Please note: The exact date this article was written is unknown.
Cleaver’s essay recounts how seven years in exile shattered his faith in authoritarian revolutionary ideals and led him to recognize the imperfect but real accountability mechanisms within American democracy. His experiences abroad, combined with Watergate and the Church Committee revelations, convinced him that the U.S. still allowed forms of dissent, scrutiny, and self-correction absent in the regimes he had fled.
Historical Context:
Cleaver's seven years abroad coincided with the collapse of the American left. The civil rights movement fractured. The Black Panther Party was destroyed, torn apart by government repression and internal warfare. The government violently suppressed Black radical organizations throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. From exile, Cleaver witnessed this repression firsthand while also observing Communist regimes commit their own atrocities. These two realities, American state violence and Communist state violence, forced him to reconsider everything he had believed about revolution.
Watergate changed the landscape. When Nixon resigned, when his own government investigated and prosecuted him, when the press exposed crimes and citizens organized against power and were heard, the revolutionary narrative collapsed. American democracy turned out to possess mechanisms for accountability. This was not rhetoric. This was fact. The system was corrupt, but it could correct itself. Authoritarian regimes could not.
Cleaver's return was an act of calculated risk. He faced serious charges, including three counts of assault with a deadly weapon and three counts of assault with intent to commit murder. The California Adult Authority could keep him imprisoned indefinitely on parole violations alone. He had no guarantee of a fair trial. He returned anyway. When he did, Bayard Rustin—a man Cleaver had once dismissed as a conservative accommodationist—emerged as his staunchest defender. Rustin understood that defending Cleaver's right to a fair trial was itself a democratic principle worth fighting for, regardless of political disagreement.
Description:
Written from Paris as he prepared to return to the United States after seven years in exile, Eldridge Cleaver's essay articulates a political philosophy that would align him with Bayard Rustin's lifelong argument: that democracy, despite its corruption, offered mechanisms for accountability that authoritarian regimes lacked. The essay explains the legal and political conditions that forced his flight and the transformed worldview that brought him home. On April 6, 1968, two days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Cleaver was arrested after a shootout between Black Panthers and Oakland police. Judge Raymond Sherwin granted him bail and ordered his release, writing that Cleaver's "peril to his parole status stemmed from no failure of personal rehabilitation, but from his undue eloquence in pursuing political goals, goals which were offensive to many of his contemporaries." The California Court of Appeals reversed Sherwin's decision and ordered Cleaver to return to prison in 60 days. Instead, Cleaver fled to Canada on November 27, 1968.
For seven years, Cleaver lived in exile in Cuba, Algeria, North Korea, China, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and France. What he encountered abroad fundamentally shattered his revolutionary ideology. He saw firsthand how authoritarian regimes used imprisonment arbitrarily, muzzled the press, and crushed dissent. The 1972 Nixon visit to China, welcomed by Chairman Mao, destroyed his faith in international proletarian solidarity. When an imperious superpower could embrace a fascist president, ideology meant nothing.
Cleaver's essay details his gradual recognition that American democracy, despite its profound flaws of racism, economic inequality, and systemic injustice, possessed structural protections that authoritarian regimes lacked. These included habeas corpus, freedom of the press, and the ability to organize and protest without facing execution. Watergate confirmed this. Watching Nixon investigate and punish his own government's abuses, and watching the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice face scrutiny, Cleaver concluded that American institutions possessed mechanisms for self-correction absent elsewhere.
The Church Committee investigations into COINTELPRO revealed the FBI's illegal surveillance and harassment of civil rights activists. Investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton placed Cleaver's own actions in a more balanced perspective. Ronald Reagan's departure as governor and Jerry Brown's election signaled a political shift. Cleaver decided to return voluntarily, confident that "a one-sided application of justice is no longer possible."
Cleaver, Eldridge. "Why I Left the U.S. and Why I Am Returning." Essay written in Paris, November 1975.
