ELDRIDGE CLEAVER’S CODPIECE

Cleaver grew increasingly disillusioned with the Algerian government's lack of support; in January 1973, Cleaver reunited with Kathleen in Paris. Eventually, the French government granted him asylum. While in exile, the couple had two children, Antonio Maceo, and daughter Joju.

Eventually, Cleaver could no longer abide life away from the United States, and he negotiated his return, on the F.B.I.'s terms, as a prisoner in 1975. Over the years, Cleaver's political views had become conservative, a turn he attributed, in part, to his disillusionment with life in communist countries. In addition, while he was in France, Cleaver claims to have had a mystical vision, in which he saw the face of Christ in the moon. The vision laid the foundation for his conversion experience. Cleaver returned to the States born again, both as a Christian and as a conservative. Shortly after he arrived, he said, "I'd rather be in jail in America than free anywhere else."

While in jail in 1976, Cleaver announced that he was a born again Christian and renounced the Marxism-Leninism and atheism of his Black Panther days. After his release on bail he began a short career as leader of a religious revivalist movement, the Eldridge Cleaver Crusades, which he founded in 1977. In 1978, Cleaver published a second memoir, Soul on Fire. In 1980, Cleaver created a new church, a synthesis of Christianity and Islam he called Christlam. He also spoke at colleges on behalf of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's campus ministry organization, the Collegiate Association of Research Principles (CARP).