Kathleen Cleaver has been involved in the human rights movement most of her life.
In 1967, she left Atlanta where she was a staff member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and joined the Black Panther Party in California, where she served as the Communications Secretary until 1971. She and her husband, Eldridge Cleaver, founded the International Section of the Black Panther Party in Algiers, Algeria, and worked there until 1973, when the Cleaver family moved to France. After returning to the United States, Cleaver graduated from Yale Law School and practiced law in New York before joining the law faculty at Emory.
She has worked to free many imprisoned political activists, including Mumia Abu-Jamal and Geronimo (Pratt) ji Jaga, who was released after 27 years for a crime he did not commit.
Cleaver co-edited with George Katsiaficas the essay collection Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, and she edited Eldridge Cleaver's posthumously- published Target Zero: A Life in Writing.
She has been a senior lecturer at Yale University and at Emory Law School, and is currently completing a memoir entitled Memories of Love and War.
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