SOURCE: "Complex 'Black Voice' Called Eldridge Cleaver," in Wall Street Journal, Vol. CLXIII, No. 51, March 13, 1969, p. 14.

[In the following review, Raggio explicates the main points of Cleaver's agenda in Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, separating his rhetoric from his insights on race relations.]

Eldridge Cleaver is not a man who errs, in life or in prose, on the side of caution. At age 20 he began a systematic program of raping white women after coming to the conclusion that Negro males had a hang-up about them. American society, he reasoned, fostered the white woman as an ideal while forbidding the black man to touch her, and she thus became a symbol of the dignity and freedom he did not have. Activist Cleaver's solution was to perfect his "insurrcctionary" technique in the black slums, then cross the tracks to touch the untouchable.

Apprehended, Cleaver spent nine years in California prisons. His...