Beverly Axelrod Biography
New Left
This is a brief political biography of Beverly Axelrod, who was a civil rights and social justice attorney for a variety of activists and organizations during the 1960s, including the Congress of Racial Equality, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement, Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, the United Farm Workers, the Chicano Movement in New Mexico, and others. Axelrod also travelled to Vietnam and helped organize the first anti-war protest that featured women and children. Her correspondence with Eldridge Cleaver formed a significant basis for his book, Soul On Ice. She was also called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Later in life she formed ACE Investigations, an investigative firm that did trial preparation for civil and criminal cases. Axelrod died in 2002 of emphysema.
ACE Investigations
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
January 7, 1998
photocopy
chronology
Right On!
Black Panther Party
Right On! was published by the Revolutionary Peoples Communications Network and the Black Community News Service of the Black Panther Party. This issue includes articles about Attica Prison Rebellion; Eldridge Cleaver and Algeria; the murder of George Jackson; the aftermath of San Quentin; prison resistance by Afeni Shakur; the murder of Leroy King; police shoot-out in Detroit; slumlords; the Black Liberation Army; police repression against Black Panthers in New Jersey; political corruption in New Jersey; Black Liberation Army in Los Angeles; Free Food Program; welfare; prison and trial news; capitalism, dope and genocide; international acts; on Revolutionary Justice; voodoo in the black community; cartoons; poetry and the Ten-Point Program.
Black Community News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
September 15-30, 1971
underground press
Cleaver Course Position Paper
Black Power
The University of California-Berkeley was one of the key sites of 1960s-era campus activism. During the early and mid-1960s, Cal students participated in the southern civil rights struggle and protested the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. In 1964, a conflict near Sather Gate sparked the Free Speech Movement. The Students for a Democratic Society were strong on campus and led student activists into the anti-Vietnam war era. During the late-1960s and early-1970s, UC-Berkeley played a pivotal role in the rise of the Black Studies and Third World Student movements.
In 1966, African Americans made up a mere 1% of the student population at the University of California-Berkeley. At the time, the Afro-American Student Union (AASU) was the lone black student political group on campus. On October 29, 1966, SDS sponsored a conference at the Greek Theater, titled, “Black Power and It’s Challenges,” which was attended by an estimated 12,000 overwhelmingly white students and featured keynote speakers, Ron Karenga (US Organization), James Bevel (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Stokely Carmichael (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), who called UC-Berkeley the “white intellectual ghetto of the West.” AASU opposed the conference, calling it “farcical,” “insidious” and “detestable.”
By 1968, the number of African American students on campus began to rise. Early that year, a coalition of black student activists and local community members demanded the creation of a Black Studies Department. In a March, 1968 issue of the Daily Californian, the group wrote, “We demand a program of ‘BLACK STUDIES,’ a program that will be of and for black people. We demand to be educated realistically and that no form of education which attempts to lie to us, or otherwise mis-educate us will be accepted.” In response Chancellor Roger Heyns promised the establishment of a new department by the Fall of 1969. In the meantime, African American students worked with the College of Letters and Sciences to offer a selection of courses on the “Black Experience” during the 1968 school year, including a course titled, “Social Analysis 139X: Dehumanization and Regeneration of the American Social Order,” which was co-organized by four university faculty, but was to be guest taught by controversial Black Panther Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver. The 10-lecture class was sponsored by the Center for Participation in Education (CPE), a university supported effort to empower students to help devise classes that focused on pressing contemporary issues. Yet, as students began to enroll in the course, conservative Governor, Ronald Reagan, and state legislators pressured the Board of Regents to pass a new rule stating that classes could only include one guest lecture per semester, an obvious ploy to severely limit Cleaver’s platform on campus. The move set off a new controversy over academic freedom on campus and helped spur the mobilization of the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of black students, Latin American students, Asian American students and Mexican American students that organized the longest student strikes in U.S. history. Ultimately, Cleaver gave six lectures on campus in 1968.
This document puts forth a defense of the "Cleaver Course," as it became known on campus.
Center for Participant Education
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
position paper
Revolution Revolution - Eldridge Cleaver for President
Black Power
In 1966, Detroit cultural radicals, Allen Van Newkirk, John Sinclair and Gary Grimshaw created Guerrilla, “a monthly newspaper of contemporary kulchur” and “weapon of cultural warfare.” The newspaper was a part of a larger project, the Detroit Artists Workshop, which was formed in 1964, “a local attempt in self-determination for artists of all disciplines.” Guerrilla mixed “humor, politics and music under the circus big top of surrealism and pop culture.” It was primarily a cultural review and included an international artistic perspective. Soon after its first issue appeared, Van Newkirk, who was an revolutionary anarchist with an antipathy for the hippie counterculture and slackers, split with the Detroit Artists Workshop and fired Sinclair, who was more aligned with the hippie counterculture. Despite their ideological and political differences, the two, in fact, continued to work together on Guerrilla, though Van Newkirk’s vision predominated. In subsequent issues, Van Newkirk included a series of oversized political posters, including this one.
