Eldridge Cleaver — Eldridge Cleaver
Full Title: Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches
Eldridge Cleaver
Random House (A Ramparts Book), New York · 1969
First Edition · First Printing
The Book: First edition, first printing of Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, edited with an appraisal by Robert Scheer. The title page identifies Random House, New York, with the A Ramparts Book designation, and the copyright page explicitly states “First Printing.” Original black publisher’s cloth with silver spine lettering in the original unclipped first-state dust jacket retaining the $5.95 price and Ramparts branding. No evidence of book-club manufacture, remainder marking, or later-issue characteristics observed.
Condition: Near Fine book in Very Good dust jacket. The book remains clean with a tight binding and no ownership markings observed. The original dust jacket exhibits light rubbing, minor edge wear, and small chips at the spine ends while remaining complete and highly presentable.
Story Of The Book
By 1969, Eldridge Cleaver had moved from prison writing into the center of American political life.
Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches gathers the political work that followed his release from incarceration, preserving Cleaver not simply as the author of Soul on Ice, but as an active participant in the Black Power movement at the height of its national visibility. The volume records the moment when ideas developed under confinement moved directly into speeches, organizing, public controversy, and political struggle.
Published as A Ramparts Book, the volume also emerged from the same radical media ecosystem that helped amplify antiwar, civil-rights, and New Left voices during the 1960s. Its publication therefore belongs to a broader history of print culture as political infrastructure: magazines, books, and speeches functioning together to carry dissident ideas from marginalized spaces into national debate.
Rather than presenting Cleaver retrospectively, the book captures him in motion—recently released from prison, politically radicalized, nationally prominent, and participating directly in one of the most contested movements of the era.
Why It’s In The Collection
This book belongs in the collection because it documents the transformation of political imprisonment into public dissent.
Cleaver’s importance here is not merely that he held radical views, but that his writings demonstrate how prison could become a site of political formation and how publication could carry those ideas beyond confinement. The book preserves the next stage of that process: a formerly incarcerated writer entering national political life through speeches, essays, and movement participation.
It also complements Soul on Ice and the collection’s Ramparts holdings by extending the story from prison literature into organized political action. Together, those objects document how dissent circulated between incarceration, journalism, radical publishing, and social movements during the late 1960s.
As a true first edition, first printing published during the height of the Black Power movement, this volume is therefore both a literary and political publication-event object—preserving Cleaver’s emergence from prison into the national conversation while that conversation was still unfolding.
Collection Categories: Political History · Political Movements · Political Dissent · Civil Rights · Human Rights · Anti-Authoritarianism · Memoir & Testimony
Full Title: Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches
Eldridge Cleaver
Random House (A Ramparts Book), New York · 1969
First Edition · First Printing
The Book: First edition, first printing of Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, edited with an appraisal by Robert Scheer. The title page identifies Random House, New York, with the A Ramparts Book designation, and the copyright page explicitly states “First Printing.” Original black publisher’s cloth with silver spine lettering in the original unclipped first-state dust jacket retaining the $5.95 price and Ramparts branding. No evidence of book-club manufacture, remainder marking, or later-issue characteristics observed.
Condition: Near Fine book in Very Good dust jacket. The book remains clean with a tight binding and no ownership markings observed. The original dust jacket exhibits light rubbing, minor edge wear, and small chips at the spine ends while remaining complete and highly presentable.
Story Of The Book
By 1969, Eldridge Cleaver had moved from prison writing into the center of American political life.
Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches gathers the political work that followed his release from incarceration, preserving Cleaver not simply as the author of Soul on Ice, but as an active participant in the Black Power movement at the height of its national visibility. The volume records the moment when ideas developed under confinement moved directly into speeches, organizing, public controversy, and political struggle.
Published as A Ramparts Book, the volume also emerged from the same radical media ecosystem that helped amplify antiwar, civil-rights, and New Left voices during the 1960s. Its publication therefore belongs to a broader history of print culture as political infrastructure: magazines, books, and speeches functioning together to carry dissident ideas from marginalized spaces into national debate.
Rather than presenting Cleaver retrospectively, the book captures him in motion—recently released from prison, politically radicalized, nationally prominent, and participating directly in one of the most contested movements of the era.
Why It’s In The Collection
This book belongs in the collection because it documents the transformation of political imprisonment into public dissent.
Cleaver’s importance here is not merely that he held radical views, but that his writings demonstrate how prison could become a site of political formation and how publication could carry those ideas beyond confinement. The book preserves the next stage of that process: a formerly incarcerated writer entering national political life through speeches, essays, and movement participation.
It also complements Soul on Ice and the collection’s Ramparts holdings by extending the story from prison literature into organized political action. Together, those objects document how dissent circulated between incarceration, journalism, radical publishing, and social movements during the late 1960s.
As a true first edition, first printing published during the height of the Black Power movement, this volume is therefore both a literary and political publication-event object—preserving Cleaver’s emergence from prison into the national conversation while that conversation was still unfolding.
Collection Categories: Political History · Political Movements · Political Dissent · Civil Rights · Human Rights · Anti-Authoritarianism · Memoir & Testimony