Rustin and prison counselor Key Hansen expose how white liberals and the media distorted Eldridge Cleaver into a militant caricature, obscuring his real threat to the state: his capacity to inspire organized resistance within a brutal prison system.
Eldridge Cleaver's "Why I Left the U.S. and Why I Am Returning": A Revolutionary's Reckoning with Democracy
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.
