Eldridge Cleaver, the 1960s Black Panther leader whose book, Soul on Ice, became a manual for the Black Power movement in the United States, died yesterday at age 62 in a hospital in the Los Angeles suburb of Pomona.
A spokeswoman for the Pomona Valley Medical Centre said Cleaver died early yesterday, but declined to give any details on the cause of death, citing a family request for privacy.
Cleaver went through many transformations, from convict to revolutionary to conservative. He ran for president of the United States as a revolutionary and once tried to win the Republican nomination for the US Senate, running as a conservative.
Soul on Ice, an autobiographical indictment of white society, was central to the Black Power movement of the 1960s.
Cleaver sprang to national prominence as minister of information, or spokesman, for the Black Panthers, a black nationalist group famous for its armed confrontations with police.
He joined the group a few months after it was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966. Cleaver fled the US for seven years after a shootout with police in Oakland in 1968, living in Cuba, Algeria and France, before returning.
He ran unsuccessfully for President in 1968. Later he was ousted from the Panthers over a bitter and public dispute with Newton. Cleaver became a born-again Christian and a Republican.
In a 1986 interview, Cleaver attempted to explain his many transformations. "Everybody changes, not just me," he said.
"I was pulled over in my car with my secretary for a traffic thing and one of the officers walked up to the car, and saw me sitting inside. He took off his hat and said, `Hey, Eldridge, remember me?'
"He used to be a Panther," Cleaver said. "It was hard to believe."