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Kathleen Cleaver is now an American professor of law currently serving as senior lecturer at Yale University. She is known for her involvement with the Black Panther Party. Kathleen Neal was born in Dallas, Texas. Her father was a sociology professor at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas and her mother had a master’s degree in mathematics.

The family moved abroad and lived in countries such as India, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Philippines. Kathleen returned to the United States to attend a Quaker boarding school near Philadelphia, George School. She graduated with honors in 1963. She continued her education at Oberlin College, and later transferred to Barnard College.

At a student conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Kathleen met the minister of information for the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver. She then moved to San Francisco in November, 1967, to join the Black Panther Party. Kathleen Neal and Eldridge Cleaver eventually got married on December 27, 1967. Kathleen became the communications secretary and the first female member of the Party’s decision-making body.

She also served as the spokesperson and press secretary. Notably, she organized the national campaign to free the Party’s minister of defense, Huey Newton, who was jailed. In 1968 (the same year her husband ran for president on the Peace and Freedom ticket) she ran for California's 18th state assembly district, also as a candidate of the Peace and Freedom party.

As a result of their involvement with the Black Panther Party, the Cleavers were often the target of police investigations. The Cleavers’ apartment was raided in 1968 before a Panther rally by the San Francisco Tactical Squad on the suspicion of hiding guns and ammunition.

Later that year, Eldridge Cleaver staged a deliberate ambush of Oakland police officers during which two police officers were injured. Cleaver was wounded and fellow Black Panther member Bobby Hutton was killed in a shootout following the initial exchange of gunfire. Charged with attempted murder, he jumped bail to flee to Cuba and later lived in exile in Algeria.

Eldridge spent seven months in Cuba and was reunited with Kathleen in Algeria in 1969. Kathleen gave birth to their first son, Maceo, soon after arriving in Algeria. A year later in 1970 she gave birth to their daughter Joju Younghi Cleaver, while the family was in North Korea. In 1971, Huey Newton, a fellow party member, and Eldridge had a disagreement; this led to the expulsion of the International Branch of the Black Panther Party.

The Cleavers formed a new organization called the Revolutionary People’s Communication Network. Kathleen returned to promoting and speaking about the new organization. To accomplish this, she and the children moved back to New York.

The Algerian government became disgruntled with Eldridge and the new organization. Eldridge was forced to leave the country secretly and meet up with Kathleen in Paris in 1973. Kathleen left for the United States later that year to arrange Eldridge’s return and raise a defense fund. In 1974, the French government granted legal residency to the Cleavers and the family was finally reunited. After only a year, the Cleavers moved back to the United States, and Eldridge was sent to prison.

In 1987, Kathleen divorced Eldridge Cleaver. She then continued her education by getting her law degree from Yale Law School. After graduating, Cleaver worked for the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and followed this with numerous jobs including: law clerk in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta, visiting faculty member at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, the Graduate School of Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College.

In 2005, she was selected an inaugural Fletcher Foundation Fellow. She then worked as a Senior Research Associate at the Yale Law School, and a Senior Lecturer in the African American Studies department at Yale University.

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