Kathleen Cleaver Neal was born in Dallas, Texas on May 13, 1945. Her parents were both activists and college graduates of the University of Michigan. Her father was a sociology professor at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and her mother earned a master's degree in mathematics. Three years after Cleaver was born, her father, Ernest Neal, accepted a job as the director of the Rural Life Council of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and they moved to a predominantly black community beside the campus. Six years later, Ernest joined the Foreign Service.
She graduated with honors in 1963. She continued her education at Oberlin College, and later transferred to Barnard College. In 1966, she left college for a secretarial job with the New York office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after her friend from childhood, Sammy Younge, had been murdered by white supremacists. The shift of the movement was characterized by the change from "Freedom Now" to "Black Power." Cleaver had been trying to get involved with the movement since she was sixteen. Gloria Richardson, Diane Nash, and Ruby Doris Robinson are among the Civil Rights fighters that inspired her to be involved in change and question the role of gender.
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