Harold Cruse’s

THE CRISIS OF THE

NEGRO INTELLECTUAL
Reconsidered
 Harold Cruse’s
THE CRISIS OF THE
NEGRO INTELLECTUAL
Reconsidered

Edited by
JERRY WATTS

ROUTLEDGE
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In remembrance of
black Yale thinkers
who left us too early

John Blassingame
Sylvia Boone
Carl Price
Nellie Jean Sindab
Lisa Sullivan
Phil White
Joe Wood
 Contents

List of Contributors ix

Introduction 1
JERRY G.WATTS

PART 1. An Overview of the Cruse Project

Chapter 1 More Than Just a Politician 17
Notes on the Life and Times of Harold Cruse
VAN GOSSE
Chapter 2 Anatomy of Black Intellectuals and Nationalism 43
Harold Cruse Revisited
MARTIN KILSON
Chapter 3 Negro Exceptionalism 75
The Antinomies of Harold Cruse
NIKHIL PAL SINGH

PART 2. Cruse as Cultural Critic

Chapter 4 Harold Cruse’s Worst 97
Nightmare Rethinking Porgy and Bess
JEFFREY MELNICK
Chapter 5 The African-American Musician as Intellectual 111
JAMES C.HALL

PART 3. Blacks, Jews, and Communists

Chapter 6 Harold Cruse on Blacks and Jews 125
CHERYL GREENBERG
Chapter 7 Narrating Nationalisms 143
Black Marxism and Jewish Communists through the
Eyes of Harold Cruse
ALAN WALD
viii

Chapter 8 The Crisis of Blacks and Communism 163

EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

PART 4. Cruse as Cold Warrior

Chapter 9 The Cold War Seduction of Harold Cruse 175
PENNY M.VON ESCHEN
Chapter 10 The Crisis of Historical Memory 189
Harold Cruse, Julian Mayfield and African American
Expatriates in Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1957–1966
KEVIN GAINES

PART 5. The Problematic Status of Female Intellectuals

Chapter 11 Religious Intellectuals, Social Change, and 209
Women’s Bodies
TRACI C.WEST
Chapter 12 Where Are the Black Female Intellectuals? 229
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL

PART 6. Cruse and Black Nationalism

Chapter 13 Harold Cruse and Afrocentric Theory 235
MOLEFI KETE ASANTE
Chapter 14 Rethinking the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual 247
Harold Cruse, Black Nationalism, and the Black Power
Movement
PENIEL E.JOSEPH

PART 7. Cruse as Political Thinker

Chapter 15 Home to Harlem 271
Black American Identity and Cruse’s Quest
for Community
FRED MONTAS
Chapter 16 Cruse’s Dismissal of African American Liberalism 289
JERRY G.WATTS
Conclusion 313
Thirteen Theses Nailed to the Door of Cruse
JERRY G.WATTS

Index 325
 List of Contributors

Professor Molefi Kete Asante

Department of African-American Studies
Temple University, Philadelphia
Kevin Gaines
Department of History and African American Studies
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Van Gosse
Deparatment of History
Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Professor Cheryl Greenberg
Department of History
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Department of English
Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia
James C.Hall
Department of African American Studies
University of Illinois, Chicago
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Independent Scholar
Los Angeles, California
Peniel Joseph
Department of History
University of Rhode Island, Kingston
Martin Kilson
Frank Thompson Research Professor of Government (Emeritus)
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Jeffrey Melnick
Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
Fred Montas
Ph.D. Candidate (Political Science)
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Nikhil Pal Singh
Department of History
University of Washington, Seattle
Penny M.Von Eschen
Department of History
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Alan Wald
Department of English
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Jerry G.Watts
American Studies Program
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
Traci C.West
School of Theology
Drew University, Madison, New Jersey
 Introduction
JERRY G.WATTS

Thirty-five years after its initial publication, Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual remains a foundational work in African American studies and
American cultural studies. Serious students of twentieth-century American
intellectual history and the history of twentieth-century American intellectuals
must wrestle with Cruse’s text not merely because of the various arguments
contained in the book, but also because of the immense influence of the book on
subsequent generations of American intellectuals, particularly African American
intellectuals. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual captures an African American
intellectual sensibility that was very widespread and influential during the late
1960s and early 1970s. Though not exhaustive of all of the major currents in
black thinking of that period, the text is a bellwether of sorts. The book is somewhat
akin to I’ll Take My Stand, the bible of the Southern agrarian intellectual
formation.1 One now reads I’ll Take My Stand not only to understand certain
romanticized and reactionary images of America that were attractive to some
southern white American intellectuals during the early decades of the twentieth
century, but also to touch base with a foundational ideological statement that
generated many supportive and oppositional responses. The significance of I’ll
Take My Stand can only be adduced by situating it amid those intellectual
forebears who gave rise to it and those intellectual responses that arose in its
wake. Similarly, the significance of The Crisis is greater than the mere
arguments contained within the book’s covers. Much like I’ll Take My Stand,
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual announces a significant intellectual
formation and stands in the crossroads of numerous debates.
When published in 1967, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was one of the
very few texts that treated African American intellectuals as
intellectually significant. The longstanding racist marginalization of African
American intellectuals within mainstream American intellectual discourses came
under intense attack during the 1960s and ’70s, at least within black intellectual
circles. Neither an announcement for the “death of white sociology” nor a
declaration of the irrelevance of white literary assessments of black literature via
the invocation of a black aesthetic, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was
nevertheless partner to this black nationalist intellectual moment insofar as it
constituted a call to arms for African American literary and artistic autonomy.
2 • JERRY G.WATTS

Momentarily suspending the desire to gain acceptance by the American

intellectual mainstream, Cruse and other black nationalist-minded intellectuals of
the late 1960s and early 1970s began to think about ways to create vibrant
intellectual communities and networks that were neither dependent on white
funding nor governed by white cultural/intellectual standards. Equally important,
this insurgent black nationalist intellectual/artistic sensibility was conspicuously
determined to reach a black mass audience. Not only were black artists and
intellectuals called to create for the black masses, but they began to celebrate the
cultural richness of everyday African American life. The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual contained a sustained acerbic attack on black intellectuals for their
inability to mine the richness of African American culture. In Cruse’s eyes, black
intellectuals had shirked their responsibility to create and control art derived from
mass black cultural production.
The significance of Cruse’s study was further enhanced by the parochialism of
white scholars of American intellectual life who tended to write as if black
intellectuals did not exist. Even so-called progressive white intellectual
practitioners of the new revisionist social historiography of the 1960s and ’70s
tended to exclude discussions of black thinkers. Among other works, Christopher
Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as a Social Type and
Richard Pells’ Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social
Thought in the Depression Era disregarded black thinkers, including W.E.B.
DuBois.2 Even when taken into account by white scholars, The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual was often relegated to the margins. It could be substantively
dismissed by being rhetorically invoked. As a graduate student at Yale
University during the late 1970s, I was enrolled in an American Studies seminar
on the history of twentieth-century American intellectuals. Taught by a soon to
be prominent left-wing white historian, the class ignored African American
intellectuals. When challenged on this issue, the professor added The Crisis of
the Negro Intellectual to the supplemental reading list, where I suppose it
languished unread. Certainly, it never informed our seminar discussions. Despite
the marginalization of The Crisis within mainstream white intellectual circles, it
stimulated sustained discussion and debate within African American intellectual
circles. Elsewhere, I have written that “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
should be seen as a polemical call to arms for black intellectuals. As a call to
intellectual and artistic arms, the book was utterly captivating to a generation of
engaged black intellectuals though it remains unclear whether the book actually
influenced the beliefs and behavior of black intellectuals or provided them with
an ideologically compelling legitimation for their existent political
involvements.”3
The intellectual milieu that greeted the publication of The Crisis was vastly
different from the world inhabited by black intellectuals today. In 1967, black
students were beginning to appear in recognizable numbers on predominantly
white campuses. Simultaneously, black studies programs were being initiated
throughout American higher education. Though few blacks were hired to the
 INTRODUCTION • 3

faculties of predominantly white colleges (and fewer still outside of the black
studies programs), American higher education appeared to be beginning to
recognize the parochialism of its past.
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was published during a highly contentious
moment in African American political life. The nation was in turmoil over the
war in Vietnam. Civil rights advances appeared to be waning. The Crisis
appeared three years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and two
years after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, two acts that were seen by
most within the leadership ranks of the civil rights movement as cornerstone
achievements in the struggle for equal black citizenship rights. Writing with a
thirty-five-year hindsight, we can see that the civil rights movement and the
resultant civil rights legislation successfully ended most aspects of de jure
segregation in the United States. These new laws finally placed the authority of
the federal government behind the enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Voting Rights Act fundamentally altered the political status of blacks in the
South. There, black residents began to vote at a higher rate than blacks
elsewhere. In the decades following the passage of the Voting Rights Act,
thousands of blacks would be elected to local, county and state offices in the South.4
The rise of the black Southern vote, when coupled with the deep black-voter
attachment to the Democratic Party at the national level, generated a white
backlash that revitalized the Republican Party in the South as the party of whites.
White Southerners embraced the “Party of Lincoln” in order to flee the
Democratic Party, which had become, in their minds, too sympathetic to the
concerns of blacks and thus too unsympathetic to their own issues. The rejection
of the Democratic Party by white Southern voters did not necessarily extend to
all local and state Southern Democratic elected officials. Though the South had
become a two-party region, it remained politically segregated.5
The monumental successes of the civil right movement at obtaining federally
enforced legal equality including voting rights for Southern blacks were stellar
victories. However, the limitations of these legislative victories were almost
immediately apparent. Having obtained the vote, black Southerners began to
recognize the shortcomings of the liberal orientation of the civil rights
movement. Now that the fanciest of local restaurants were open to black
customers, how many blacks could actually afford to dine in them? Black
Southerners came to the realization that the right to vote did not automatically
translate into group economic mobility. Long neglected issues of economic
justice now rose to the foreground.
The black political optimism that arose as a result of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act was violently brought into question by
events in a predominantly black neighborhood of Los Angeles. During the summer
of 1965, a massive civil disturbance occurred that was unprecedented in the history
of urban American civil disturbances. Popularly referred to as the Watts riot or
Watts rebellion (depending on one’s political slant), this urban protest was a
testimony to the political despair of a segment of the black American populace
4 • JERRY G.WATTS

that had long possessed the right to vote but had come to the recognition that the
vote was not an efficacious mechanism for realizing economic inclusion.
Because of their different historical experiences with voting, black Southerners
felt enthused at precisely the point that black urban Northerners and Westerners
recognized the substantive limitations of voting rights and voting. If anything,
the national rhetoric celebrating America’s racial progress in the aftermath of the
civil rights legislation only added to the frustration of many blacks who
experienced no relief from their subjugation.
While Lyndon B.Johnson’s Great Society programs would continue
throughout the remainder of his term in office, the massive escalation of the U.S.
commitment to a war in Southeast Asia drained resources that could have been
invested in the “War on Poverty.” In the contest between “guns and butter,” guns
won. By 1965, the United States had committed more than 500,000 troops to the
war effort. In addition, Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have
persuasively shown that Johnson’s “War on Poverty” had never been intended to
systematically rid the nation of poverty.6 In response to Johnson’s Vietnam War
policies, an antiwar movement arose. Throughout America, news clips regularly
showed marching protesters, civil disobedience activists, and white “hard hats”
spewing venom against the protesters.
When the Cruse book first arrived in bookstores, the civil rights movement was
quagmired in a crisis of purpose from which it would never emerge. The
movement’s liberal integrationist outlook had been challenged, if not replaced, in
many sectors of black America by black nationalism and black power advocates.
While we cannot assume that most blacks were advocates of black nationalism,
it was clear that black nationalism had attained a significant presence and
respectability within the ranks of black political activists, intellectuals, and
college students. Insofar as the civil rights movement was in decline following
1965, black nationalism took on the appearance of a rebellious ideology. This
image of insurgency was further highlighted by the rhetorical fire, fervor, and
excesses that came to dominate the speeches of the perceived leaders of the black
power movement. Their rhetorical insubordination, which first gained credibility
following the events at Watts, was further reinforced by the black riots/rebellions
that took place in Detroit in 1966 and Newark in 1967. Stokely Carmichael,
H.Rap Brown and Eldridge Cleaver became media celebrities. Fortuitously for
Cruse, his book appeared at precisely the moment that a rhetoric of revolutionary
black nationalism had popularly emerged to challenge the liberal integrationist
praxis of Martin Luther King Jr. and his spiritual confreres.
Despite its long and rich tradition, the black nationalism that emerged during
the late 1960s was never saddled with the aura of defeat as was its counterpart,
integrationism. Integration, a project premised on restraint and gradualism was
unable to withstand the understandable frustrations of those whose dreams were
repeatedly deferred. Nothing served as better proof of this than the images of
silhouetted black figures darting in and out of stores engulfed in flames.
 INTRODUCTION • 5

