Kathleen Cleaver
Kathleen Cleaver, Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow, Emory Law School, Senior Lecturer, African American Studies, Yale University, says:
I see Professor Churchill as an outstanding representative of the honorable tradition of scholar activists, such as Howard Zinn, professor of history formerly at Boston University, Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT, and the late Edward Said, professor of literature at Columbia. Like Churchill, these scholars taught at their universities but did not confine their scholarship nor their activism to their specific discipline, nor limit their concern to the campus boundary. . . .Given the rightward-moving authoritarian orthodoxy that certain politicians have actively sought to impose on universities for nearly a decade, the insidious campaign to remove Professor Churchill raises cause for alarm. Further, it represents the antithesis of the integrity that Churchill demonstrates in his scholarship and writing, which he devotes to revealing truth and exposing hypocrisy. . . .Among the valuable works Ward Churchill has published, those I have used most have been his research into the FBI’s COINTELPRO, specifically in its operation against the Black Panther Party. . . . . In addition, Churchill’s work on political imprisonment, notably the anthology Cages of Steel, the revised version of which is in press, has also provided extremely helpful to those of us engaged in the heartbreaking effort of defending and seeking the release of political activists unfairly imprisoned within the United States, some of whom have been incarcerated for more than thirty years. . . . Having suffered during the late 1960s and early 70s the stings of disinformation, infiltration, political repression and the murder of members of my political organization, my take on current political development may differ from many. In the massive campaign to oust Churchill, I cannot help but detect the fine trace of an operation designed to appear ‘spontaneous’ but actually manipulated to attain a larger political objective.
