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Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (William Morrow & Co., 1967; 1984) In this seminal, scholarly skewering of the twentieth century black intellectual, Cruse predicted that black life in the inner city ghetto would come to resemble American Indians' fate on reservations. Written during Black Power's rise to prominence, Cruse's book critiqued black intellectuals for their inability to reconcile the twin impulses toward integration and/or nationalism. Cruse also laid out the notion of a "triple front" for the empowerment of black communities: leaders must simultaneously focus on cultural, political and economic matters. Returning to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Cruse showed how various strands of black protest thought had failed because they neglected one or more of the "fronts." The artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance, Cruse wrote, failed in their role as community leaders because they never turned their cultural nationalism into economic and political momentum; Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, focusing on the economic and political empowerment of black communities, nonetheless celebrated Western economic and cultural models while underestimating African or Black culture. Historian Christopher Lash wrote at the time that "when all the manifestoes and polemics of the Sixties are forgotten, this book will survive as a monument of historical analysis." The New Yorker called it "a book that will infuriate almost everyone." MORE: Recap of a 1995 Stanford University conference devoted to the book Amazon |
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