Best remembered as a Black Panther Party firebrand in the late '60s and early '70s, Cleaver later followed a tortuous path that took him through Communism, born-again Christianity, Mormonism and the Unification Church, a spell as a clothing designer and on to the Republican Party. In the end he found a measure of peace in a tiny church called the New Vision Center, Church of Religious Science, in Fontana, Calif., where his girlfriend, Tauni Seniff, 50, is board president. He even made the pancakes and hash browns at the church's Easter breakfast. "He loved to cook," says Seniff. "He used to cook in prison."
The son of a waiter and an elementary school teacher, Cleaver, born in Wabbaseka, Ark., lso used to write in prison. It was Soul on Ice, his 1968 collection of essays on race written while he was serving a 2-to-14-year sentence in Folsom (an admitted rapist, he was found guilty of assault with intent to kill), that first made him a countercultural star. Paroled in 1966, he soon joined the Black Panthers, becoming their minister of information.
After a 1968 gun battle with Oakland police, Cleaver jumped bail and went on a seven-year odyssey to Cuba, North Korea and Algeria, taking along his wife, Kathleen (the couple, divorced since 1985, have two grown children, Maceo, 28, and Joju, 27). Eventually, homesick, he came home to a light sentence and a life that never seemed to find a center.
On Valentine's Day 1997, Cleaver read his poetry at an open-mike night at the Serve U Java coffeehouse in Fontana. The fire was gone. "Tears welled up in his eyes," Andy Dominguez, a manager at the coffeehouse, told the Riverside Press-Enterprise. "He was very apologetic for the things he had done."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