Enter Harold Cruse. Within black activists and intellectual circles, The Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual loomed as a major source of black political debate.
Blacks on various sides of the political spectrum sharpened their ideas through
interrogations of the book. It was as if Cruse had provided an interpretive format
for understanding urban rebellions and the new mood of militant assertiveaess.
Furthermore, he had issued a call for black intellectuals to give direction to the
angry but chaotic black masses. Black anger, dissatisfaction, and frustration were
insufficient for emancipation. Blacks needed a program of action, and only black
intellectuals could provide it. In granting black intellectuals/artists the role of
formulating that plan of action, Cruse appealed to their honest desires to become
“relevant.” Furthermore, to the extent that The Crisis offered a critique and
condemnation of the white Left, many white intellectuals and scholars wrestled
with the implications of Cruse’s arguments and what they might harbor for an
emergent New left.
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual does not easily lend itself to summation or
linear analysis. The sheer multiplicity of Cruse’s arguments, assertions, and
innuendoes precludes an all encompassing, singular critique. If there is any
conclusion that can be reached after reading the essays contained in this
collection, we might agree that it succeeds primarily in raising numerous
important questions concerning twentieth-century African American intellectual
life. The hyperaggressive, if not dogmatically didactic, nature of this polemic
leads Cruse to grandiose statements. His assessments of individual African
American writers could by themselves generate a volume of critical responses.
Individual chapters on figures like Richard Wright, Claude McKay, and Lorraine
Hansberry have not stood up well in regards to scholarship then and now.
Because of his provocativeness, Cruse’s errors and miscalculations have
sometimes stimulated rich scholarly responses. On other occasions, his errors
were sufficiently grotesque so as to demand complete denunciation. For
instance, Cruse’s ad hominen attacks on the political behavior of West Indian
intellectuals in the United States has given rise to a devastating rebuttal by
Columbia University historian Winston James. In fashioning this wonderful
rebuttal, James has provided us with an entirely new, historically nuanced
discussion of twentieth-century West Indian radical intellectuals in the United
States.7 Even Cruse’s thesis about the Communist Party as a dominator of black
cultural production has been refuted by insightful counter arguments written by
Mark Naison, William J.Maxwell, and Bill V.Mullen, among others.8 The point
here is not that the desire to rebut Cruse has singlehandedly inspired the work of
numerous scholars. Instead, Cruse can be viewed as a serious participant in the
reevaluation of the American intellectual Left during the first half of
the twentieth-century. Those whose subsequent studies revise, refute, and even
condemn his arguments are but partners with Cruse in an ongoing revisionist
conversation.
Due to the attitude and vantage point of its author, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual has often been viewed as a solitary enterprise standing outside of any
6 • JERRY G.WATTS

tradition of intellectual discussion. Cruse, an idiosyncratic individualist, wrote

The Crisis as if its ideas and intentions were created de novo. He fails to mention
any previously published critiques and discussions of black intellectual politics
and thought. As such, one can read The Crisis and never realize that anyone prior
to Cruse ever attempted to analyze the politics and art of earlier generations of
black intellectuals. Cruse was overtly intent on making himself appear to be an
innovative, creative thinker without precedent. He aspires to be a Promethean
figure who is willing to disturb the mediocre quietude of the black intelligentsia
and accept the personal costs of doing so.
The Crisis is thoroughly unsystematic. One does not read Cruse expecting to
uncover a pyramid sequence of logical arguments that culminate in a profound
conclusion. Instead, Cruse places his personal experiences in the very center of a
discussion of African American intellectual politics during the twentieth century.
How else can we explain why Cruse spent so much energy discussing the
minutia of the Communist Party’s behavior in Harlem during the 1940s and
’50s? In 1967, black intellectuals, for the most part, were not concerned about a
reconsideration of the Communist Party’s cultural policy toward black
Harlemites during the 1940s. In addition, like most male intellectuals of his
generation, Cruse did not view black women as significant contributors to
African American intellectual and artistic life. While Cruse’s sexist parochialism
cannot be excused, it can be understood as a norm of his generation’s gender
conceptualizations. What cannot be so easily excused or understood is the degree
to which those who read and reviewed the Cruse text when it was first published
also ignored the relative absence of female thinkers in The Crisis.
The earliest reviews of The Crisis were either extraordinarily praiseworthy or
extraordinarily condemnatory. While most reviewers conceded the
provocativeness of the book and its ultimate value as an educated polemic, some
were angered or put off by Cruse’s vicious style of argument. Left-wing historian
Christopher Lasch, who, as mentioned earlier, had snubbed black thinkers in his
1965 book on American intellectuals, reviewed The Crisis for the New York
Review of Books in 1968. Lasch wrote, “When all the manifestoes and polemics
of the sixties are forgotten, this book will survive as a monument of historical
analysis.”9 Effusive in its praise, the review is primarily a rehashing of various
Cruse arguments and Lasch statements of concurrence. Lasch notes that Cruse is
perceptive in warning black nationalists of the 1960s not to become prisoners of
the white Left. Lasch agrees with Cruse’s assertions that the Negro ghetto needs
self-help organizations and buyer collectives. In addition, Lasch concurs with
Cruse that many black nationalists mistakenly viewed the Watts uprising as
“revolutionary” when in fact such chaotic events had no deep
political significance. Lasch agrees with Cruse that Marxism can be utopian and
escapist, but he criticizes Cruse for not recognizing the same possibilities in
black nationalism.
Albert Murray, not yet the prominent man of letters that he would later
become, reviewed Cruse’s book for the Chicago Sun Times in 1967. Murray
 INTRODUCTION • 7

called The Crisis “imaginatively documented and politically sophisticated…the

most urgently needed if not the most important book of the year,” with “often
brilliant insights into the political and cultural implications of the Negro
experience, his rich historical background and his cultural black
nationalism….”10
Eugene D.Genovese, then a Marxist historian, delivered a critique of The
Crisis at the Socialist Scholars Conference held in September 1968. Titled
“Black Nationalism and American Socialism: A Comment on Harold Cruse’s
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual” the talk would later be published in a
collection of Genovese’s essays.11 In the essay, Genovese claims that in regard to
books on the American racial crisis, “The Crisis transcends anything written in
our generation.” In noting that the book is a blend of ideological manifesto,
sober history and sociology, and hyperpolemic, Genovese posits that it could be
justifiably damned or celebrated on an unlimited number of points. He does not
buy into Cruse’s argument that the “Negro question” was a form of a generic
ethnic American political struggle,”12 but instead argues that blacks constitute a
very unique social formation. Moreover, he does not think that Cruse is correct in
viewing American Jews and Zionism as the typicality of American white ethnic
groups. More important, Genovese accuses Cruse of being uncritical of the
nationalist tradition. While Cruse condemns American communists for
opportunism and treachery, he omits any mention of the opportunism and
treachery that have historically thrived in nationalist movements. Genovese notes
that Cruse understates the significance of class distinctions and conflicts within
and outside black America as if to imply that black nationalism renders moot all
issues of class conflict.
Robert L.Allen, a black leftist political commentator, situated Cruse within a
discussion of the cultural nationalist movement that had emerged within black
intellectual circles during the late 1960s. Finding Cruse far more substantive than
the ideas advanced by LeRoi Jones and Maulana Karenga, the two leading of
advocates of black cultural nationalism, Allen wrote that Cruse “brought to his
work intimate knowledge of the inner machinery of the older white Communist
movement and its serious failings. He is clearly committed to black people and to
their liberation, and he raises serious questions as to why so many black
intellectuals have not exhibited in their actions a similar concern. The outcome is
a passionately compelling intellectual treatise. At times his passion grates against
reason, and he displays occasional discursive drifts, but there can be little doubt
that Cruse is among the critical figures helping to shape an indigenous African
American radicalism.”13 Allen, like Genovese, is not convinced by Cruse’s
argument that the real struggle in America is to make the society one that accepts
black cultural particularity as one cultural component of an ethnically pluralist
social order. He is baffled by Cruse’s view of democracy as democratic relations
among ethnic groups. Such a view of democracy leaves the class issue
untouched. Finally, Allen views Cruse’s advocacy of the leadership of
intellectuals as inherently elitist.
8 • JERRY G.WATTS

Robert Chrisman, the young editor of the new journal The Black Scholar,
would pen a thoughtful review titled “The Crisis of Harold Cruse.” Published in
the initial issue of The Black Scholar, Chrisman would call The Crisis, “a
remarkable achievement,” noting, “Documentation is thorough and extensive;
many texts and sources on black experience emerge for the first time or are
pleasantly renewed and the index is excellent. The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual is by far the most impressive history of black intellectual
development to emerge in this decade.”14
Chrisman sees real problems in The Crisis despite the book’s brilliance. He
believes that Cruse is unnecessarily confusing in his use of the term culture.
Cruse, Chrisman argues, employs only an esthetic sense of the term when in fact
he should also have utilized the idea of culture in its more functional,
socialscientific sense. Moreover, he accuses Cruse of vicious anti-Semitism in
his use of Jews as a scapegoat for black intellectual failure. Challenging Cruse’s
belief that culture precedes political and social change, Chrisman declares that
“if art alone could make revolution, there would be daily upheavals.” Finally,
among other shortcomings, Chrisman believes that The Crisis “does not resolve
its own conflicts nor fulfill its thesis. It rides through its 500 pages on a razor’s
edge of ambivalent fury. The fury is more precise and lethal when it is turned to
blacks…. When turned toward the individual and institutionalized oppression of
white America, the fury of Cruse sputters, fizzles, and fails. Fails, falls back
upon itself and any black within its range. Having evaded an analysis of
American capitalism and economic racism and the relationship between
capitalism and culture, Cruse returns to his favorite whipping boy, the black
intellectual.”15
In a vein similar to Chrisman’s, Ernest Kaiser, an older black leftist, also
criticized Cruse for letting American capitalism “off the hook.”16 Insofar as
Cruse accepted capitalist America as a permanent given, he was forced to
construct an argument for black emancipation that did not bring into question the
nation’s economic structure. Appearing in the black leftist intellectual organ
Freedomways in the winter of 1969, Kaiser’s review of The Crisis would be by
far the most condemnatory analysis of the text published in a major journal. It
was not surprising that Kaiser and his conferes at Freedomways would give such
prominence to a review of The Crisis, for Cruse had repeatedly attacked the
Freedomways crowd in the book. Kaiser’s review offers numerous examples of
conceptual confusion in Cruse’s book. For instance, Kaiser views it as absurd
that Cruse could assert that black intellectuals should have worked out a
synthesis of Marcus Garvey’s economic nationalism (orthodox capitalism) and
Marxism. How could the two be synthesized? Most important, Kaiser is the
only early reviewer of The Crisis who was sufficiently familiar with the Harlem
intellectual scene and the treatment of blacks within the Communist Party to be
able to challenge Cruse on the facts of his arguments. In conclusion, he
considered The Crisis a dangerous and wrongheaded text.
 INTRODUCTION • 9

