The 1960s is arguably the most contentious decade in American history. From the widely unpopular Vietnam conflict and numerous urban riots to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., the decade of the Flower Child was filled with fear, anger, and uncertainty. In particular, the black community typified the social and cultural uncertainties that existed in the nexus between the racism of Jim Crow and the implied hopefulness of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The uncertainty of living in this nexus was best exemplified in Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Cleaver’s reflection and commentary allowed his audience a rare peek inside the mind and soul of a young black man struggling to overcome past prejudices and future fears.
This peek inside Cleaver’s existence highlighted the problems facing the civil rights generation. Incidentally, many of those problems are still around and currently plague the hip-hop generation as well. First of all Soul on Ice illustrated Cleaver’s determination to find some kind of religious sanctuary in a 1960s American society that apparently eschewed any likeness to a divine being. From Christianity to Islam to Plato, Cleaver discussed how he and his fellow inmates at Folsom Prison searched in vain to find that one piece of religious anchor that would serve them in their present situation. They never found it.
Secondly, Cleaver masterfully portrayed the generational disconnect in the black community. In the chapter titled “Lazarus, Come Forth” he attempted to draw a parallel between the New Testament Lazarus shedding his grave clothes and the civil rights-era black man shedding his grave clothes of segregation and second-class citizenship. Cleaver further illustrates this symbolic raising from the grave in the boxing career of Muhammed Ali, who shed his “slave” name, Cassius Clay, to be born again as a free man. Where Clay could be controlled by the power structure that ran boxing, Ali could not. It is here that Cleaver showed his mastery of social allegory by rejecting the constraints placed upon the disenfranchised while encouraging the same to take off their grave clothes and come out free from whatever binds them.
Lastly, Cleaver described his rage against a society that continually saw his as a menace. His mind tried to make sense out of the rage he felt for white society, a society that held him in contempt, and his lust for what that society said was the perfect embodiment of womanhood: the white female. Cleaver admitted to several instances of sexually assaulting white women, but he defended as actions by believing he was attacking white society by defiling the very thing it held in the highest esteem: the virtue of the white female. While most would agree that there is never a justification for the sexual violation of another, Cleaver’s superficial excuse illustrated the depths to which the powerless will travel to exact pain against the seemingly powerful.
Surely, Soul on Ice touches on a range of other topics that were culturally viable in the 1960s. However, young black men at the dawn of the 21st century are also discussing similar topics. Hopefully, they will allow the modern American society to peek inside their achievements, uncertainties, and discontent while matriculating on the college campuses of their choice, instead of the prisons of society’s choice.
Reference
Cleaver, Eldridge, Soul on Ice, New York: Dell Publishing, 1999 (1968)
