Part Two of the CVSP Forum

Kathleen Cleaver

Entitled "Un-American Acts: Kathleen Cleaver, St. Clair Bourne, and the Legacy of the Black Power Movement," the second and last installment of the Civilization Sequence Program forum organized by CASAR, drew a large and interested audience on May 27. In her lecture, Kathleen Cleaver, a law professor at Yale and Emory Universities, spoke of her experience as the first female communications secretary and the first female to sit in the inner circle of the Black Panther Party, the controversial African-American civil rights and self-defense resistance movement of the 1960s and 1970s. St. Clair Bourne, a pioneering African-American film maker and Emmy nominee, addressed issues of race and film production in the United States.

The forum began with a screening of William Klein's very rarely seen documentary, "Elridge Cleaver, Black Panther." The film, consisting mostly of footage from Elridge Cleaver's exile in Algiers in the 1970s, also included clips of Cleaver in America and footage of aggressions and uprisings around the world. In her presentation, Kathleen Cleaver, Elridge's ex-wife, did much to explain the film and the importance of the Black Panther's position in Algeria.

Though Algeria was an accidental destination for the exiled Cleaver and his then pregnant wife, owing to the country's political climate in 1970, it subsequently became a haven for a whole body of refugees and political dissidents. Arriving in the midst of the Pan-Arab African Cultural Festival, the transplanted Black Panthers found an atmosphere of cultural support and, thanks to the political work of Frantz Fanon, an anti-fascist consciousness very familiar to the Panther Party's sentiments. Kathleen Cleaver described the situation as a "tri-continental convergence," with Asia, Africa, and Latin America gaining a common consciousness towards the affirmation of oppressed people and a push for decolonization.

Bourne, on his part, spoke of his experiences in the world of filmmaking, and directly addressed some of the issues the Black Panthers faced in the 1960s, as well as those still extant. The main theme of his presentation, as well as of the film he showed, related to the complications of being a dissenting voice. He posed the question of when to speak out and risk censorship and when to play along with the status quo to gain the power of the system. Both Bourne and Cleaver engaged the audience in discussions of how to sustain organization outside the organization of the state.