The essays contained in the present volume are collectively a testimony to the
continuing significance of The Crisis despite its shortcomings. This collection
includes critics of various perspectives who continue to read the The Crisis in
vastly different ways. There has been no attempt on my part as editor to generate
any consensus of perspectives on the Cruse text. I disagree with many of the
arguments contained within, and yet I am thrilled to be able to publish a
collection of essays that are resolutely serious in their approach toward Cruse. In
so doing I hope to pay homage to a thinker worthy of continual reconsideration.
Most of the authors herein have chosen to discuss specific arguments made by
Cruse. Some have utilized Cruse’s arguments to launch broader discussions of
various issues pertaining to African American intellectuals. Still others have
contributed discussions on intellectual issues completely ignored by Cruse.
Van Gosse provides a penetrating profile of the enigmatic Cruse. Despite the
prominence of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Cruse has been highly
successful at keeping himself outside of public view. Most readers of The Crisis
have known little about the intellectual trajectory that gave birth to The Crisis.
Gosse’s discussion of Cruse’s life before the publication of The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual fills an important gap in our knowledge of the noted author. One
fascinating aspect of Cruse’s life that comes through in this interview is Cruse’s
unusual introduction to Marxist thought. Cruse notes that he was introduced to
Marxist thought by the left-wing Italian partisans who were simultaneously
fighting against Italian fascism and the Nazi occupation of Italy. Intrigued by
Cruse, Gosse has penned a sensitive portrait.17
Martin Kilson has provided an ambitious if somewhat scathing critique of The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual In large part, Kilson is baffled by the ways in
which The Crisis celebrated a neo-Booker T.Washington, racially
accommodationist, self-help tradition and yet retained its patina as a militant
black nationalist text. Kilson believes that Cruse’s most glaring error lay in his
willingness to denounce liberal-leftist integrationists at precisely the moment
that this sector was involved in the civil rights movement, the largest progressive
African American political movement in United States history. Yet Kilson finds
much to be excited about in many of Cruse’s formulations.
Like Kilson, but for very different reasons, Nikhil Pah Singh provides
penetrating criticisms of some of the twists and slips in Cruse’s arguments. He
situates The Crisis amid writings that Cruse published before and after it. In so
doing, Singh allows us to perceive alterations in Cruse’s thinking that Cruse
never acknowledges in his writing. Singh views Cruse’s work as an American
precursor to the emergence of cultural studies in the United States.
Jeffrey Melnick’s critique of Cruse’s discussion of George Gershwin
opens new vistas for delineating cultural exchanges between Jewish Americans
and African Americans. Cruse depicted Gershwin as a member of the cabal of
leftwing Jews who milked and exploited black culture, and believed that the
Jewish Gershwin’s ability to market Porgy and Bess as authentically black not
only stemmed from Gershwin’s privilege of whiteness but resulted in lesser
10 • JERRY G.WATTS

opportunities for the artistic exploration of black folk culture by black writers
and playwrights. Cruse thus found him to be an interloper. Melnick concludes
that Cruse’s understanding of the appropriate art for blacks and for Jews is rooted
in racial essentialistic ethnic/racial aesthetics and thus does not truly comprehend
the rich interplay between ethnic cultures.
One of the major absences in Cruse’s text is a serious consideration of the
political and cultural implications of black music. James C.Hall offers an
important critique of Cruse in regard to his apparent unwillingness to consider
jazz musicians as artists of the highest caliber (on par with literary artists such as
novelists) who confronted and promulgated ideas through their art form. Cruse,
Hall notes, concentrates on the absence of an African American-controlled
artistic infrastructure that could support jazz and jazz musicians. Hall recognizes
Cruse’s concern as justifiable, but he criticizes Cruse for not having mentioned
attempts by blacks to create such infrastructures in regard to music. Hall wonders
if black capitalist owners of record companies and others in the music industry
would be governed by an ethic any different from that of white record company
owners. Additionally, Hall criticizes Cruse for omitting a discussion of actual
creative forms and styles of jazz and the fact that black jazz musicians were
conspicuously engaged in creating music that challenged the homogenizing
tendencies of consumption-oriented capitalism. Hall also reminds us of Cruse’s
dismissal of African American popular music (such as that of James Brown).
Given the seminal influence of African American music on American culture and
society, Hall’s essay is utterly important.
Cheryl Greenberg delves into one of the most controversial aspects of The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Cruse’s discussion of the relationship between
blacks and Jews. Unlike Cruse, Greenberg provides a thoroughly documented
and nuanced discussion of the conflicts and partnerships between the two
groups. While she acknowledges that blacks and Jews often clashed over issues
deriving from their economic differences, she also notes that there were
differences within the Jewish community toward blacks, and vice versa.
Alan Wald utilizes his essay to discuss Cruse’s claim that blacks within the
Communist Party were the dependents of Jewish cultural arbiters within the
Party. Wald argues quite persuasively that Cruse’s depiction of black-Jewish
relations within the Communist Party is not accurate. He utilizes a reading of The
Lonely Crusade, Chester Himes’s 1947 novel about black-Jewish relationships
within the party in Los Angeles during the early 1940s. Wald then analyzes in
detail specific claims Cruse makes about the supposed controlling behavior of
Jews toward blacks within the party, as well as the supposed obsequiousness of
black Communist Party members to their Jewish superiors. Nevertheless, Wald
has no doubt that there were individuals within the party who behaved in the
manner described by Cruse.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, author of Blacks and Reds, a history of the conflict and
cooperation between the U.S. Communist Party and African Americans, offers a
synopsis, of sorts, of that extended work. He believes that Cruse is both correct
 INTRODUCTION • 11

in describing the paternalism of the Communist Party toward blacks and incorrect
in understating the significance and sincerity of the party’s attempts to engage
black Americans. Yet Hutchinson believes that Cruse was absolutely correct in
dissecting the party’s fear of black nationalist sentiments among black people.
Simply put, the Communist Party was fearful of what it could not incorporate;
thus, black nationalism would be deemed reactionary by party leaders even as
late as the era of Malcolm X. In this sense, Ofari thinks that Cruse understood
something about blacks and black consciousness that the Communist Party never
grasped.
Penny M.Von Eschen shrewdly discusses the ways that Cruse’s vision of the
domestic political possibilities were premised on an acceptance of the U.S.
participation in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. By divorcing domestic
political concerns from an analysis of U.S. imperialistic ambitions in
undermining decolonization struggles around the globe, Cruse was unable to
grasp the authentic democratic impulses behind Paul Robeson’s anticolonial
politics. Cruse, caught in a cul-de-sac of Cold War reasoning, labeled any
criticism of U.S. international behavior as pro-Soviet.
Kevin Gaines focuses on the personal animosity and political conflict between
Cruse and black writer Julian Mayfield to underscore Cruse’s misreading of the
international concerns of many progressive black intellectuals during the period
of African decolonization. Like Von Eschen, Gaines highlights the shortcomings
of Cruse’s commitment to Cold War politics and his resultant inability to grasp
the significance of international politics on domestic American race relations.
Julian Mayfield and a sizable cadre of progressive African American
intellectuals (including W.E.B.DuBois) became expatriates in Ghana shortly
after its independence. Under the leadership of the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah,
independent Ghana became a symbol of African possibility. It was a place where
the new politics of the “third world” could begin to unfold. Many black
American intellectuals thought that they could realize their pan-African
sensibilities by placing their talents in the service of Ghanian nation building.
Insofar as Ghana attempted to avoid a non-colonial relationship with both the
Soviet Union and the United States, the expatriates in Ghana were viewed by the
American government as antithetical to this nation’s international interests.
The essay by Traci C.West offers a rather pathbreaking discussion of the
sexism that precluded African American women access to one of the few
blackcontrolled infrastructures for the dissemination of ideas. While most black
ministers are not intellectuals, those who are constitute one of the largest
constellations of organic intellectuals in the African American community. The
sexist exclusion of black women from pulpits constitutes a phenomenal waste of
intellectual talent in a community direly in need of all the thinkers it can get. In his
well-known essay, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” Cornel West
pronounces the black preacher tradition as one of two organic intellectual
traditions in African American life. While we may not agree with his assertion,
we cannot ignore the central role that the ministry plays in the dissemination of
12 • JERRY G.WATTS

ideas in black America. In her essay herein, Traci C.West focuses our attention
on an intellectual arena within black America in which democratic discourse is
utterly distorted. Given Cruse’s conspicuous avoidance of any discussion of the
relationship between African American intellectuals and the black church
tradition, as well as his thoroughly weak consideration of African American
female thinkers. West’s essay on African American female religious intellectuals
could not have been centered around a critique of The Crisis.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s essay is a short commentary on Cruse’s disregard for
the ideas of female African American intellectuals; Cruse could have more
accurately titled his book The Crisis of the Negro Male Intellectual Except for
Lorraine Hansberry, whom Cruse mentions only to pillage, no singular female is
analyzed. Given Cruse’s belief in the artistic value of mining African American
folk culture, one might have expected him to confront the writings of Zora Neale
Hurston. Furthermore, it is not clear why Cruse ignored Ida Wells-Barnett, given
his fondness for highly assertive black thinkers. The highly politicized writer and
Communist Party fellow traveler Alice Childress was also given only a
perfunctory mention.
Molefi Kete Asante, the founder of the Afrocentrism intellectual movement,
believes that in many respects, Cruse’s work was a precursor to Afrocentrism. In
highlighting Cruse’s argument for the importance of black cultural autonomy,
Asante argues that Cruse and Afrocentrists similarly understand the problems of
African American identity confusion. The primary difference between the
Afrocentrist and Cruse is that Cruse did not recognize that African Americans
were Africans in America. Had he recognized this, and grounded his call for
black cultural autonomy in an African cultural identity, Cruse might have been
able to realize his project of freeing black intellectuals and artists to realize their
highest creativity.
Peniel Joseph contributes a perceptive discussion of Cruse’s intellectual
development. He utilizes Cruse’s biography as a means for understanding the
vicissitudes in his thought. Joseph offers insight into the origins of Cruse’s
resentment toward Lorraine Hansberry and Paul Robeson. Reading Joseph, it
becomes clearer just how phenomenal it was that Cruse, a struggling writer who
was working odd jobs to make ends meet, could muster sufficient discipline to
write The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a massive and ambitious work.
Though Cruse labored in obscurity before the appearance of The Crisis, he would
become an honored figure among subsequent generations of black nationalist
intellectuals.
Fred Montas, a young political theorist, attempts to situate Cruse’s notion of
ethnic-premised cultural democracy within a discussion of the
theoretical preconditions necessary for a dynamic democratic individuality.
Montas argues that Cruse’s advocacy of black nationalism places blacks in a
cul-de-sac from which they could never authentically realize the richness of their
humanity. Black nationalists, like Cruse, would intentionally preclude open-
ended African American quests to experience the world around them, for Cruse
 INTRODUCTION • 13

and colleagues desired to provide blacks with an unchallengeable static identity.

