Kathleen Cleaver, Senior Lecturer at the Emory University Law School and former Communications Secretary for the Black Panther Party, will be speaking about her life as an activist and a scholar at Sonoma State University on Thursday, Sept. 26 at 8 p.m. in the Cooperage auditorium. Admission is free. Students, staff, faculty, and the public are encouraged to attend.
Kathleen Neal Cleaver first became active in the civil rights movement when she began working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1966.
Shortly thereafter, she became involved with the Black Panther Party, headquartered in Oakland, California. Cleaver was Communications Secretary for the Panthers from 1967 to 1971. In the late-1960s, she was forced to flee into exile with Eldridge Cleaver, the writer/activist who was then her husband. The two returned to the United States in 1975.
Since the 1970s, Kathleen Cleaver has remained involved in struggles for human rights, especially through her scholarship and teaching as a professor of law. After earning a BA and JD at Yale University, she served as a visiting scholar there and also at Sarah Lawrence College.
She has won fellowships from Harvard University, Rutgers, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia, where she has also served as a member of the board of directors for the Southern Center for Human Rights.
At Sonoma State, Professor Cleaver will speak about her life's work struggling for social justice. The talk will be distilled from her memoir "Memories of Love and War," which she is in the process of completing.
"A Conversation with Kathleen Cleaver" is co-sponsored by the Sonoma State History Department, Women's & Gender Studies Department, Inter-Cultural Center, and the School of Social Sciences.
