Kathleen Neal Cleaver, senior lecturer at Yale University in the African American Studies Department, and co-founder and producer of the International Black Panther Film Festival, will be the guest speaker for the annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Luncheon beginning at 11:30 a.m. on Friday, January 18, 2008.
Cleaver has spent most of her life participating in the human rights struggle. She discontinued studies at Barnard College in 1966 to work full time with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) where she served in the Campus Program. From 1967 to 1971, she was the communications secretary of the Black Panther Party — the first woman member of its Central Committee.
After years of exile with former husband Eldridge Cleaver, she returned to the United States in late 1975. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale College in 1984 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989, Cleaver became an associate at the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore. She has devoted many years to the defense of imprisoned Black Panther Party members, including Geronimo (Pratt) ji Jaga and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Cleaver joined the faculty of Emory University Law School in 1992 and also has been a visiting faculty member at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, the Graduate School of Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College, where she was the Joanne Woodward Professor of Public Policy during 1999. She won fellowships at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University, the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library to complete her anticipated book Memories of Love and War.
Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Ramparts, The Black Panther, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe and Transition, and she has contributed scholarly essays to the books Critical Race Feminism, Critical White Studies, The Promise of Multiculturalism and The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Along with George Katsificas, humanities professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology, she co-edited the essay collection Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (Routledge, 2001). She recently edited a collection of writings by Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing (Palgrave, 2006).
Cleaver serves as co-director of the Human Rights Research Fund, part of a network of anti-racist organizations engaged in documenting violations of the human rights of U.S. citizens who challenge racist and military policies within the United States. She has participated in international forums and study programs at the American University of Beirut in 2006 and through a United States law school consortium in Rio de Janeiro in 2007.
This year’s luncheon will be held at the Red Lion Hotel, 1415 Fifth Ave., in downtown Seattle. Tickets for the luncheon are $40 for attorneys and $20 for students and law clerks. For more information, please see the KCBA Web site at www.kcba.org or contact KCBA Diversity Programs Manager Josh Isgur at 206-267-7052, or use the convenient order form on the back page of this issue.
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LaKeysha Miles-Washington is a 1L at Seattle University School of Law. She is currently the 1L representative for the Black Law Student Association and a member of the Loren Miller Bar Association.
