is that the American people would have revolted against the status quo. We had the anti-war movement and the black movement coming together for a better America. Now, victory in those terms would have meant that we would have been able to have a group of people who could get control of the government and administer it. But I do not think that we had a winning scenario. We never dreamed that we would be able to overthrow the American government. We didn’t see that as our task. We saw that as the task of the survivors. Our job was to tear down the status quo and leave it to other people on how to rebuild because it was not possible to seize control of the government and install our people. That’s reserved for banana republics. We had no illusions on that point and so victory, in our sense, was to get the laws passed that were passed. They started passing voter rights acts and all this kind of stuff, new civil rights bill, so we saw ourselves as providing backbone that was missing from Dr. Martin Luther King’s nonviolent movement and we did not think that movement would be rewarded.
It’s like the NAACP. NAACP used to be considered a wild eyed radical organization until Martin Luther King came along and then they became acceptable and Martin Luther King was the devil. So when we came along Martin Luther King started looking better. To some people. Obviously not to all. Because when the killing started it was to liquidate the plan hatched here in Boston, or I should say in Massachusetts, between the Kennedy dynasty and Martin Luther King.
Their plan was for Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to work together because together they could turn out the total black vote and then with the votes that the Kennedys could deliver they would have been able to establish a dynasty that would have ruled this country into the next century. That was their plan and that is why they were liquidated. The two Kennedy brothers killed, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X killed so that plan could not come into fruition. That was the scenario, that is why they were killed we do not understand that. The only one that really broke it down was this guy Sorensen who was the Kennedy choice for the CIA, but the establishment would not allow him to take control. Maybe it was the FBI, he was supposed to become head of the FBI.
GATES: Theodore Sorensen?
CLEAVER: Yeah. He was a speech writer. And so Kennedy tried to get him appointed head of the FBI and they wouldn’t do it and so they were murdered and so the powers that be murdered them and they made — if you look at all four of those assassinations they were textbook. They were murdered and the finger was pointed at some obvious enemy in all four cases. In all four cases, baloney. They were killed by the powers that rule this country who did not want to see the political dynasty of the Kennedys take control and last into the next century. They were still paranoid from how long Roosevelt was in power. Remember they changed the laws so that he couldn’t run again and he obliged them by dying and so they were very fearful that this could be repeated, and it was on the way to being repeated but they knocked them out because by now Martin Luther King would have been president. That was their scenario.
GATES: Eldridge, how is it different to be black today in 1997 than it was when you were in that basement in Oakland 30 years ago? We have the largest black middle class that we’ve ever had in history. 45% of all black children live at or beneath the poverty line. It’s like we have the best of times and the worst of times. What’s that all about?
CLEAVER: That’s because our black middle class has followed an assimilationist ethic. They have become white and they’ve adopted all the worst features of America in terms of not caring about the other people. Like the white ruling class never cared about poor white people, let alone about black people and other minorities and these blacks who are following W.E.B. Du Bois’ formula of educating that 10% who will then come back and lift up the rest of the people — the argument that was had between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington was over how we’re going to manage this thing.
Booker T. said we’ve got to teach these people how to work, then they’ll get jobs, then they’ll be able to afford education and then they can do that. And Du Bois said no, we’ve got to concentrate on the intellectual development of the people and get 10% of our people educated and then they can help the other people, but if you just learn a trade and you don’t know what’s going on, that ain’t going nowhere.
I say both of them were right. We need both of what they promised and we’ve got both of what they promised. But they didn’t have a unifying vision and consequently we’ve got an enlarged black bourgeoisie but they have departed from the basis of the black bourgeoisie according to E. Franklin Frazer. This was the professional classes and that was their economic base but the progress that has taken place has given a new economic base to the black bourgeoisie, to the expanded black — now their economic base is political as well as up front economic and they still have a professional class but it is been expanded because you have a lot of black people with a whole lot of money coming from these other pursuits.
Add to that, the million-dollar salaries to football players, basketball players and baseball players, not that they’re doing anything constructive with all of that money, but they have it. But they didn’t bring it back to pull the other people up and so it’s like the devil take the hindmost. That is what we’re dealing with so that the black bourgeoisie is as corrupt and immoral as the white bourgeoisie and that is the problem.