Eldridge Cleaver on what MLK’s assassination changed (1968) #Shorts

Eldridge Cleaver was 32 when he gave this speech. He’d already done seven years in prison — first for marijuana, then for assault. He came out and wrote “Soul on Ice,” a collection of essays that became a defining text of the Black Power movement, published just two months before this.

When Martin Luther King was shot, the debate inside Black America wasn’t just about grief. It was about strategy. Nonviolence had been the dominant framework for a decade — Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma. King’s death didn’t just remove a leader. For a faction of the movement, it invalidated the method.

What you’re watching is Cleaver spelling out that logic in real time, at Sacramento State College, days after the assassination.

Two days later, he was in a shootout with Oakland police. His fellow Panther, 17-year-old Bobby Hutton, was killed. Cleaver was shot in the leg and arrested. He jumped bail, fled to Cuba, then Algeria. He stayed in exile for seven years.

He came back in 1975 a different man. Converted to Christianity. Became a born-again conservative. Eventually ran for the Senate as a Republican.

The man who gave this speech and the man who returned were barely recognisable as the same person.

#eldridgecleaver #blackpantherparty #mlk #civilrights #history #1968 #deadwronghistory

Видео Eldridge Cleaver on what MLK’s assassination changed (1968) #Shorts канала Dead Wrong History