Soul on Ice (book)

Background

Eldridge Cleaver was born in August 1935 in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, at a time when pernicious racism prevailed in the segregated South. In 1946, his family moved to Watts, California, where he began engaging in petty crime. After a series of arrests for bicycle theft and vandalism, he was sent in 1954 to Soledad State Prison for possessing a large quantity of marijuana.

In 1957, Cleaver was released from Soledad. Later that year, he was convicted of sexual assault with intent to murder. He was sent to San Quentin and then transferred to Folsom. He began to write regularly about his physical and mental imprisonment, his personal transformation, and the political events and cultural happenings of the era.

In 1965, he sent a letter to Beverly Axelrod, a Bay Area-based attorney, asking her to represent him. She agreed and their relationship proved instrumental in the publication of Soul on Ice. When she visited him in prison, she smuggled him contraband leftist books and magazines, and he slipped his prison essays into the stacks of legal papers she carried with her.

She showed his essays to Edward Michael Keating, founder of Ramparts magazine, who began publishing them in June 1966. After Cleaver was paroled in December 1966, he was hired as a Ramparts staff writer in their San Francisco office. His prison writings, a number of which had already appeared in Ramparts, were collected in the volume Soul on Ice, and published by McGraw-Hill in early 1968.

Description

The essays in Soul on Ice are divided into four thematic sections:

• "Letters from Prison", recounts Cleaver's experiences with, and thoughts on, crime and prisons.
• "Blood of the Beast", discusses race relations and black liberation ideology.
• "Prelude to Love—Three Letters", contains two love letters Cleaver wrote to Beverly Axelrod, and one love letter from her to Cleaver.
• "White Woman, Black Man", reflects on gender relations, black masculinity, and sexuality.

In the Introduction, Maxwell Geismar likens Soul on Ice to Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, stating that in both books, "the central problem is of identification as a black soul which has been 'colonized' ... by an oppressive white society that projects its brief, narrow vision of life as eternal truth." Geismar especially praises the last portion of Soul on Ice where the author "has reached his own spiritual convalescence, his healed spirit (no longer racist or narrowly nationalist), and his mature power as a writer".

Cleaver immediately courts controversy in the opening essay, "On Becoming". He describes his realization as a young man that he had been "indoctrinated to see the white woman as more beautiful and desirable than my own black woman." In the wake of the 1955 lynching in Mississippi of Emmett Till for allegedly flirting with a white woman, Cleaver says he developed an "antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white women" that he acted upon when released from prison in 1957: In a spirit of confession, he soon adds:

In the essay, "The White Race and Its Heroes", he mentions how he was inspired by the current generation of white youths who were battling racism in the South and thereby commanding his respect: "If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America."

In the book's other essays, he navigates through the history and present state of his country. He covers areas such as the race riots occurring in U.S. cities; the murders of Malcolm X and Emmett Till; the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign policy and the American Flag; Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr. and other black notables of the 1960s; Richard Wright's Native Son; Islam and Christianity; day-to-day prison life; and the nature of black manhood.

Cleaver sparked controversy with his essay "Notes on a Native Son", which is a homophobic criticism of the writings of author James Baldwin. In an article in African American Review, Zachary Manditch-Prottas called Cleaver's attack on Baldwin "the most notorious and frequently cited example of homophobia in the Black Power era." In her 1979 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, black feminist author Michele Wallace singled out Cleaver's Soul on Ice for reinforcing the harmful "black macho" stereotype.

Censorship

Soon after its publication, Soul on Ice was banned from certain school libraries for its references to miscegenation.

It was later one of eleven books involved in the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case, Island Trees School District v. Pico. The targeted books were removed from high school and junior high school libraries by the Board of Education of the Island Trees Union Free School District in New York for being "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy".

References

References

1. Cummins, Eric. (1994). "The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement". Stanford University Press.
2. Anderson, Jervis. (December 1968). "Race, Rage {{&}} Eldridge Cleaver".
3. Taylor, Michael. (May 2, 1998). "Ex-Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver Dies / 'Soul on Ice' author, voice of black resistance was 62". [[San Francisco Chronicle]].
4. Kifner, John. (May 2, 1998). "Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther Who Became G.O.P. Conservative, Is Dead at 62". The New York Times.
5. White, Ray Lewis. (June 1978). "Eldridge Cleaver's ''Soul on Ice'': A Book Review Digest". [[College Language Association.
6. Bailey, Jeff. (December 18, 2023). "Leroy Eldridge Cleaver".
7. Warren, Jennifer. (May 2, 1998). "Former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver Dies at 62". Los Angeles Times.
8. Cleaver, Eldridge. (1968). "Soul on Ice". McGraw-Hill Book Company.
9. Larrabee, Harold A.. (December 1970). "Review: The Varieties of Black Experience". [[The New England Quarterly]].
10. Day, Frank. (2023). "Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver". [[EBSCO Information Services.
11. Marine, Gene. (1969). "The Black Panthers". New American Library.
12. Richardson, Peter. (2009). "A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of ''Ramparts'' Magazine Changed America". The New Press.
13. Ide, Derek. (November 18, 2024). "The Life of Eldridge Cleaver". Picturing Black History.
14. (1997). "The Oxford Companion to African American Literature". Oxford University Press.
15. Auther, Jennifer. (May 1, 1998). "'He was a symbol': Eldridge Cleaver dies at 62". [[CNN]].
16. "The black homosexual, when his twist has a racial nexus, is an extreme embodiment of this contradiction. The white man has deprived him of his masculinity, castrated him in the center of his burning skull, and when he submits to this change and takes the white man for his lover as well as Big Daddy, he focuses on “whiteness” all the love in his pent up soul and turns the razor edge of hatred against "blackness"—upon himself, what he is, and all those who look like him, remind him of himself." ''Soul on Ice'', p. 103.
17. Manditch-Prottas, Zachary. (2019). "Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's ''No Name in the Street'', and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular". [[African American Review]].
18. Sexton, Jared. (2003). "Race, Sexuality, and Political Struggle: Reading ''Soul on Ice''". Social Justice.
19. {{harvnb. Cummins. 1994
20. Fenyo, Mario D.. (2022). "Miscegenation and Censorship". [[EBSCO Information Services.
21. "Island Trees Sch. Dist. v. Pico by Pico 457 U.S. 853 (1982)".