Completely opposing Asante’s argument, Montas thinks that a secure identity
(including a secure black identity) is but a fiction that is invoked to simplify a
world that cannot be actually managed in such a manner. Contingency cannot be
escaped however anxiety ridden it might be.
In the final essay, I dissect Cruse’s treatment, or lack thereof, of African
American liberalism. I argue that Cruse erroneously dismissed African American
liberalism as hopelessly accommodationist when in reality African American
liberalism as a distinct branch of American liberalism never made peace with
white supremacy. Unlike mainstream American liberalism, which viewed
antiracism as an issue that could be sacrificed, African American liberalism
foregrounded the antiracism struggle and fought hard to end Jim Crowism.
African American liberals included such figures as Ida Wells-Barnett, Thurgood
Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Walter White. Unfortunately, Cruse
tended to view any intellectual who entertained pragmatic bargaining as being
the same as an accommodationist.
Though written over three decades ago, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
remains central to all serious discussions of twentieth-century African American
intellectuals. The essays in this volume are testimony to the continuing vibrancy
of Cruse’s arguments. Hopefully, this volume will stimulate further reflection on
this immensely important text.
In closing, I would like to thank James Miller, my former Trinity College
colleague who now haunts the campus of George Washington University, for
helping to conceptualize this project.

Notes

1. Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand (New York: Harper & Row, 1930).
2. Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (New York: Knopf, 1965);
Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams:Culture and Social Thought
in the Depression (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
3. See Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics
and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina
Press, 1994).
4. For a history of the impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (and its extensions) on
the American south, see Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting
Rights Act, 1965–1990, Eds. Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Controversies in Minority Voting: The
Voting Rights Act in Perspective, Eds. Bernard Grofman and Chandler Davidson,
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992); and J.Morgan Kousser,
Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second
Reconstruction, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
5. For an overview of the rise of the Republican Party in the South in response to
perceptions about the Democratic Party’s allegiances to blacks, see Earl Black and
14 • JERRY G.WATTS

Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 2002).
6. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor (New York:
Pantheon, 1971).
7. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in
Early Twentieth-Century America, (London: Verso, 1998), esp. the postscript,
“Harold Cruse and the West Indians: Critical Remarks on The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual,” 262–91.
8. See Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New York:
Grove Press, 1984); William J.Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American
Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999); Bill V.Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American
Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
9. The review is reprinted in Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New
York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1969), 155.
10. Albert Murray, cited in Erenst Kaiser, review of The Crisis, Freedomways 9, no. 1
(1969): 25.
11. See Eugene D.Genovese, In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and
Afro-American History (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 188–99.
12. Cruse would later develop this hopelessly flawed thesis in Plural but Equal: Blacks
and Minorities in America’s Plural Society (New York: William Morrow, 1987).
13. Robert L.Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytical History
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 144–45.
14. Robert Chrisman, “The Crisis of Harold Cruse,” The Black Scholar 1, no. 1
(1969): 77.
15. Ibid.
16. Kaiser, review of The Crisis, 24–41.
17. Reading Gosse’s portrait, I thought it striking that Cruse learned Marxism from
rank-and-file Italian communists, a fact that may ultimately help to explain Cruse’s
lack of a theoretical orientation toward Marxism. Cruse would acquire a strategic
understanding of Marxism and treat it as if Marxism constituted a method for
understanding power. The failure of the Communist Party to win the hearts of black
Americans becomes, for Cruse, the failure of Marxism. Cruse would repeatedly
confuse tactics and strategies with theorizing. This confusion saturates The Crisis.
 Part 1

An Overview of the Cruse Project

16
 1
More Than Just a Politician
Notes on the Life and Times of Harold Cruse

VAN GOSSE

In the thirty years since the publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
Harold Cruse’s analysis of the necessity of a cultural revolution in America by
African Americans has exerted great influence, often critiqued but never
superseded. As Manning Marable notes in his history of postwar black activism,
it is “the most complex theoretical work produced in the Black Power period.”1
Though his ideas continue to receive attention, Cruse himself remains elusive,
despite a fifty-year career as an intellectual activist. It may be that he wanted it
that way, and has effectively controlled his own representation through sheer
force of textual authority. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is explicitly about
Cruse himself, his crisis or “Crusade” (as Julian Mayfield punned at the time),
but its intense personalism on the intellectual plane serves to render the rest of
the author’s life opaque. This reticence, combined with Cruse’s fiercely
polemical style, makes him an apparitional figure in the story, there and not
there, as if he is always standing on the side, noting for future appraisal the
follies around him. He etches in acid a vast range of political actors since the late
1940s—in Robert Chrisman’s memorable aphorism, “Cruse may not be the
gadfly of Athens, but he is certainly the horsefly of Harlem”—but his own role
remains elliptical.2 By the author’s own admission, “talking very much about
myself and my own political exploits…would have necessitated another kind of
a book—a political autobiography, a genre I was not interested in.”3
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was followed in 1968 by Rebellion or
Revolution? selected essays introduced by a brief, eloquent memoir intended to
“explain some of the activities in which I was involved” and “the line of
critical progression which led to the publication of my first book.”4 Taken
together, the two books present Cruse’s political career as a series of sour
failures, the only merit of which was to force his intellectual evolution. This
progress toward enlightenment is described as “a road leading deeper into a
peculiar kind of American cultural sickness, a pathological region of the
American psyche defended by political and cultural antagonists of all kinds I
came through it all badly mauled, scarred, traduced, defeated in a score of battles,
but determined to win the war even if that required becoming a critical Kamikaze
fighter on the cultural front.”5
18 • VAN GOSSE

Certainly most readers are likely to retain an image of Cruse as a perpetual

outsider, disgusted by the obtuseness he finds on all sides, and above all by the.
machinations of the Marxist Left. This characteristic narrative voice appears to
have mirrored his personality. Diverse acquaintances from his years of obscurity
remember him as “a very brooding person…speaking bitterness” and how “he
often spoke as though he personally, as well as other black peoples, had been
wronged by the CPUSA [U.S. Communist Party].”6
Under these circumstances, sorting through Cruse’s political affiliations and
activities after he left the Communist Party and comparing his version with what
others may remember, must have seemed redundant. No historian to date has
looked into the circumstances whereby a budding Marxist theoretician of the
post-World War II era emerged years later as the preeminent theorist of an anti-
Marxist black nationalism. The audacity of his work justified itself, as did
Cruse’s insistence that he was exclusively a “social critic,” his favorite self-
description. Clearly, this was a man who had seen much, and for a long while
that was sufficient. Now, perhaps, it will be useful to unpack both what he saw
and what he did.
What follows is a preliminary sketch, based on conversations with Cruse and
several former associates, and a look through readily accessible sources. A fuller
examination of Cruse’s life and times will have to wait until his personal papers
become available.7
To begin, one must make a case for the biographical approach that goes
beyond interest in the private life of any distinguished author. I argue that Cruse
played an important role in a little-documented period of black radical and
nationalist politics, the decade between 1955 and 1965. These two bookends are
in themselves well known. 1955 saw not only the beginning of the Montgomery
bus boycott but the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which triumphantly
announced to the world the aspirations of colonized peoples of color. 1965 was
the year of the Watts rebellion and Malcolm X’s murder, as the Southern-based
civil rights movement began its turn left and northward as part of the surge
toward Black Power.
At that time and since, the Black Power movement has been described as
inspired largely by Malcolm X’s charisma and his articulation of a rigorously
coherent nationalist position, in tandem with the rebuff to the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention.
But unnoticed by white politicians, journalists and radicals, a nationalist and anti-
imperialist constituency did begin developing in the late 1950s outside of both
the civil rights movement and the Nation of Islam. It grew rapidly in the early
1960s, in response to events like the Cuban Revolution and the CIA-supported
killing of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, which
symbolized the West’s backing of unrepentant white-supremacist forces in
Africa’s southern half—the Belgians in the Congo, the Portuguese in
Mozambique and Angola, and white settlers in the Union of South Africa and
“Rhodesia.”
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 19

Inspired by international events as well as by the growing militance of

Southern black activists, from 1960 on, a Northern urban constituency of
intellectuals, students, and older radicals disillusioned with the established Left
began the painful process of institution building. In the next five years, they
spawned a host of local organizations and various publications, even attempting
to create a national presence via the abortive Freedom Now Party of 1963–64.
Their efforts were centered in New York City, and had significant international
connections in Europe and Cuba, and with black American expatriates in Kwame
Nkrumah’s Ghana.
This emerging secular nationalist community was the world in which Harold
Cruse moved (though not the only one, as we shall see), and which he wrote
about. It was also, until the publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
the only world in which he was a known presence—known enough to be invited
to participate in many of its important formations, from the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee to the Freedom Now Party to the Liberator magazine. In fact, Cruse
made his name among political activists by writing more effectively than anyone
else about “The New Negro Nationalism,” with The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual the culmination of his documentation and analysis. Paradoxically,
that book was so scathing and dismissive that it both summed up this new
politics and dismissed it as a set of derivative blind alleys. Cruse wrote as a
theorist drawing lessons from the past to argue for a particular political direction
in the future. He would reject the idea that his account by itself is sufficient to
understand the events of the 1955–65 period, and so should we.
According to the various biographical dictionaries to which he has submitted
brief items, and references in his various writings, Harold Wright Cruse was born
on March 8,1916, in Petersburg, Virginia, and by the time he was a teenager had
moved to New York, growing up in Harlem and an integrated Queens
neighborhood. He was 25 years old when he joined the U.S. Army in 1941, and
after serving for four years in a Jim Crow unit of the Quartermaster Corps in
Africa and Italy, he became a sergeant at the age of 29.
For the next seven years, until 1952, when he left the Communist Party at age
36, Cruse participated in the traditional Left, assuming a position of considerable
respect among Harlem communists as “an up-and-coming Marxist theoretician…
not a mere rank-and-filer like the rest of us…he functioned on a policymaking
level,” though Cruse himself was content to describe his role more modestly, as
merely a “librarian and part-time reviewer in the cultural department” of the
Daily Worker.8 Since his rupture with the CPUSA is the one event Cruse has
written about in considerable if elusive detail, it is passed over here, though his
fight for a nationalist position when the party was undergoing an “anti-white
chauvinism” campaign bears further study. Cruse spent most of the 1950s
unknown and unsung before beginning to publish essays, and was 44 when he
went to Cuba in 1960—a pivotal event in his later trajectory.
This chronological specificity is important because a single leitmotif runs
throughout Cruse’s writings and later oral reminiscences (other than his deep
20 • VAN GOSSE

anger at the CPUSA)—his sense of a distinct generational identity in the

Depression and World War II years. In 1968, he would write evocatively about
“the inheritance of my Harlem generation…the will of most black youth to make
dreams out of their own spiritual inheritance,” and add that, “I don’t properly
belong to the current generation of young black militants, but am a carry-over
from the World War II generation that came to maturity during the 1940s.”9 As
late as 1996, his most distinct memory of the Cuba trip in 1960 was that he was
much more “experienced” than people like the Fair Play for Cuba Committee
leader Richard Gibson and LeRoi Jones and couldn’t share in their enthusiasm,
that he was “just along for the ride They looked a little askance at me, wouldn’t
confide in me, I was from another generation.”
Thus, when Cruse first began his post-Communist career as a writer, he was
no longer a youth, a fact he wants us to remember. This lends a particular
poignancy to his fond description of the 1950s, his years in a figurative
wilderness: “I found individual freedom a grand personal experience. For about
five years, I read and wrote, but published nothing…. I was thinking and writing
alone, unnoticed in my Chelsea, Manhattan garret.”10
But how did he live, and what was he writing? Throughout this period, Cruse
rented an apartment at 203 West 14th Street, and worked in an “ordinary staff
position” at Macy’s on 34th Street, “because it was convenient” (Gibson also
remembers him as a waiter in a restaurant on 14th Street, and that he studied at
the 42nd Street Library).11 He later described himself as “a Harlemite who
became a Villager in 1950,” and besides this conscious identity as a Greenwich
Village bohemian—for that is clearly how he saw himself—throughout the
1950s and 1960s, he tried to develop a career as a man of letters in the old-
fashioned sense, a dramatist and also a novelist.12 This fact is alluded to only
cryptically in later writings and remains sensitive, but it is central to
understanding how Cruse arrived at his cultural critique of radical politics: by
leaving politics and embracing art.
Cruse’s only explicit references to his nonpolitical writings came in the
Introduction to his Rebellion and Revolution?

