GATES: It sounds like you’re saying we were better off in the 60s or under segregation than we are today. 
CLEAVER: No, I’m not saying that. A lot of people think that we were better off because we had more integrity to our black colleges and there were a lot of black businesses and all that, but that is like a tempest in a teapot. We are better off because we have more access, we have more mobility, but we have a problem which is a political problem because when the laws were passed to open up the political arena for black people the most visible leaders and the ones who were able to get those jobs were our protest leaders so what they did, they took our protest machinery and transformed it into their personal political machinery to get them reelected which stripped the black community of any kind of organizational machinery and consequently it left us floundering and treading water in a miserable state.
That is why the number one task that we have in the black community is a coup d’état against our present leadership to strip them from that machinery that controls the community so that new ideas and new people can percolate up and then we can have a new agenda. But because of the way that it’s controlled right now, the number one task of the black politician who’s got these position should be to politically educate the black community but they didn’t do that because they knew that if the black community was politically educated the first thing they would do would be to get rid of them.
So consequently the black community is devoid of any kind of democratic process. We’re under the dictatorship of the black bourgeoisie as it has never been before. And so they have federal money now to fund their political machine and keep any new people from moving, any new ideas from moving, and they’re not any more concerned with the poorer black people than the rich white politicians are concerned with poor white people.
GATES: We were talking about black leadership. What’s your take on the Million Man March and Minister Farrakhan?
CLEAVER: I think the Million Man March will go down in history as the defining episode for a generation of people and I know Minister Farrakhan personally and have known him for years. And my overall decision on Farrakhan is that the Afro-American people are not going to follow him anywhere and as General Colin Powell said in his famous commencement address at Howard University, he said that after what we’ve been through and after coming this far we cannot afford to take a detour through the swamps of hatred and that is the Achilles heel of Farrakhan is that the doctrine of the Nation of Islam is a racist doctrine and the Afro-American people are not racist people. We are anti-racist people.
We among all the people of the world have put up a valiant struggle against racism and for emancipation from a system based on racism and so that is the problem with Farrakhan. He needs to be born again. He needs a new vision. Somebody needs to talk to that guy. I tried to talk to him but he’s too slick. He won’t listen, you see.
I remember him when he first came along, when he was nothing but a pimp and a calypso singer and Malcolm X pulled him and let him sing his song which was A White Man’s Heaven Is A Black Man’s Hell and by singing that song at Malcolm X’s rallies every week he got to hear Malcolm X’s speech 1000 times so when Malcolm X was murdered, the show must go on so they were looking around for who could keep the show going. Farrakhan was there. He knew Malcolm’s speech word for word, he has a good mind and a good memory and he was able to do it because he was a showman from the beginning and so he was able to step into that vacuum, but the boy’s not creative and he’s blind sided so consequently he was not able to shuffle off that mortal coil which he should have done.
He should have not felt obligated to carry on the doctrine according to Elijah Mohammed but he did that to stay the hands of his rivals who were willing to do that in order to get the power. So they were calling him a revisionist for a long time. That is why he had to stick to what Elijah Mohammed was teaching and for that reason we cannot follow him because we don’t want to go where he’s going, and where he’s going is where all haters go and that’s into the garbage can of history and we’re not going with him.
GATES: What about Colin Powell?
CLEAVER: I think Colin Powell is a magnificent American and he is different from these other so-called leaders because he is not a protest leader. The man is an American leader, he’s an all-American leader, but because he has this Afro-American ancestry he appeals to black people but he also appeals to white people and that is the way it should be because we don’t need no narrow mentality person in the White House. We need a person who is an all-American and this brings me closer to my agenda. I have to apologize to Vice President Gore because he will not become president in the year 2000 —
GATES: Who will?
CLEAVER: Because he is too little too late. In the year 2000 the American people, are going to elect the first woman president of the United States of America and it’s not just going to be a woman, it’s going to be a mother because what is missing from our decision making process in this Old Boy network is the heart and the concerns of a mother and so I, along with a lot of other people, are going to make it happen. We don’t want to specify who is our choice right now because we have to get women to raise their self esteem and to realize and understand that there are a lot of women in America who are qualified to be president of the United States of America.
You would have to look up under a whole lot of rocks in America to find a woman as unqualified as these suckers we’ve been sending to Washington and women need to understand that and deal with that because we cannot go into a new millennium and a new century with the Old Boy network which is racist and misogynistic. We have got to go in there with a new deal and I hope that we will have time to tick off a few points that I feel are extremely important but I want to make sure you finish your questions first on this.