Kathleen Cleaver delivering the keynote address, March 8, 2018
Keynote Speaker, March 8, 2018, 4:30pm Mary Tefft White Center, University Library
Kathleen Neal Cleaver has spent her life participating in the human rights struggle. She started alongside her parents in the 1950s civil rights protests in Alabama. By 1966, Kathleen Neal dropped out of Barnard College in New York to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) where she served in its Campus Program based in Atlanta. She then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and from 1967-1971, she was the first communications secretary of the Black Panther Party. After sharing years of exile, in Algeria and France with former husband Eldridge Cleaver, she returned with her family to the United States in late 1975.
In 1984, Cleaver graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History from Yale College and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989, Cleaver became an associate to the law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, and later clerked for the late Judge A. Leon Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia. In 1992 Cleaver joined the faculty of Emory University Law School.
Kathleen Cleaver: A Black Panther Turned Bulldog
Memories Of a Proper Girl Who Was A Panther
Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party by 
Cleaver family photograph circa mid 1970s. Left to right: Joju, Kathleen, Eldridge, Maceo
Source: Eldrigde Cleaver Photograph Collection, 1966-circa 1982, BANC PIC 1991.078. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver meeting with the press upon their return to the United States,1975.
Source: Eldrigde Cleaver Photograph Collection, 1966-circa 1982, BANC PIC 1991.078. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver meeting with the press upon their return to the United States,1975.
Source: Eldrigde Cleaver Photograph Collection, 1966-circa 1982, BANC PIC 1991.078. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.