The text on this poster reads: "A Rule Of Thumb Of Revolutionary Politics / Is That No Matter How Oppressive The Ruling Class May Be / No Matter How Impossible The Task Of Making / Revolution / May Seem / The Means Of Making That / Revolution / Are Always At Hand." At the center is information on a publication, Guerrilla with the quote "our purpose in entering the political arena / is to send the jackass back to the farm and the elephant back to the zoo." At the bottom is "Eldridge / Cleaver / For President / Minister of information/Black Panther Party".
Eldridge Cleaver was the controversial "Minister of Information" for the Black Panther Party. Cleaver, who edited the Black Panther Party newspaper, is credited with crafting a more radical and incendiary public rhetoric for the organization. His 1968 book, Soul On Ice, was a best-seller, simultaneously praised and condemned, and much-debated. Cleaver was the presidential candidate for the Peace & Freedom Party in 1968, earning .05% of the vote. Following a deadly altercation with Oakland police that same year, Cleaver fled the United States, first to Cuba, then to Algeria and ultimately France, before he returned to the United States in 1975. An ideological split between Cleaver and party co-founder, Huey Newton, led to Cleaver's ouster from the party. Following his exile, Eldridge Cleaver became a born-again Christian, dabbling in a variety of different denominations. He also participated in conservative politics through the Republican Party. Cleaver died in 1998.
Guerilla: Free Newspaper of the Streets
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
poster
The Front
Black Power
This booklet describes the goals and platform of the Malcolm X United Liberation Front, a Marxist-Leninist black radical organization based in Tallahassee, Florida, and founded and headed by Robert Perkins. The group was in existence from 1969-1976. The Malcolm X United Liberation Front supported the Black Panther Party and remained committed to exposing the racialized caste system in the U.S. and ending sexism in the black community.
Malcolm X United Liberation Front
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969
booklet
Off the Pig (Black Panther)
Black Panther Party
<iframe width="640" height="480" src="https://archive.org/embed/Black-Panther-Film-FBI-1968" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
Internet Archive
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Huey Newton Trial in Oakland (29 images)
Black Power
Huey P. Newton was a revolutionary black leader and co-founder, with Bobby Seale, of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in 1966. Newton was born in 1942 in Monroe, Louisiana, one of the most racially violent parishes in the entire South. Following WWII, the Newton family moved to Oakland as a part of the second wave of the Great Migration. Though his family moved around the Bay Area quite a bit, Newton always felt like he had food and shelter and love. He was arrested a few times as a teenager, including for gun possession and vandalism when he was 14. Newton later reflected that during his childhood in Oakland, he was often made to feel ashamed of being black. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, he wrote, “During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.” Newton graduated high school in 1959 without learning to read, though he went on to teach himself. In 1966, he earned an associates degree from Merritt College and took classes at the San Francisco School of Law. During this period, Newton began to ask questions about his family and the world around him, which led him to get involved with the civil rights movement. At Merrett, he joined the Afro-American Association and a fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma, and helped get the first Black Studies course organized on the campus. Newton began to read political and theoretical works by radical thinkers, like Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Emile Durkheim and Che Guevara. It was also at this time that he met Bobby Seale and they formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in response to police brutality against local African Americans. The group was influenced by Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, practiced a militant self-defense strategy and developed community survival programs related to employment, community health, education, nutrition, food security, prisoner’s rights, and other grassroots issues. The Panthers practiced “revolutionary socialism” and articulated their platform in a manifesto, “Ten-Point Program.” The Black Panther Party was willing to work in alliance with other revolutionary organizations, including white radicals. According to Newton, “We don't hate white people, we hate the oppressor: If the oppressor happens to be white, then we hate him.” FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover labelled the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and subjected the group to a range of repressive tactics as a part of COINTELPRO.
Huey Newton was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon for a 1964 stabbing and served six months in prison followed by a period of probation. After the end of his probation, on October 26 and 27, 1967, while out partying with friends, Newton and his compatriots were pulled over by an Oakland police officer, John Frey. When back-up forces arrived, a shoot-out ensued, leaving Frey dead and another cop, Herbert Heanes in serious condition. Huey Newton was shot in the abdomen. The circumstances surrounding the incident were and remain cloudy and contested. Convicted in 1968 of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of officer Frey, Newton was sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. In 1970, a California Appeals Court ordered a new trial, which twice ended with a hung jury. The prosecutor declined to retry the case for a fourth time.
