1968 - Mark Kurlansky [65]
I opened One-Dimensional Man and got as far as page five. Eros and Civilization had been a terrible bore. And now I had to read another of Marcuse’s books, all because Díaz Ordaz had happened to mention “the philosophers of destruction.”
A Martinique-born psychiatrist named Frantz Fanon became an international figure after he wrote a book in 1961 called Les damnés de la terre. Translated into twenty-five languages, the book was read by U.S. college students under the title The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon had finished his French medical studies in Algeria in 1953, where he joined the Algerian National Front and became a leader in the fight for Algerian independence. This alone was credentials enough in the French youth movement that began in the late fifties by opposing French policy in Algeria. Independent Algeria, like Cuba, came to be regarded as a symbol of resistance to the established order of the world. Not a predictable anticolonialist tirade, Wretched of the Earth examines the psychology not only of colonialism, but of overthrowing colonialism and the kind of new man that is required to build a postcolonial society.
By explaining the complexity of the inner struggle to break with colonialism, Wretched of the Earth wielded an important influence in the United States on the American civil rights movement, where it helped make the connection between oppressed American blacks trying to rise up from white rule and oppressed African Muslims trying to free themselves from Europeans. This was the theme of the Black Muslim movement, especially under Malcolm X, who like Fanon was born in 1925, but in 1965 had been murdered, it appeared, by fellow Black Muslims, though this was never proven. Black Muslim boxer Muhammad Ali, as he defied the white establishment, was often seen as a standard-bearer for emerging poor nations. Eldridge Cleaver called Ali “the black Fidel Castro of boxing.”
Even Martin Luther King, Jr., identified the civil rights movement with the struggle of underdeveloped nations. In 1955 he said of the Montgomery boycott, “It is part of a world-wide movement. Look at just about any place in the world and the exploited people are rising against their exploiters. This seems to be the outstanding characteristic of our generation.”
Eldridge Cleaver became a sixties icon largely through his literary ability. Cleaver first went to prison at the age of eighteen for smoking marijuana. He later went back for rape. Released from prison in 1966, he joined the staff of the counterculture magazine Ramparts—famous for being charged with a crime for its 1968 cover of burning draft cards. The magazine staff encouraged him to publish the essays he had written while in prison, essays that expressed harsh self-criticism along with harsh criticism of the world that created him. Cleaver was virtually unknown until 1968, when his book of essays, Soul on Ice, was published and he was credited by critics, including in The New York Times Book Review, with a brash but articulate voice. His timing was perfect: In 1968, what was wrong with American society was a leading question in America. A June Gallup poll showed that white people by a ratio of three to two did not believe America was “sick,” but black people by a ratio of eight to seven did. Soul on Ice was published at almost the exact same moment as the Kerner Report on racial violence and, as The New York Times review pointed out, confirmed its findings. “Look into a mirror,” wrote Cleaver. “The cause is you, Mr. and Mrs. Yesterday, you, with your forked tongues.”
Shortly before the publication of his book, Cleaver had brokered an important black-white alliance in California. The New Left there