Soul On Ice

Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice is a memoir and collection of essays written while the author served time in Folsom Prison. The essays were first published in Ramparts magazine in 1965, and then collected in book form after Cleaver’s release in 1968. His essays were instrumental in forming the philosophies and ideas behind the black power movement. After his release from prison, Cleaver became a prominent member of the Black Panthers, advocating urban guerilla warfare against a corrupt police force. However, Cleaver’s surprising late-in-life turn from the radical left towards conservative politics casts him and his memoir in a different light.

Soul on Ice is divided into four parts that describe the author’s journey from a “supermasculine” but disadvantaged young man into a radical Black liberationist. While in prison, Cleaver experienced a political awakening by reading the works of Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and other political and philosophical writers.

The first section, “Letters from Prison,” discusses Cleaver’s history of crime and experience in prisons. At the time of writing, Cleaver, then in his thirties, had served time in youth detention centers and several stints in prison. He writes of his felony drug charge for marijuana at the age of 18, which landed him in federal prison for two years. Later, he is convicted of rape and assault with intent to murder-- a charge Cleaver freely admits to in his essays.



Controversially, he describes his way of thinking while he was still a free man: that the rape of white women was an “insurrectionary act” for a black man to commit, a way to take revenge on the systematic oppression of African-Americans in the US. Cleaver also admits to raping multiple Black women while in the ghetto for “practice.” At the time of writing, however, Cleaver renounces rape and his reasoning for committing it. He confesses to taking a long look at himself and realizing his acts were removed from civilization and humanity. He says that with his justification gone, his moral structure collapsed, and he started writing these essays to save himself.

The second section, “Blood of the Beast,” expounds on race relations in America and the ideology of the Black Liberationist movement. Cleaver discusses the history of race in America, the civil rights movement, race riots, and the Vietnam War. He angrily discusses the unjustified murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy famously assaulted and lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman, and other heinous acts committed against African-Americans.  Cleaver also contrasts a discussion on Martin Luther King, Jr. with a section on white heroes. He claims here that the white race has lost its heroes, and that its heroes of the past have become villains to modern eyes because of their racist beliefs or actions—such as cowboys who massacred American Indians.

Part three, “Prelude to Love - Three Letters,” includes two love letters from Cleaver to his attorney, Beverly Axelrod, and one letter from Axelrod to Cleaver. Axelrod, a notable civil rights attorney who often represented Black Panther members and other activists, is the one who advocated for Cleaver’s work to be published. Axelrod took a collection of Cleaver’s letters to Ramparts for publication while Cleaver was still serving time. The tone in these letters contrasts with Cleaver’s anger throughout the rest of the book. Here, he is sentimental and effusive, and so is Axelrod in her reply.



In the final section, “White Woman, Black Man,” Cleaver discusses his views on gender, sexuality, and black masculinity. He describes the racial divide in America as one between body (black people, after centuries of slave labor) and mind (white people, after centuries of slave ownership and positions of intellectual power). He expresses the idea that black people are left mentally impotent, unable to use their minds after so long a time of being used only for their bodies and physical strength. Furthermore, he claims that women are like bargaining chips in the ongoing racial war: white men feel that white women belong to them, and black men are equally possessive of black women. He argues that each side seeks to gain control and sexual power over women.

At the time of publication, the New York Times called Soul on Ice one of the best ten books of the year. The essays helped to ignite the Black Panther movement, and Cleaver rose to prominence alongside Huey Newton. Shortly after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Cleaver led an ambush on of Oakland police officers, after which he was charged with attempted murder and fled, first to Cuba and then to Algeria, for a period of political exile. Cleaver and Newton had a falling-out over the right direction for the party which ended with Cleaver breaking from the movement. Cleaver returned to the US and surrendered himself to the FBI in 1977. His wife later said he never fully recovered from his time in exile, and that he was “profoundly changed.”

In 1978, he wrote the follow-up to Soul on Fire detailing disillusionment with the Black Panther party and his conversion to born-again Christianity. But he continued to change himself in the following years. He founded a short-lived hybrid religion between Christianity and Islam, briefly considered joining Sun Myung Moon’s cult, and was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1983. In the 1980s, Cleaver changed affiliation from a radical black liberationist to a conservative Republican, leaving his ultimate legacy in question. Cleaver’s views on women and sexuality have also aged poorly. But the authenticity of his voice and his rage continues to shine a light on the black experience during the 1960s.