Throughout these trials, the Black Panther Party organized a powerful “Free Huey” campaign, which caught on nationally and became a point of focus for the broader 1960s New Left. The campaign cast Newton as a revolutionary martyr of systematic state oppression and built him into a political icon similar to other figures at the time, like Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. As Gilbert Moore wrote in A Special Rage, “There was an inevitably about the Huey Newton trial which drove me fairly insane. The smell of manifest destiny was everywhere. A giant ferris wheel, spinning, controlled by a conspiracy of faceless robots. In its path lay Huey Newton." Poet Langston Hughes wrote a poem, titled, “Black Panther”:
Pushed into the corner
Of the hobnailed boot,
Pushed into the corner of the
"I don't-want-to-die" cry,
Pushed into the corner of
"I don't want to study no more,
"
Changed into "Eye for eye,"
The Panther in his desperate boldness
Wears no disguise,
Motivated by the truest
of the oldest lies.
Black Panther Party leaders recognized “that a potential black martyr could galvanize young blacks of all persuasions, in a way that they couldn’t otherwise.” Inflammatory Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, said, "At this moment our leader, Brother Huey P. Newton, is being tried by old baldheaded racists who are predetermined to send him to the gas chamber. But they will carry out the sentence over our dead bodies. There seems to be little hope of avoiding armed war in the streets of California and of preventing it from sweeping across the nation. If there has to be a war, then let there be a war." Earl Anthony, author of Spitting in the Wind, wrote, "If you so much as touch a hair on Huey's pretty head, you better give your soul to the Lord because your ass belongs to the Black Panther Party." Newton himself stated, “There will be no prison which can hold our movement down…The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.” He embraced the idea that he was committing what he called, “revolutionary suicide”:
“The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.
I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.”
After his release from prison, Newton credited the grassroots protest for his freedom, saying, “That was the true power of the people - they freed me. I was just sittin’ up in my 5x7 cell, in my 5x7 hell, up there on the 10th floor of the Alameda County Jail.
Newton’s iconic status was also double-edged. Former Panther Hugh Pearson recalled, “From the mouths of Free Huey activists, Huey began to sound like a messiah. Their enthusiasm to see Huey set free paralleled the Christian enthusiasm for the second coming…Young radicals and militants of all persuasions began preparing for the rebellion they were sure Huey would lead.” But, as actor Roger Guenveur Smith, who wrote and starred in the award-winning play, “A Huey P. Newton Story,” reflected, "Yeah they freed Huey. Then Huey came out and they wanted Huey to free them and I keep trying to tell the people, I say people, that's the true power of the people, you freed me, you freed Huey, now why don't you all go ahead and free yourself? But see, they can't do that can they? They can't do that cause the people always have to create what they call a leader and a leader is everything that the people want to be but the leader is everything that the people can never be so then when the leader fails, he's gonna fail, he's just flesh and blood, he's gonna fail, when the leader fails then the whole construction of the concept of leadership fails and then it just becomes a matter of contempt. And that's when they assassinate you and then put your image on a postage stamp so they can keep lickin' you in the grave."
The images taken here by Roz Payne were outside the Oakland Court House.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Panther 21 Trial (6 images)
Black Power
Roz Payne took these photos outside the Panther 21 trial in New York City.
Description
In April of 1969, after a lengthy, coordinated effort by local and federal law enforcement to infiltrate and disrupt the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, District Attorney Frank Hogan indicted 21 members of the organization, claiming a widespread conspiracy to murder policemen and blow up four police stations, five department stores, railroad lines, the Queens Board of Education building, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Ultimately, 13 Panthers, including Afeni Shakur and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, stood trial in a case that became a cause celebre among black militants and the broader New Left. For ten months prior to the trial, the jailed Panthers were held in solitary confinement with lights on 24 hours a day and denied reading materials, recreational facilities and family visitation. Several were not given mattresses and the two female Panthers were limited to four sheets of toilet paper per day. It was also reported that prison officials harassed Panther attorneys. Famed composer, Leonard Bernstein, helped raise bail money for the “New York 21.” During the court proceedings, District Attorney Hogan referred to the Panthers as a “terrorist organization,” read from Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book,” showed jurors the film, “The Battle of Algiers” and attempted to introduce political posters from one of the defendant’s apartment into evidence. In what was, at the time, the longest and most costly trial in New York state history, the Panthers were acquitted of all 156 charges on May 12, 1971. In the wake of the failed prosecution, local law enforcement and the FBI continued to target the New York Black Panther Party.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970-1971
Eldridge Cleaver Controversy at UC-Berkeley
(196 images)
Black Power
The University of California-Berkeley was one of the key sites of 1960s-era campus activism. During the early and mid-1960s, Cal students participated in the southern civil rights struggle and protested the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. In 1964, a conflict near Sather Gate sparked the Free Speech Movement. The Students for a Democratic Society were strong on campus and led student activists into the anti-Vietnam war era. During the late-1960s and early-1970s, UC-Berkeley played a pivotal role in the rise of the Black Studies and Third World Student movements.