Life, circumstances, my creative psychology, plus the vagaries of the

publishing field, have made of me a social critic almost against my will.
Over the last eighteen years or so, I have written many things, both
little and ambitious, in different literary forms. For a variety of reasons—
subjective, objective, and external—none of my output, except some
articles, was ever published. One of the external reasons was that the
politically repressive and intellectually vapid decade of the fifties was not a
receptive atmosphere for genuinely critical and creative ‘black
literature.’”13

A more succinct explanation came in his terse account of how he had known
LeRoi Jones years before they went to Cuba together in 1960. After all, Jones
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 21

was not yet famous at all in those years, just a young man out of the U.S. Air
Force trying to find his way in the Village Beat scene. To Cruse, however, there
was nothing odd in his knowing the poet Jones, “because I was more-than just a
politician.” Jones confirms that he knew “Harold Cruse, the writer…from my
MacDougal Street days, often in the Cafe Figaro. (He lived then in a furnished
room on West 23rd or West 14th, and was always complaining about how
Broadway producers were turning down musicals he was writing.)”14
From this passing comment one gleans a sense of a strikingly different Cruse—
a would-be writer of hit Broadway shows first and a polemicist after. It is
unclear how many musicals, plays and novels he did write, but the biographical
squib for his second published article, “Race and Bohemianism in Greenwich
Village,” a short piece of cultural commentary in the NAACP’s Crisis in January
1960, noted that “he has written three plays in search of a producer and is now at
work on a novel giving a panoramic view of the Negro in the Village.” Several
of the dramatic works are extant. The New York Public Library has a play script
dated 1960 and titled Irma Tazewell: The Maid’s Dilemma (A Play in Two Acts
and Eleven Scenes). Two different versions of a musical called Headline Hetty
are at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (the first
from 1955, with book and lyrics by Cruse, and a 1959 revision with lyrics by
Cruse and Edward Bland and music by Bland). Notes from a class he gave in
1965 have Cruse mentioning that in 1961 he had written a musical “around Pearl
Bailey. Took years to get lyrics; another year for money (millionaire sponsor),
found composer—$2000 for score…. Later, Bailey refused.”15
From the manuscript of Headline Hetty one gleans some idea of Cruse’s
literary interests and style. Not having heard the music or seen the show, one can
still venture that Cruse’s later readers would be surprised by Headline Hetty. It is
in no sense political, nor does it aspire to the dramatic gravitas of the tradition
leading from Oscar Hammerstein to Stephen Sondheim. Headline Hetty is a light
piece with no discernible dark tones or larger agenda, and reads like a Guys and
Dolls, Harlem style, rather than a Brecht-Weill musical. Besides Hetty, “a
newspaper girl,” its main characters have Damon Runyonesque names like
Boney Bigdeel, Stella Bella, Ace, Joe Elbow, Professor Lownote and Amy
Tattle. The chief dramatic device is a floating chorus of Shoe Shine Boys who
inhabit the archetypal Harlem corner where Hetty plies her trade until fortune
hits. The song titles are perhaps the clearest indication of Cruse’s
romantic, sentimental and popular bent in the style of the wisecracking
1930s—“I’m Gettin Up in the World,” “There’s a Boom in the Love Market,”
“The Horse-Sense of Consequence,” “I’m A-Hungering for Scandalmongering,”
“This Side of Heartbreak,” “Where Love Birds Fly,” and “What Used to be a
Lady,” among others.
These semirevelations (for those who knew Cruse in the 1950s remember his
literary bent, while those who met him in 1960 and after know nothing of it) may
seem of little consequence. It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the
centrality of Cruse’s literary ambitions to his life.
22 • VAN GOSSE

In the most obvious terms, it appears that Cruse spent at least 15 years actively
trying to get his plays staged, with no luck. In his angry 1968 review of The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Julian Mayfield wrote that as far back as 1949,
“Mr. Cruse had written a play…the left wing off-Broadway theater groups,
which were the only ones encouraging black writers then, had all turned it
down.” In this same review, Mayfield also suggested that “more than a decade after
Lorraine Hansberry, as Cruse implies, revealed herself to be hopelessly
integrationist and a puppet of the white Marxists, he was asking her to lend her
name, prestige and money in support of his musical play….”16 Since Hansberry
first turns up in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual as a young writer for Paul
Robeson’s newspaper Freedom in 1952, one gathers that Cruse’s request that she
read one of his musicals came in 1963 or later, which is confirmed by his own
testimony that when he left Liberator magazine at the end of 1964, and signed a
book contract with the publisher William R.Morrow, he was at the same time
writing and producing a musical play with other writers, including Frank Fields,
who had written the music for Jules Dassin’s 1946 film Body and Soul with John
Garfield and Canada Lee.
Besides these play scripts and the memories of others, friendly and otherwise,
there is additional contemporary evidence that as late as 1960 Cruse defined
himself in literary rather than political terms. Before he went to Cuba, and
through the same association with Richard Gibson, Cruse was invited to contribute
to a special July 4 issue of the now legendary Cuban cultural weekly Lunes de
Revolucion, focused on “Los Negroes en USA.” This was no small event,
because Gibson had also rounded up pieces from such eminences as James
Baldwin and Langston Hughes, as well as well-established writers Mayfield and
John Henrik Clarke.
It is odd and indeed interesting that although Cruse went all the way back to
his Daily Worker days for the collected essays in Rebellion and Revolution?
reprinting four brief film and theater reviews, he omitted his contribution to
Lunes de Revolucion, which came at a critical time in his evolution and was a
serious comment on “El Arte Negro y El Arte Occidental” (“Negro Art and
Western Art”). In this essay he meditated at some length on what we now call
Eurocentrism: “The idea of Greek superiority in literature, theater, the plastic
arts, philosophy and science is a Western idea. Many works have been written
affirming that all that is superior in Western society had its origin in the
Greek tradition. From this belief comes the idea that only the white race can
create great art.” From here he goes on to talk about Sidney Bechet, Ellington,
Porgy and Bess, and Dvorak’s use of black musical themes in his “Symphony
for a New World.” He indicts Benedetto Croce and Bernard Berenson for their
aesthetics of racial exclusiveness, and suggests that “the United States is the
ultimate hope for white supremacy in the politics and economy of the world, and
therefore in its art,” but that “art in the United States does not represent our
multiracial composition.” The most interesting comment comes at the end, where
Cruse is identified as “Novelista y dramaturgo norteamericano conocido como
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 23

agudo essayista estudioso del arte negro” (“North American novelist and
playwright known as a sharp essayist studying Negro art.”)17
A focus on the theater is evident even in Cruse’s published political writings.
In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual he anatomizes the history of the black
theater, rather than painting and the other visual arts, or poetry, or the novel. He
indicated his deep affinity for the musical stage more directly in Rebellion and
Revolution? in describing his Harlem boyhood and implicitly how it led to
“creative impulses I had for other kinds of literature which are neither forensic
nor theoretical nor polemical.” Harlem “introduced me to the exciting and
impressionable black vaudeville world of the local theaters” and “great
personalities” like Ellington, Calloway, Hines, Webb, Basie, Henderson and
more—a “black theatrical art…not only unique but inimitable.” Besides his
heartfelt remembrance of the singer Florence Mills, “a stately female vision,
faceless in time, a radiant form in a darkened spirit house full of unseen
worshippers murmuring in cadence to rhythm and song,” what is most striking
about the memoir is Cruse’s casual citations of his intellectual influences.
Besides the philosophers Marx and Schopenhauer, and black writers like Hughes,
Wright, Du Bois and Locke, he includes the white playwrights O’Neill, Ibsen
and Shaw, and the now-forgotten drama critic George Jean Nathan.18
Cruse may have been known as a “sharp essayist” in 1960, but in reality he
had published exactly two essays; apparently, however, he was already
beginning to make his mark. In the late 1950s, he had “transferred his cultural
loyalties” to the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC), a spinoff of the
Paris-based Society for African Culture (SAC), founded in 1947, which became
a magnet for an emerging transnational group of anticolonial theorists, including
American expatriates like Richard Wright, radical but with a anticommunist
tinge. In 1957, Cruse had an article, “An Afro-American’s Cultural Views,”
accepted by SAC’s prestigious journal Presence Africaine, and on this basis he
became active in AMSAC when it was founded soon after. Almost immediately,
polemics ensued because of Cruse’s controversial claims in his Presence
Africaine article, and he participated in an abortive debate with the black critic
J.Saunders Redding, who later attacked him in the New Leader.19
The polite ambience of the CIA-funded AMSAC was evidently not enough to
contain Cruse’s new political and cultural interests, and soon came his fateful
engagement with the Cuban Revolution. As Richard Gibson, a former Agence
France Press correspondent then working for CBS and holding a fellowship at
the Columbia University School of Journalism tells it:

I cannot recall exactly where I met Harold, probably at some FPCC

meeting or through Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). I think he was
working as a waiter on 14th Street. Cruse was very interested in the Cuban
Revolution and intrigued by the Revolutionary Government’s relationship
with the Afro-Cuban population. His own political position at the time
reminded me as very much similar to Richard Wright’s when I knew
24 • VAN GOSSE

Wright in Paris in the 50s, maintaining the concepts of Black and White
more relevant than Left and Right. They shared the same hostility to the
Communist Party…. But at the time, the Cubans were declaring
themselves ‘humanistas’ not ‘communistas’ and he eagerly accepted my
invitation to him to go to Cuba with the FPCC delegation.20

On the basis of his acquaintance with Gibson, Cruse was one of the second-or
third-ranked black writers (Baldwin, Hughes, and John Oliver Killens had bowed
out) to participate in the now-legendary Fair Play for Cuba delegation in July
1960, which he described in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, as did Jones in
his prize-winning Evergreen Review essay “Cuba Libre.” By that time, Cruse had
already become active in an emerging group of quasi-nationalist “downtown”
black artists led by Jones, and this circle of contacts was the apparent basis of his
invitation to Cuba. Jones had begun by forming something called the
Organization of Young Men. As he later noted:

It was one fledgling effort at building some political consciousness

downtown. And not so strangely, it was all black. Not that I’d planned it
that way, but that is who was in it. And not so strangely, almost all of those
had white wives or lovers. Archie Shepp, Steve Cannon, Leroy McLucas,
Walter Bowie, Harold Cruse, Calvin Hicks, A.B.Spellman, Bobb Hamilton,
and a few other folks. We weren’t certain just what we wanted to do. It
was more like a confirmation of rising consciousness. We issued at least
one statement, but the sense of it was that we knew it was time to go on the
offensive in the civil rights movement. We did not feel part of that
movement.

