SOURCE: "Quite White," in New Statesman, Vol. 97, No. 2513, May 18, 1979, pp. 725-26.

[In the following review, Johnson recounts Cleaver's life as related in Soul on Fire.]

In November 1968 Eldridge Cleaver, the Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, jumped bail in California and absconded to Cuba. Cleaver, who had expounded at length his stirringly militant Black Power beliefs in the best-selling Soul on Ice, was then at the height of his notoriety. It was the era of the police shoot-outs with the Panthers, and brother Eldridge was talking more or less openly of carrying the struggle into regularised urban guerrilla warfare. From exile he continued to hatch similar plans. From their training center in Cuba the Panthers would launch an invasion of the US through Mexico, setting up guerrilla bases in the Rocky Mountain West, gradually expanding via the Alleghenies and Appalachians to the Blue Ridge Mountains …

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