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Show Tells BYU students Cleaver 6in from cold' When Eldridge Cleaver finally came in from the cold, he found that life in the United States was much warmer and more congenial than it had been during his days as a lawbreaker and revolutionary expatriate. That's what the former Black Panther leader and ex-disciple of communism com-munism told a group of Brigham Young University law students at a recent forum sponsored by the Student Bar Association. Cleaver said he has come to believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ provides the answer to problems in American society. He sketched his own background for the students, and, in response to their questions, told them he believes blacks are prepared to move into a new mainstream role in the United States and that he has learned freedom is a thing that cannot be secured for separate ethnic groups in society one by one. Noting the irony of his speaking to the group in the J. Reuben Clark Law School's Moot Courtroom, Cour-troom, he recalled that his mother said he was "a little angel" until he was 12. But disagreements between his mother and father split the family apart about that time, and the hostility and anger he developed from the trauma of that split carried over into his defiance of any correction. correc-tion. He first got in study how communism was put together. The idea was to learn how to be a better communist." He learned instead that his Cuban experience was not atypical; in all the communist countries, the people who were supposed to benefit from communism were alienated from their powerful party-line rulers. Dissidents from communist nations presented overwhelming evidence of repression and torture in their homelands. Cleaver told the future lawyers that the United States has a two-fold problem in providing justice for all: to apply laws fairly, and to work with those in prison to change their lives. trouble with the law when he was 13. Before the end of his teens he had been sentenced to 10 years in prison. He and the young offenders of-fenders who were his friends called their life "the California merry-go-round": into custody, out, "pick up a new case," back into custody. "It was a revolving door in the prison." State penitentiaries were "like a parallel educational system." A young con interested in a particular type of crime could learn from experts behind the bars who would give a "seminar," a "one-year course," or a "two-year course." In prison Cleaver was introduced to the library and to books that he used to educate himself. He became acquainted, through another prisoner, with the Communist Manifesto, and many of the books he read were the works of Marx, Lenin, Engels and Mao. He learned to admire Black Muslim leader Malcolm X and vowed that when he was released from prison he would stay out of legal trouble and work for a new social order in the United States. CJeaver joined the Black Panther Movement shortly after being paroled from prison in 1966. Confrontations between that group and police eventually led to a 1968 shoot-out that resulted, after a legal fight, in certainty that he would be back in prison within 60 days. It was then he decided to accept a Cuban offer to go to the island nation and train urban guerrillas. It took him only eight months to learn that Cuba was not the communist paradise he envisioned, and that the common people there were not the friends of the Marxist elite. He moved to Algeria and spent several years traveling in communist countries "to |