Soon, however, the Organization of Young Men merged into “a stronger,

somewhat more organized group, the name of which came to be On Guard,”
which was led by Calvin Hicks.21
In reality, this was a small and very intimate milieu, the antithesis of the
disciplined and bureacratized world of the CPUSA, where Cruse had his first
career in politics. As Cruse remembers it, “The Cuban Revolution changed the
activities and orientation of a lot of people in different ways…. It was Gibson
that got me involved in the Cuban situation…. We used to meet at different times
and talk about matters. As a consequence, On Guard was tied in with Fair Play…
I was associated, all of us were loosely associated, nothing firm. These were
floating affairs.”
Cruse remained on the periphery of these groups, wary but still involved as
long as he was invited in or someone gave him a specific task; he had noticed the
growing role of Cuban Communists while in Havana (“I saw the Communist
takeover”), and at least in retrospect was already feeling some disillusionment.
However, this did not prevent him from attending the reception at the Theresa
Hotel in September 1960 when Fidel Castro came to Harlem, or even from acting
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 25

as a go-between in efforts to bring Malcolm X and Castro together. At the time,

Malcolm was part of a welcoming committee set up in Harlem to greet African
diplomats accredited to the United Nations. The hope was that Castro could be
included in this open-door process, providing him with an entrée to Harlem—no
easy task. As Cruse remembers it, one group from that summer’s delegation
said,” ‘Harold, why don’t you try to see Malcolm?’ It was agreed I would talk
with him. I did these things mechanically. I had no illusions about the left.” At
some early point before going to Cuba, he had also met the then-famous
Southern NAACP leader Robert F.Williams, who was practicing a vigorous
armed defense in Monroe, North Carolina.
Oddly enough, given its later importance to his career, Cruse had no role in the
Liberation Committee for Africa, founded in the spring of 1960 out of the milieu
of Fair Play for Cuba and On Guard. Nor was he a part of On Guard’s most
visible and flamboyant political intervention, the then infamous “riot” at the
United Nations on February 15, 1961, perhaps because of his less flexible
employment situation at Macy’s. At the time, it had just become public that in
January Patrice Lumumba was summarily murdered while in the custody of
troops loyal to Belgian and CIA-backed Katangese secessionists led by Moise
Tshombe. As a consequence, several of the “loosely associated” people around
On Guard decided that something extraordinary must be done. According to
Gibson, Calvin Hicks, Dan Watts (president of the Liberation Committee for
Africa) and Robert F.Williams were in his apartment and they “discussed making
a public protest against the obvious American hand in the elimination of
Lumumba. A number of black women were subsequently recruited by them for
the occasion.”22
The subsequent fracas was headline news in the New York Times, which
reported that 60 people (the men with black armbands and the women veiled in
black) “burst into the Security Council chamber,” interrupting U.S. chief
delegate Adlai Stevenson’s maiden speech, and fought with security guards. The
principal organizations named were the Liberation Committee for Africa, On
Guard, and James Lawson’s United African Nationalist Movement, though
LeRoi Jones (who was arrested as the battle continued outside) remembers
Lawson pointing out people to police officers.23
At this point, Cruse clearly remained on the periphery of On Guard, Fair Play
for Cuba, and similar efforts. His presence was noted by others, but he made no
initiatives, unlike the peripatetic Jones, who dived headfirst into political
involvements, taking over the presidency of Fair Play’s New York chapter later
that year. Gibson remembers, “I don’t think [Cruse] ever had any formal
relationship with FPCC, but was listed on our mailing list” which seems to
adequately sum up Cruse’s role as a watcher at this point.24
The next major step in Cruse’s career, which spawned a deepening political
involvement, was a nearly book-length manuscript submitted in late 1961 to
Studies on the Left, the groundbreaking journal of the white New Left out of
Madison, Wisconsin. After editing that reduced one hundred pages down to
26 • VAN GOSSE

thirty, Cruse’s article “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American”

appeared as a centerpiece of the spring 1962 issue, devoted to “The New
Radicalism and the Afro-American.”25 It provoked an immediate storm, and put
Cruse on the map as a major new theorist of American radicalism, with
audiences and effects he himself could not anticipate. While one Studies reader
responded by labeling the journal Studies on the Right, and the next issue
featured fourteen pages of debate between Cruse and his critics, others read its
trenchant declarations as a clarion call: “The failure of American Marxists to
work out a meaningful approach to revolutionary nationalism has special
significance for the American Negro,” wrote one reader. “The Negro has a
relationship to the dominant culture of the United States similar to that of
colonies and semidependents to their particular foreign overseers: the Negro is
the American problem of underdevelopment…. The revolutionary initiative has
passed to the colonial world, and in the United States is passing to the Negro, while
Western Marxists theorize, temporize and debate.”26
Cruse had no way of knowing its impact, but the cold precision of his critique
indicates a growing sense of mastery. While his 1957 essay in Presence
Africaine brought him to the attention of the elite AMSAC coterie, his
intervention in Studies on the Left was a clarion call to the emerging New Left
nationwide—especially its farthest left edges, both white and black. In late 1962,
the fledgling cadres of the tiny Revolutionary Action Movement, the first black
organization committed to armed struggle and a catalyst for the later Black
Panther Party, were instructed “to seriously study the article” by Donald
Freeman, their leader and the founder of the Afro-American Institute in
Cleveland, who “also said black radicals elsewhere were studying the article and
that a movement had to be created in the North similar to the Nation of Islam,
using the tactics of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) but
outside of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) and, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).”27
A striking indication of how Cruse’s theorizing contributed to the New Left is
that Martin Sklar, then a key Studies on the Left editor, remembers hosting an
impromptu meeting with Malcolm X at his house during the latter’s late 1962
visit to Madison: “I was informed (either by my black friends or by Malcolm)
that this was the first time Malcolm consented to go to a white person’s place of
residence for a meeting of this sort, and that he did so because he knew of
SoL, especially the issue with the Cruse and Williams pieces, and that he carried
SoL in the bookstore of his Harlem mosque.”28
The year 1963 was a pivotal one for Cruse’s increasing willingness to engage
in ordinary politics. Perhaps spurred by the respect he was garnering from a new
generation, Cruse simultaneously involved himself in two important and linked
ventures—the Freedom Now Party and the Liberator magazine.
The history of the Freedom Now Party (FNP) is virtually unrecorded. It was
one of those well intentioned, briefly impressive but evanescent affairs in which
1960s radicalism abounded—especially when it came to electoral politics. There
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 27

were no records and apparently no formal national organization, and there is

little precision in anyone’s memories as to how it functioned, outside of
Michigan, where a practical-minded cadre-led James and Grace Lee Boggs took
it much further than anywhere else.
Whatever the FNP was and was not, Cruse played a major role in it. The
initial inspiration came from two well known independent black radicals, the
journalist William Worthy and the attorney Conrad Lynn. The pacifist Worthy
had been a special CBS News correspondent in Moscow and elsewhere in the
1950s, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University when he broke U.S. laws by
going into Communist China for CBS in 1957 to score a major journalistic coup.
Lynn had been briefly a member of both the Communist Party and the Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) decades earlier and became one of the tiny handful of
successful left-wing lawyers in the 1950s and ‘60s, aided by a young assistant
named William Kunstler.
In 1962, Worthy became a minor cause célèbre when the U.S. government
indicted him for passport violations after he repeatedly violated official travel
bans on Cuba. Many other journalists had violated these laws without sanction,
and Worthy argued that he was singled out because of his outspoken support for
the Cuban Revolution. In November 1960, ABC had aired his graphic
documentary Yanki No! about the tide of Cuban-inspired revolutionary sentiment
sweeping Latin America, but by 1962 he no longer worked for the television
networks and was featured only in the Baltimore Afro-American, the nation’s
largest-circulation black newspaper.
Worthy was convicted, but continued to appeal his case with the help of a
high-profile defense committee of notables, including the eminent A.Philip
Randolph. The satiric folksinger Phil Ochs even recorded “The Ballad of William
Worthy” with its famous line “William Worthy isn’t worthy anymore,” which is
all that many people now remember of these events. On June 1, 1963, he was
speaking to a Harlem crowd, and decided to broach publicly the idea of an all-
black political party. As the New Yorker reported a few weeks later, “He
suggested the formation, by Negroes, of a Freedom Now party, to propose Negro
candidates for public offices. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘Talk about it. Kick the
idea around. We may not win many offices, but with one out of ten Americans a
Negro…we can make our voice heard in the land.’” Worthy then posed a
wonderful and fantastical scenario to evoke the promise of black political
power: “‘Do you know what would happen if Fidel Castro were President of the
United States instead of John F.Kennedy?…Bull Connor would be given a fair
trial and then shot. Ninety five percent of the police would have to flee to South
Africa for political asylum. J.Edgar Hoover would be thrown into an integrated
jail. It that didn’t cure him, he would be left there for life.’”29
As Conrad Lynn later summarized the party’s progress after this event, “A few
more speakers addressed the assemblage, including myself, and we followed
through on the formation of the Freedom Now party.”30 But how exactly did this
take place, and when did Cruse come into it?
28 • VAN GOSSE

The March on Washington had been announced at this time by Martin Luther
King Jr., and appears to have provided the initial impetus for launching the FNP.
As Lynn put it in his memoirs, “I was skeptical…but decided to attend. If we felt
no viable program was enunciated, we would issue a call for our new party.”31 In
fact, the party was announced to the world in the most impressive of all possible
ways four days before the March on Washington, via a front-page story in the
New York Times on August 24, 1963, “An All-Negro Party for ‘64 Is Formed.”
This well timed preemptive strike considerably exaggerated the party’s
strength, declaring that a national committee of one hundred people had already
been formed under the acting chairmanship of Lynn, and an office opened in
Harlem. It also said that the “initiators of the national committee intend to
distribute handbills to participants” not only in Washington but in other cities,
and at factory gates, including the Ford River Rouge plant in Detroit—a
characteristic touch suggesting the Boggses’ involvement. The bulk of the article
by M.S.Handler, who covered black politics for the Times, provided priceless
publicity for the infant organization by quoting its first brochure:

What sense does it make to go on supporting the party of Eugene (Bull)

Connor? Bull Connor is still Kennedy’s Democratic National
Committeeman from Alabama Why should Southern Negroes register to
vote—at the risk of death—when the only ‘choice’ on the ballot is a James
O.Eastland or a George C.Wallace?…Our African brothers have shown us
how to win freedom. Their principal technique: All-black political action.
This is self-reliance, not ‘racism.’32

At this late date it is difficult to sort out the sequence of events in the FNP’s
founding. No one involved remembers them exactly, and Lynn’s autobiography
is clearly mistaken when he writes that after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech
“The radicals repaired to the Park Sheraton Hotel to prepare our manifesto for a
Freedom Now party. After a five-hour meeting we agreed to form a committee
for a Freedom Now party with myself as acting chairman,” since the Times
article predates any such meeting.33
What seems apparent is that a small group got together in New York in late
1962. It apparently included Lynn, Worthy, a woman named Pernella
Wattley (who on July 22, 1963, joined Worthy in a polite sit-in at the United
Nations where they forced Adlai Stevenson to discuss South Africa), probably
Dan Watts and “perhaps others that had been on board with the Cuba issue.”34
As Worthy remembers it, Harold Cruse became involved “[a]fter we started
holding meetings at Pernella Wattley’s apartment. He lived on Fourteenth Street
and I lived on Nineteenth Street. The small group that began meeting, we were
fishing around for likely people,” so Worthy called Cruse, and went to his
apartment with documents. All that was involved was “mainly kicking around
ideas,” though Cruse did call him once to say he wanted to be chairman of the
program committee.35
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 29

Cruse largely corroborates this account in that he remembers meetings at a

woman’s apartment and writing the FNP’s draft program, as well as that Lynn,
Worthy, and himself were the main actors. But from here on, the FNP becomes
formless, perhaps reflecting its stillborn status after a grand beginning. Worthy
remembers a single press conference with Lynn presiding, and Cruse an actual
convention with “a couple of hundred people in Brooklyn, as I recall. The only
ones who came were people ready to back the party. The factions didn’t show up.
A lot of interesting people without the least idea of what to do next.” The major
problem of the Freedom Now Party, however, in most accounts, was the role of
whites, or specifically organized white Marxists, in a party dedicated to black
liberation.
As Lynn wrote of the Washington meeting on August 28,1963:

