One summer when I was 17 years old I lived inside of a military surplus parachute that I erected like a tipi inside of an abandoned square dance hall in Los Gatos, California. I lived off of brown rice, rolled oats and a bag of 500 white cross Benzedrine tablets, which I consumed almost as voraciously as the books I read. This was the summer that I read Brautigan, Burroughs, Lao Tzu and perhaps most significantly Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice, a pivotal book for many teenagers of my generation. Cleaver and I came from radically different worlds but we shared something in common: a profound distrust of our government and a deep-seated hatred of racism. While Cleaver was a direct victim of racism and I was merely consumed with guilt and the shame of privilege, there was still a bond, no matter how tenuous, between my sense of cultural self-loathing and Cleaver’s outright hatred for his white oppressors, of which I was only a member genetically.

Soul On Ice got me off my hippie ass and down the mountain to the Bay Area where I went to the Oakland branch of The Black Panther Party headquarters and volunteered to do whatever I could for the movement. A couple of Panthers with sardonic smiles on their faces handed me a bundle of “The Black Panther” newspaper and sent me out the door. I’d paid the cover price for the papers, 25 cents each, and when I was done selling them I took the revenue from the newspaper sales and donated them to the Panthers’ school breakfast program. It was a good cause and helped to mollify some of my white guilt.

It’s Eldridge Cleaver’s birthday today and I still regard him highly for writing a book that shook up my world at a time when my world needed some shaking. He was no saint by a long shot and becoming a born-again Christian may have been his way of dealing with the dark shit, but there is no denying the power and eloquence of his early writings. I found them extraordinarily moving and inspiring.  In honor of the aspects in Cleaver that changed my life, I am sharing this excellent documentary on the Black Power Movement, All Power To The People! .