This collaborative project builds on Kathleen Neal Cleaver’s iconicity to produce a historical narrative that up until this point has largely been documented through whispers in underground circles and collected and protected in private homes. While the story of the Black Panther Party has been chronicled by a number of books, exhibits, and through Panthers themselves, the stories of how they came to be involved, the behind the scenes organizing, collaboration, and home-building is oftentimes overshadowed. Ms. Cleaver called together a team of collaborators: Stephanie Alvarado, Lia T. Bascomb, Sierra King, Leigh Raiford, Delphine Sims, and John Stephens to bring her story to a wider audience on her terms.

In early 2018, the team completed a two-day video taping. This short film introduces viewers to the collection as Ms. Cleaver guides us through her involvement with the Black Panther Party, her role in the BPP, and her move abroad living “inside exile” when her husband was branded a fugitive in the U.S. and she herself had relative freedom of movement.

Producer, Dr. Leigh Raiford; Associate Producer, Dr. Lia T. Bascomb; Cinematographers, John Stephens and Sierra King; Sound Technician, Floyd Hall

DOCUMENTATION

Ms. Cleaver has been photographed around the world. She often retained copies of these photographs and fully understood the importance of visual work in her life. Over decades she has built her collection, inherited others from family, and carefully kept them safe. With thousands of images, Ms. Cleaver’s photography collection includes snapshots and formal portraits, contact sheets, and family albums made by professional photographers, amateurs, and Ms. Cleaver herself. The collection extensively covers Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver’s period in the Black Panther Party, especially their time in exile in Algeria and France (1969-1975), during which they headed the International Section of the BPP (until their expulsion from the Party in 1971) and traveled throughout socialist Africa and Asia. It also includes fragile materials from the erudite Neal and Johnson families, some dating back to 1890s Virginia; items documenting the afterlives of the Party and its participants, including documents from the court case of Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, a Party member who spent 27 years in prison on false charges (Ms. Cleaver served as a member of his legal team); and correspondence and ephemera surrounding Eldridge Cleaver’s death in 1998.

This project began at the behest of Ms. Cleaver who pulled together a team of scholars, artists, and archivists to organize her collection. She and former Emory student Stephanie Alvarado began to organize the collection of photographs that were housed in Ms. Cleaver’s home. They reached out to Leigh Raiford, a Professor of African American and African diaspora studies at UC-Berkeley and a scholar of social movement photography, for help in 2016. Around that time, Ms. Cleaver met photographer John Stephens at a Gordon Parks Foundation event. Although they met in New York, they quickly learned that they were nearly neighbors in Atlanta and Ms. Cleaver recruited him into the project of organizing her collection. He, in turn, recruited his photographer-archivist niece, Sierra King. In looking at the collection and talking with Cleaver, Leigh Raiford brought in Delphine Sims, a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art program at UC-Berkeley with curatorial experience. Sims put together the team’s cataloging space as they organized the collection. In the summer of 2017, Leigh Raiford also recruited Lia T. Bascomb, an Associate Professor in Africana Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. With the assistance and consultation of a number of archivists and other professionals, this team was charged with preparing Ms. Cleaver’s collection to go to a formal archive and to otherwise bring the collection to a public audience.

For three years the team worked with Ms. Cleaver in her home to organize and begin to catalogue her photography collection. She shared the stories behind the photographs as they protected thousands of photographs and catalogued nearly 1000. The catalog descriptions come largely from the conversations and stories Ms. Cleaver offered. The collection’s relevance is all the more compelling in a contemporary time when revolutions, state repression, and community organizing across the U.S. and across the world have emerged anew. The project’s goal is to bring these histories to a larger public, especially the current generation of social justice activists, those engaged in women’s histories, and those interested in the unique challenges of building families and communities while fighting for human rights domestically and internationally.

The Kathleen Cleaver Papers including her extensive photography collection now reside at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. The collection is open to the public by appointment.

FINDING AID: Kathleen Cleaver Papers at Emory University