The main disagreement at the meeting was between the separatists and the
integrationists. A shaky compromise was reached: all candidates for public
office would be black, but individuals of whatever color were free to join
[In the coming months,] fending off the white liberals with one hand, it
was necessary to use the other to hold back the separatists. Many blacks
made it crystal clear they wanted no truck with white people. They were
particularly concerned that certain white radical parties not obtain a
manipulating influence in our councils.36

At the time, Worthy disagreed, writing in late 1963 that the party had to be all
black so as to avoid being “the political equivalent of CORE.”37 Cruse dismisses
the question of white participation as “a side issue, a mini-issue,” but clearly took
major exception to the interventions of “those established forces trying to come
in on it, the Communists, the SWP, the Black Nationalists, the West Indians, all
trying to make hay off the idea.” At that time, as he remembers it, there was
really “a mass movement” made up of “dozens of little movements, but none
were really together, all were acting up in the spirit of the times.” In the end, he
notes, “It just collapsed…. I realized finally it would never get off the ground, it
was part of my education. It was a bundle of contradictions, a melange of
activists stimulated by Cuba and Africa, ranting and raving.” Cruse goes on to
lay particular blame at the feet of the Michigan FNP, led by the Boggses and
their associates in the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL): “They went
back to Detroit and started their own, on their own, a separate faction. You can’t
build a national party if people go off on their own.”
Not surprisingly, after so many years, others remember it differently. No one
else, for instance, defines the relationship between the FNP in New York and in
Detroit as a “split,” to use Cruse’s words, or even remembers any particular
differences, though Lynn’s memoir does quote a hard-edged letter from
James Boggs:
30 • VAN GOSSE

“I wrote that I did not believe the party should be under any kind of
umbrella. If you want to know what I mean by an umbrella, I mean that it
should not be under the auspices of any radical group. And if you want me
to be more concrete, I am under the impression that the people you have in
Detroit and Cleveland are people whom you were given by the SWP. Are
they or are they not? And isn’t this true of some other places?
The other point I want to get home very clearly and very sharply. If
white radicals are saying they must be in the party in order for it to be a
party, then I am against the damn party…. There are going to have to be
some choices here. Are you going to have some Muslims or are you going
to have some whites and no Muslims? Because you are not going to have
the two….”38

This particular animus toward the SWP is corroborated by Cruse’s public

denunciations of the same group in his article “FNP vs. SWP: Marxism and the
Negro” in the May 1964 issue of the Liberator, which prompted a strong rebuttal
from Clifton DeBerry, the African American who was the Trotskyists’ 1964
presidential candidate. In an odd touch, the SWP (then building a strong working
relationship with Malcolm X) was apparently so pleased by the fact of their
public debate with Cruse that they reprinted the various Liberator pieces,
including Cruse’s denunciation, as a pamphlet.
All agree that outside of Michigan (where the state branch ran a statewide
ticket headed by the Reverend Albert Cleage, running for governor in November
1964) the FNP had a very brief life, mainly because of an overwhelming lack of
unity and direction. It was “divided from the very beginning,” in Cruse’s words.
Worthy drifted away before leaving the country in late 1964, “because nothing was
getting done,” though he remained personally close to the Boggses and others.
The most tangible evidence of the FNP’s existence, other than the Michigan
branch’s electoral efforts in 1964–65, were the draft program written by Cruse
and published in the Liberator, and the party’s strong connection to the
Grassroots Leadership Conference held on November 9–10, 1963, in Detroit.
The Grassroots Leadership Conference posed an open challenge to a parallel
civil rights “summit” in the same city, organized by King and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It was keynoted by Malcolm X, who
gave his famous speech, “A Message to the Grassroots,” anticipating his
break with the Nation of Islam and linking with broader radical forces in a call
for a black revolution. In a tangible sense it represented the first open challenge
to the existing leadership of the civil rights movement, and Worthy’s open
promotion of the Freedom Now Party briefly suggested that the FNP might
become the vehicle for that challenge, an eventuality that did not arise.39 Cruse,
however, had nothing to do with the Grassroots Leadership Conference, so we
will focus instead on his penultimate political engagement before turning to
writing The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual—his year and more as part of the
editorial board, and dominant figure, in the key nationalist magazine, Liberator.
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 31

Liberator was originally the newsletter of an intended political organization,

the Liberation Committee for Africa (LCA). The LCA was closely modeled on
the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), which was launched through an April
6, 1960, ad in the New York Times featuring the names of various writers and
intellectuals, including the black authors John Henrik Clarke, James Baldwin,
and Julian Mayfield. This gambit proved very successful, prompting a thousand
or more letters and requests for membership to flood the FPCC office set up by
two CBS journalists, Robert Taber and the already-mentioned Richard Gibson.40
Soon after, Gibson’s friend and neighbor in the Upper West Side of New York’s
Park West development, Dan Watts (then the first black architect hired by one of
New York’s major firms, just as Gibson was the first black newswriter hired by
CBS) decided to launch a similar effort for Africa. He ran an ad denouncing U.S.
policy, naming himself as head of the embryonic Liberation Committee for
Africa. But success did not strike twice, as Gibson (LCA’s nominal vice chair)
remembers it:

It was copycatted from the FPCC ad in the Times, which had an excellent
response. But there wasn’t any similar response to the LCA ad, except for
many bitter comments from the American Committee on Africa, who
seemed to fear that militant and angry blacks were about to poach in their
liberal but mainly white preserve. The critics included the American
Friends Service Committee and pacifists opposed to French nuclear testing
in the Sahara. Dan Watts was disapointed to discover that the African
diplomatic corps in New York at the UN and in Washington, D.C. were
not very enthusiastic nor supportive. The FLN [Algerian National
Liberation Front] office in New York, headed by M’hammed Yazid and
Mohammed Sahnoun, who were personal friends of mine, were among the
more appreciative, as was Vusumi Make, then representative of the Pan-
Africanist Congress of Azania, in New York. (He was later to marry Maya
Angelou and move with her to Cairo.)41

From this somewhat inauspicous beginning, the LCA slowly grew, building an
audience among émigré Africans and the still relatively small number of African
Americans interested in current African politics from a radically anti-imperialist
perspective. In mid-1961, an office was opened near the United Nations; at that
point, the LCA’s principals included only Watts, Clarke, and a white man named
Lowell Beveridge, named as the magazine’s editor. Increasingly, the newsletter
became its main project. Liberator’s early issues featured in-depth articles on the
continent’s remaining colonies, plus publicity about cultural programs on
African themes in New York, often endorsed by the various U.N. missions from
the newly independent African nations.42 Considerable attention was given to the
travails of the African student population, which had come to America on U.S.
government-sponsored programs to combat communism, with numerous
32 • VAN GOSSE

testimonial letters from the Pan-African Students Organization in the Americas,

the Organization of Arab Students, and the like.
In those years, Liberator’s cover usually featured an African leader—a
martyred leader of the Cameroon freedom struggle, allegedly assassinated by the
French intelligence services; a commandant of the Angolan guerrillas killed in
battle; Nkrumah, of course; the premier of Burundi, also assassinated. In these
years, it seemed to progress in a modest sense, without any evident connection to
American events. Congratulatory letters were printed from figures as important as
Nasser. The Liberator Book Service, advertised on the back cover, promoted
popular titles like Dubois’s The Souls of Black Folk, John Howard Griffin’s
Black Like Me, An Atlas of Africa, Hughes’s An African Treasury, J.A. Rogers’s
Africa’s Gift to America and C.Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America. In
May 1962, an honorary advisory board was announced that included Ossie
Davis, the civil rights lawyer Len Holt, the eminent Harlem intellectual figures
L.H.Michaux and Richard Moore, Captain Hugh Mulzac (a doyenne of the Old
Left, as the first African American to command a ship of the Merchant Marine),
George Murphy Jr., and others.
Criticism of this Afro-centric focus was raised in the sharpest possible fashion
by a letter Watts saw fit to print in the August 1962 issue. Mae Mallory, one of
Robert F.Williams’s closest associates during the armed conflict in Monroe,
North Carolina, in 1960–61, was at this point in jail in Cleveland, Ohio, awaiting
possible extradition. In her letter, she denounced Dan Watts personally:

I saw the last copy of LIBERATOR. I must admit it is fairly good.

However, you spoke of Monroe, North Carolina only in passing…. I
deeply appreciate your interest in Africa, though it takes more than mere
words on paper to change things…When the activists are jailed, you so-
called “intellectuals” find safe grounds to cover.
Mr. Watts, there are no safe grounds for black skins in this country, as
there were no safe grounds for Jews in Germany and Poland….
I hope that we can co-operate for our common good. It is just as essential
to defend Afro-Americans as Africans.
May I expect your co-operation, will you urge the various African groups
that you have contact with to wire Attorney General Robert Kennedy to
order North Carolina to drop the spurrious charges against us….

In September 1962, the magazine announced its “new look…with substantial

coverage not only of Africa but also of the struggle in the United States,” and
Paul Zuber’s lead article focusing on “The Problem of Segregation in Northern
Public Schools.” Its focus shifted sharply toward the hypocrisy of the
administration of President John F. Kennedy, and the need for a more radical and
independent black politics. During the first half of 1963, the now-color covers
featured James Baldwin, Sonny Liston, and a photo of congressman Adam
Clayton Powell, Jr. on a Harlem dais with Malcolm X standing behind him,
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 33

smiling. Increasingly the emphasis was on New York City politics and black
theater and jazz, and a new group of young writers became editors (and
members, with Cruse, of the editorial board, announced in December 1963),
including Carlos Russell, C.E.Wilson, and Clebert Ford, a black actor gaining
prominence for his role in Jean Genet’s The Blacks. Especially notable were
sharp attacks on Martin Luther King, Jr. as a lapdog of the white establishment.
One cartoon showed Kennedy holding a leashed, docile King on all fours, and
telling a Southern cop, “No…. You hold your dog…. King doesn’t bite!” However,
the Liberator continued to also feature African National Congress statements and
the like.43 Testimonials were received from Mrs. Paul Robeson and Lorraine
Hansberry—” It is becoming an excellent publication”—rather than Nasser.
By this time, a woman activist who had been working with Malcolm X in
Harlem, Rose L.H.Finkenstaedt, was writing pointed articles about the direction
of the civil rights movement, including a December 1962 piece, “Needed: An
Afro-American Political Party,” that anticipated the FNP. In January 1963, her
husband, James Finkenstaedt, a white vice president with the publisher William
R.Morrow, signed on as a volunteer associate editor, though his main job was
handling circulation. Their connection to the Liberator proved to be a fortuitous
one for Cruse.44
Cruse’s first article, “Rebellion or Revolution? (Part One),” appeared in the
Liberator in October 1963, along with William Worthy’s article on the FNP, “An
All Black Political Party” (which was presumably no coincidence since all of the
parties concerned had been attending the same meetings). In this same issue the
sponsoring organization was changed from the Liberation Committee for Africa
to the Afro-American Institute, also indicative of a new direction. Over the
summer Cruse had decided to write some articles, and visited Watts.
Presumably, they had known each other earlier in the circle of On Guard, but the
magazine’s focus on Africa held little interest for Cruse; the organizing of the
FNP apparently brought them into closer contact: “I just sent him my stuff and
went to a few meetings where articles were presented…. It was very simple.”
According to James Finkenstaedt, Cruse was “invited to a Liberator meeting by
Dan Watts, and was immediately highly respected by the entire staff. He was
named to the editorial board in December, 1963….”45
Over the next year, Cruse’s in-depth analyses of black politics in the past and
present dominated the Liberator, as Finkenstaedt remembers it: “Cruse’s role at
the Liberator from the time of his first article in the issue of October, 1963…was
one of preeminence. He was probably the leading intellectual on the
staff.”46 These articles also greatly extended Cruse’s public reputation and later
formed the main body of his second book, Rebellion or Revolution? but that was
not all he published in the magazine.47 In November 1963, even before he officially
joined the editorial board, a short piece, “Third Party: Facts and Forecasts,”
appeared and was billed as the first installment of a monthly department, or
“forum.” In it, Cruse analyzed the August March on Washington as “the end
of an era,” the end of false hopes and “illusions.” The new phase would be an
34 • VAN GOSSE

