Cleaver discusses the history of race in America, the civil rights movement, race riots, and the Vietnam War. The second section, “Blood of the Beast,” expounds on race relations in America and the ideology of the Black Liberationist movement. He says that with his justification gone, his moral structure collapsed, and he started writing these essays to save himself. He confesses to taking a long look at himself and realizing his acts were removed from civilization and humanity. Cleaver also admits to raping multiple Black women while in the ghetto for “practice.” At the time of writing, however, Cleaver renounces rape and his reasoning for committing it. Later, he is convicted of rape and assault with intent to murder- a charge Cleaver freely admits to in his essays.Ĭontroversially, he describes his way of thinking while he was still a free man: that the rape of white women was an “insurrectionary act” for a black man to commit, a way to take revenge on the systematic oppression of African-Americans in the US. He writes of his felony drug charge for marijuana at the age of 18, which landed him in federal prison for two years. At the time of writing, Cleaver, then in his thirties, had served time in youth detention centers and several stints in prison. The first section, “Letters from Prison,” discusses Cleaver’s history of crime and experience in prisons. DuBois, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and other political and philosophical writers. While in prison, Cleaver experienced a political awakening by reading the works of Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, W.E.B. Soul on Ice is divided into four parts that describe the author’s journey from a “supermasculine” but disadvantaged young man into a radical Black liberationist. However, Cleaver’s surprising late-in-life turn from the radical left towards conservative politics casts him and his memoir in a different light. After his release from prison, Cleaver became a prominent member of the Black Panthers, advocating urban guerilla warfare against a corrupt police force. His essays were instrumental in forming the philosophies and ideas behind the black power movement.
The essays were first published in Ramparts magazine in 1965, and then collected in book form after Cleaver’s release in 1968. Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice is a memoir and collection of essays written while the author served time in Folsom Prison.
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