In 1966, African Americans made up a mere 1% of the student population at the University of California-Berkeley. At the time, the Afro-American Student Union (AASU) was the lone black student political group on campus. On October 29, 1966, SDS sponsored a conference at the Greek Theater, titled, “Black Power and It’s Challenges,” which was attended by an estimated 12,000 overwhelmingly white students and featured keynote speakers, Ron Karenga (US Organization), James Bevel (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Stokely Carmichael (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), who called UC-Berkeley the “white intellectual ghetto of the West.” AASU opposed the conference, calling it “farcical,” “insidious” and “detestable.”
By 1968, the number of African American students on campus began to rise. Early that year, a coalition of black student activists and local community members demanded the creation of a Black Studies Department. In a March, 1968 issue of the Daily Californian, the group wrote, “We demand a program of ‘BLACK STUDIES,’ a program that will be of and for black people. We demand to be educated realistically and that no form of education which attempts to lie to us, or otherwise mis-educate us will be accepted.” In response Chancellor Roger Heyns promised the establishment of a new department by the Fall of 1969. In the meantime, African American students worked with the College of Letters and Sciences to offer a selection of courses on the “Black Experience” during the 1968 school year, including a course titled, “Social Analysis 139X: Dehumanization and Regeneration of the American Social Order,” which was co-organized by four university faculty, but was to be guest taught by controversial Black Panther Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver. The 10-lecture class was sponsored by the Center for Participation in Education (CPE), a university supported effort to empower students to help devise classes that focused on pressing contemporary issues. Yet, as students began to enroll in the course, conservative Governor, Ronald Reagan, and state legislators pressured the Board of Regents to pass a new rule stating that classes could only include one guest lecture per semester, an obvious ploy to severely limit Cleaver’s platform on campus. The move set off a new controversy over academic freedom on campus and helped spur the mobilization of the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of black students, Latin American students, Asian American students and Mexican American students that organized the longest student strikes in U.S. history. Ultimately, Cleaver gave six lectures on campus in 1968.
These photos, taken by Roz Payne show Eldridge Cleaver lecturing, as well as Kathleen Cleaver on campus, Ronald Reagan at Regents meetings and some of the campus protests surrounding Cleaver's lectures and the broader Third World Liberation Front activism on campus.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968-1969
Eldridge Cleaver at New York University
(2 images)
Black Power
Photos of Black Panther Party Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver at New York University.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970
A Pig On Both Your Houses
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This flyer publicizes a protest against New York politicians - Paul O'Dwyer, Jacob Javits, Ed Koch and other Democratic and Republican politicians for "peace" in Vietnam, calling them "liars" and their position a "farce." The authors also express solidarity with Vietcong women, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, black people and Eldridge Cleaver.
satirically signed by National Liberation Front of South New York, West Bank Sinn Fein, Downtown Irgun, Wild Bill Stern Gang, Hong Kong Flu, Jesus and the Women's International Conspiracy from Hell
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s or early-1970s
mimeograph
flyer
Eldridge Cleaver at University of Vermont
Black Panther Party
Flyer for a talk on the University of Vermont campus by former Black Panther Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver. The title of Cleaver's talk, "Ideological Disarmament and World Peace," was sponsored by The Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles.
The Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
undated
photocopy
flyer
Revolution Revolution
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This poster features a photograph from an anti-war demonstration with a participant holding a poster from Guerrilla: Free Newspaper of the Streets that read, "Revolution Revolution - Eldridge Cleaver for President." The image underscores the growing radicalism and the interconnections between various movements in the New Left
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1968
poster
Eldridge Cleaver Quotation
Black Power
This button includes a quotation from Eldridge Cleaver, the controversial "Minister of Information" for the Black Panther Party. The quote, which became a popular slogan on the New Left in the late-1960s and early-1970s, is actually adapted from a longer statement by Cleaver: "There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem." Cleaver, who edited the Black Panther Party newspaper, is credited with crafting a more radical and incendiary public rhetoric for the organization. His 1968 book, Soul On Ice, was a best-seller, simultaneously praised and condemned, and much-debated. Cleaver was the presidential candidate for the Peace & Freedom Party in 1968, earning .05% of the vote. Following a deadly altercation with Oakland police that same year, Cleaver fled the United States, first to Cuba, then to Algeria and ultimately France, before he returned to the United States in 1975. An ideological split between Cleaver and party co-founder, Huey Newton, led to Cleaver's ouster from the party. Following his exile, Eldridge Cleaver became a born-again Christian, dabbling in a variety of different denominations. He also participated in conservative politics through the Republican Party. Cleaver died in 1998.
Unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s to early-1970s
Button
Physical Object