The Violent Radicals and Me

ON BEING ALMOST-IN-LAWS WITH THE BLACK PANTHERS, AND TRACING THE HISTORY OF THE HOUSE WHERE IT ALL WENT DOWN

Photo by JD Doyle on Unsplash

(Heading into a short week that nonetheless promises long days of news both dark and discouraging, here’s another diversionary tale of people and politics in bygone days. You can’t make any of this stuff up.) 

My husband-to-be, then a young bachelor newsguy named Bud, was looking out the window, talking to his friend Tom while waiting for a woman who had answered his house-for-rent ad.

“Interesting,” he said, as he spotted her crossing the street. “It’s Kathleen Cleaver.”

“What are you going to do?” Tom asked?

“If she wants, it,” Bud said, “I’m going to rent the place to her.” Which he did. Bud settled into the garage apartment, renting the two main floors of a dilapidated San Francisco Victorian he’d recently purchased to newlyweds Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver. Its location, at 2777 Pine Street a dozen or so blocks west of Fillmore, could have been generously described, at the time, as sketchy.

This was in 1967. It was shortly after Eldridge was paroled from Folsom and San Quentin prisons where he’d been incarcerated for eight years after being convicted of rape and assault with intent to murder. His official position with the Panthers was minister of information.

Many of the houses in the vicinity were in disrepair; others were occupied by citizens of questionable repute. “Aren’t you a little nervous about living there?” Bud was regularly asked by friends who did not come over for tea. “Why?” he regularly replied. “Either the police or the Black Panthers are here at any given time, usually both.”

In little more than a year Eldrige would win fame with publication of his prison memoir Soul on Ice, and subsequently become a fugitive after leading an ambush on Oakland police officers that left two officers wounded. Eldridge was also wounded in that dust-up and his friend and fellow Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed.

All of which pretty much terminated the lease. Undaunted, Bud went to Black Panther headquarters in Oakland and asked for the remaining rent, which they paid.

Kathleen was the one who handled business affairs at their Pine Street domicile. She was mostly working to advance the causes of the Black Panthers, but helped the family finances by writing for Ramparts Magazine.

Landlord and tenants got along fine though they weren’t exactly close personal friends. My favorite memento of those days is a letter neatly typed on Ramparts letterhead which reads:

“Mr. Johns:

“Please excuse the delay but I have been so god damned busy with these pigs and courts and chaos that I completely forgot to pay the rent. You are very sweet to be so unobtrusive and gentle with me, I think you ar a perfect landlord and I would just like to warn you that you should prepare yourself for any day now some time of assault on this house. I think it is beautiful, I love it, I won’t go away, but the local, federal, international, secret and off duty pigs as well as reagon (sic) . . . wallace . . . alioto et all (sic) want to do us in, Eldridge first, then me. Here’s the rent.

“Peace. – (signed in ink) Mrs. Cleaver”

The Cleavers divorced in 1981 after two children and a life that must never have been dull. Kathleen followed her fugitive husband around the globe before coming back to the U.S. and laying the groundwork for him to come home too. She did post-grad work (law, etc) at Yale and elsewhere, eventually becoming a distinguished lecturer and law professor. He eventually became a Mormon and a conservative Republican. Eldridge died, at 62, in 1998. Kathleen is, as far as I know, alive and well and I would give almost anything to know if she remembers her Pine Street landlord.

Or, for that matter, 2777 Pine Street. Bud sold it not long after the Cleavers left, to help raise the down payment on another Victorian a mile or so farther west that I would later happily call home.

I suspect he sold it for something under $20,000. You could pick it up today — if it were on the market, which it is not — for three or four million. Gentrification has been kind to Pine Street property values.

I sometimes reflect on it all as I walk by the former home of my good husband, who is now, in all likelihood, on some celestial cloud trading stories with Black Panthers and other interesting friends. I try not to take offense at the plaque testifying to the nineteenth century origins of the house and proclaiming it to be the former home of Eldridge Cleaver, “Black Panther and Republican leader.”

Not a word about the former landlord.