Kathleen Neal Cleaver once sat at a table eating peppers with Martin Luther King Jr. and Black Panther Stokley Carmichael. With a napkin tucked into his shirt, King told Carmichael, “All revolutionaries like hot peppers.” “I’ll never forget that,” Cleaver said. The Office of Multicultural Affairs and the MLK Committee invited Cleaver, senior lecturer at Yale University’s African-American Studies Department, to be the commemorative speaker for the University’s 21st weeklong Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. Cleaver, Black Panther Party member, said it bothered her that the video clips of King shown during Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month were just a sampling of who he was and what he stood for. “If this was King, why was he killed?” she asked the audience. Cleaver, who was in elementary school when King arrived in Montgomery, Ala., said King transformed her life. When Cleaver was a teenager, she traveled to the Fellowship House in Pennsylvania to learn about nonviolent resistance to racial discrimination. “In high school in 1963 just before I graduated, when I was young and ideal, I became an avid supporter of nonviolent resistance,” she said. Cleaver asked her art teacher if she could speak to her classmates at an assembly at her high school. She talked to them about using peaceful methods. “All I wanted to do at this point was join the movement,” she said. “I wanted to be on the front lines.” Cleaver, who was the first woman in the Black Panther Party’s Central Committee, said she was in a Black Panther office in San Francisco on April 4, 1968, when she heard about King’s murder. She said everyone in the office fell silent. Cleaver’s husband Eldridge Cleaver told her to live with a friend in Berkley until the riots resulting from King’s death,calmed down. She later learned that her husband was wounded in a shootout with police in Oakland. He was arrested and taken to prison. “There wasn’t really any time for private mourning,” she said. Brittany Crockett, political science freshman, said she enjoyed the program. “It was wonderful to have a speaker that actually knew Dr. King,” she said. “She’s living history.”
—–Contact Angelle Barbazon at [email protected]