Kathleen Neal Cleaver

Kathleen Neal Cleaver is a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas School of Law. She has spent most of her life participating in the human rights struggle. She dropped out of Barnard College in 1966 to work full time with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) where she served in the Campus Program. From 1967 to 1971 she was the Communications Secretary of the Black Panther Party, the first woman member of their Central Committee. After sharing years of exile with her former husband Eldridge Cleaver, she returned to the United States in late 1975. Devoting many years to challenging racist injustice, Cleaver has worked to free imprisoned freedom fighters, including Geronimo (Pratt) ji Jaga and Mumia Abu-Jamal. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History from Yale College in 1984, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989, Cleaver became an associate at the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore. Kathleen Cleaver joined the faculty of Emory University Law School in 1992. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Ramparts, The Black Panther, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, and Transition, and she has contributed scholarly essays to the books Critical Race Feminism, Critical White Studies, The Promise of Multiculturalism, and The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Along with George Katsificas, humanities professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology, she co-edited the essay collection Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (Routledge, 2001). She recently edited a collection of writings by Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing (Palgrave, 2006).