The crisis of the negro intellectual - Harold Cruse

Published in 1967, as the early triumphs of the Civil Rights movement yielded to
increasing frustration and violence, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual electrified
a generation of activists and intellectuals.

The product of a lifetime of struggle
and reflection, Cruse's book is a singular amalgam of cultural history, passionate
disputation, and deeply considered analysis of the relationship between American
blacks and American society.

Reviewing black intellectual life from the Harlem Renaissance
through the 1960s, Cruse discusses the legacy (and offers memorably acid-edged portraits)
of figures such as Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin, arguing that
their work was marked by a failure to understand the specifically American character
of racism in the United States.

This supplies the background to Cruse's controversial
critique of both integrationism and black nationalism and to his claim that black
Americans will only assume a just place within American life when they develop their
own distinctive centers of cultural and economic influence. For Cruse's most important
accomplishment may well be his rejection of the clichs of the melting pot in favor
of a vision of Americanness as an arena of necessary and vital contention, an open
and ongoing struggle.