“all-black party” with a “comprehensive program…a break with moderate

NAACP’ism, surface manifestations of the Jim Crow system.”48
By this time, Liberator had left Africa behind and immersed itself totally in
what it was calling the “North’s Black Revolution.” In February 1964, it
published Cruse’s draft Program for the Freedom Now Party (no author was
named), with its strong emphasis on the need for “cultural revolution.” Cruse
admits that others were not sympathetic to his emphasis “on the cultural side,”
and Watts’s editorial in the same issue said outright that he disagreed with some
of the program, apparently foreshadowing later tensions. Cruse’s major article,
“The Roots of Black Nationalism” appeared in the same issue, with critical
remarks about both the FNP and the “pathological martyrdom of the jailhouse”
in the Southern civil rights struggle. The April 1964 issue put Malcolm X on the
cover, contrasting him with King, “the obedient boy of the empire,” and the
next month featured an interview with the now ex-leader of the Nation of Islam
leader.
As 1964 went on, the pace quickened, as did Liberator’s mounting
engagement with the various elements of the black liberation movement. Cruse’s
next essay, “The Economics of Black Nationalism,” was the lead article in the July
1964 issue, along with an interview with SNCC president John Lewis, and pieces
by Rolland Snellings and Malcolm X himself, recounting the lessons of his
African tour (“Travel broadens one’s scope…My outlook is much broader than
before I left”) under the headline “We Are All Blood Brothers.” Don Freeman,
founder of the Revolutionary Action Movement, reported on a Black Nationalist
Youth Movement meeting in Nashville that explicitly endorsed Cruse’s position
on the relation of Marxism to the black movement.
The rest of 1964 saw more of the same, as events from the Harlem riot to the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution provided ever more evidence of white liberalism’s
bankruptcy and the danger posed by “the gutless, spineless lackeys of the white
power structure.” Watts’s editorial just before the November presidential election
stated plainly the Crusean position that “If we choose to remain here, then we
must organize black economic and political power in order to survive….” For all
these months, Cruse was still listed as a member of the editorial board, but after
August no more of his articles appeared. By his account, he was locked in an
increasingly acrimonious relationship with Watts (though it does not appear to
have been an open split, in Finkenstaedt’s recollection).49 As Cruse recalls,
“Africa was the big issue for people like Watts, who was not essentially
interested in the American civil rights issues…. He wanted to hobnob with the
Africans in the UN…. Dan Watts didn’t understand that the kind of magazine he
wanted couldn’t be based on African questions…. My articles put his magazine
on the map, and he had to accept it. I just stepped in and boldly used it and he
said, ‘Go ahead.’ I thought naively that this was the direction it would go.”50
This caused a division that Cruse could not overcome: “I tried to ease Watts
out, to be president so someone could take over as editor. But his attitude was
‘it’s mine, all mine’—he was riding a popularity wave” with African affairs.
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 35

Eventually, says Cruse, “I quit, I just quit. I got tired of wasting my time with
Dan Watts…a spokesman for that crowd at the U.N.”51 As of January 1965,
Cruse was off the Liberator’s masthead, with no explanation and no apparent
shift in the magazine’s politics. Indeed, that same issue had an article by Max
Stanford with a title, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American
Student,” that consciously evoked Cruse.
Certainly, Cruse had other reasons for moving on. He was trying to both write
and produce a new musical with several others. His health was also precarious. His
1968 recollection states simply that “I felt highly satisfied in my Liberator role,
but it was short-lived because of certain ideological conflicts that were bound to
develop within the staff over editorial policy…. In 1964, during hospitalization
after an ulcer attack, I quit Liberator, finally convinced that only a lengthy book
would allow me to fully elaborate my views.”52
Most important, however, was his relationship with James Finkenstaedt, which
both men stress had nothing to do with their work on the Liberator. In
Finkenstaedt’s words, “My function as William Morrow Vice-President had
nothing to do with my activities for the Liberator. It simply gave me a certain
professional competence. I deliberately kept the two worlds separate. However,
through my contacts with the Liberator, I was able to introduce authors to
William Morrow. William Worthy, Imamu Baraka, Harold Cruse, Larry Neal,
Len Holt, Reverend Cleague, C.Eric Lincoln, Charles Hamilton were published
by William Morrow.”53 In early 1965, Finkenstaedt gave Cruse a contract for
two books: his collected articles, and a new work presenting his comprehensive
critique of black politics, which became The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.
Morrow encouraged Cruse to write the latter book first, for the greatest possible
impact. In any case, it made a dramatic difference in Cruse’s life: for the first time,
he had the financial independence to devote himself exclusively to research and
writing.
One more significant political engagement remained before the publication of
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual made Cruse famous, and moved him from
New York to the University of Michigan as a leading figure in the new discipline
of black studies. In 1965, Cruse’s old acquaintance with LeRoi Jones and the
respect he had gained as an analyst of black politics led to his teaching in Jones’s
celebrated but short-lived Black Arts Repertory School in Harlem.
Cruse’s class in “cultural philosophy” began on July 1, 1965. One of the
participants was Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American interned in World War
II who later moved to Harlem and became active in civil rights and nationalist
politics, including Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity and
the Revolutionary Action Movement. According to Kochiyama, the class had
twelve to fifteen students, Harlem activists rather than intellectuals, “people who
were not that well read. But he didn’t seem to mind…we were really at
rockbottom in terms of left thinking.” Cruse was apparently a superb teacher,
patient and egalitarian, and “a very easy person to get along with. We all felt
very comfortable with him. He treated us very well…. As a human being, he was
36 • VAN GOSSE

unpretentious, didn’t think of himself as a distinguished or eminent person.” The

class, which included a personable FBI infiltrator named Don Duncan, continued
meeting for several months at Cruse’s apartment downtown on Fourteenth Street
because, Kochiyama noted, “when all the crazy stuff started, it got kind of scary
and the place [the Black Arts School] was closed” because of violent tensions
between LeRoi Jones and two brothers, Charles and William Patterson, part of
the school’s leadership. Eventually Jones was threatened personally and
relocated to Newark, New Jersey, and his friend, the poet Larry Neal, was shot
and wounded.54
Detailed notes of the class sessions reveal Cruse (“he had all these little cards
he was reading from”) working out many of the key ideas he would express in
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. On the first day, after defining the tension
between “cultural nationalism” and “cultural assimilation,” and that “Afro-
Americans most militant group, had never learned to make cultural affairs
political,” he stressed that

White European social theory was inapplicable to theory of social

revolution for American Negro…. Social theories created out of
necessities. 19th century theories not pertinent for today’s Negroes.
American Negro must create his own social theory.
Marxist theory has deficiencies because Western culture is not relevant
to people who did not grow out of Western civilization. Every ethnic
culture has its own theory. Negroes must develop their own. White people
think their philosophy is superior.

From here Cruse went on to another of his major theses, that identity in America
is by “group,” that “the problem is group democracy, not class democracy,” and
the key question: “How can the Negro bourgeois class and the Negro ghetto class
ever come together?” This was only a prelude, however, to his synopsis of U.S.
capitalist development and the twentieth-century explosion of mass media,
making the “cultural aspect…a revolutionary idea applicable to Afro-Americans
because of the peculiar and unique way that the U.S. developed.”55
In this and the next class, on July 6, Cruse also gave his working-class
students detailed definitions of key words like culture, nationalism, integration,
assimilation, theory, revolution, democracy, prejudice, racialism (“no such word
as racism or racist in dictionary”), plurality, bourgeois, proletarian, nihilism,
socialist, anarchism, anarchy, dialectics, individualism, economics,
politics, pragmatic pragmatism, and aesthetic. He also focused at length on
Harlem as a “base of cultural movement” and a “base of nationalist
reorganization along political, economic and cultural lines,” examining in
intensive and specific detail how and by whom this might happen, and the need
for an “Afro-American cultural philosophy” because “[t]he route to democracy
lies in the control of the cultural apparatus.”56 The clash between European and
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 37

Afro-American cultural forms, especially in music, was detailed, and the current
crop of black magazines like Liberator and Freedomways was critiqued.
To any reader of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, these phrases, themes,
and epigrams from Cruse’s lectures must seem very familiar, yet periodically he
did engage with issues left out of the book. These range from cooperative
economics in Europe and their relevance for Harlem to the politico-economic
strategy of the Cuban Revolution in coming to power and changing the island’s
social order (and a suggestion that the continued domination of whites meant “[a]
nother revolution needed within Cuban Revolution on race issue”), as well as
references to Nasser and “African socialism” as “pragmatic.” Periodically,
detailed exegeses of revolutionary history and theory in Europe, and the Marxist
legacy, were offered. Repeatedly, however, he returned to the pivotal role of the
Negro intellectual in any future revolution, even stressing the need for “political,
economic, and cultural bureaus” of “specialists” and “experts”—“Movement
must be cultural or it is no movement at all.” Throughout are his descriptions,
biting even in secondhand form, of the “dominant ethnic group feeding off
subordinate ethnic group,” as with Porgy and Bess, “a Jewish-Anglo-Saxon
collaboration,”57 though his animus toward West Indian activists within African
American politics—a major theme of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual—is
noticeably absent.
Certain influences upon Cruse, and aspects of his political program, are
clarified by these lectures. The importance of C.Wright Mills is evident, both in
Cruse’s insistence upon “group” versus “class” and his conception of the
intellectual’s proper role. His short list of books “to read and study” included
Black Nationalism by E.U.Essien-Udom, Nationalism by Hans Kohn, The Negro
in American Culture by Margaret Butcher, and Mills’s essays in Power, Politics
and People. References to “men of power” and the “power elite” are sprinkled
through the notes, as is this intriguingly opaque description of Mills, who
“consecrated his work in human affairs,…has had policy-making
ramifications.”58
Years later, Cruse dryly summed up his experience with the Black Arts
School: “It was part of my learning process of what revolutionary situations can
produce…not what you expect.” The last class with his former Black Arts students
was on January 20,1966. Meanwhile, he finished his massive manuscript, was
again hospitalized for ulcers, and joked to acquaintances that when his book
came out, “maybe I should leave the country.”59
In any event, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual changed Cruse’s life
completely. From a modest notoriety among black radical intellectuals in
New York and a few other cities, he became world famous and was invited to
speak in Europe and at the most prestigious American universities, bringing this
narrative to an end.
This much seems obvious: the life of Harold Cruse in these years indicates the
profound quandaries facing black intellectuals (a point made forcefully by Grace
Lee Boggs in a later interview). Having broken with orthodox Marxism, Cruse
38 • VAN GOSSE

constantly had to renegotiate his relation to Marxist analyses of colonialism,

racism, capitalism, and imperialism—in and around Cuba, in the Freedom Now
Party, and writing for the Liberator. And all of these engagements raised the
agonizing question of whether to engage at all. What indeed was the correct
position for an African American social critic? None of Cruse’s political
experiences was successful, by his own assessment, yet without his renewed
involvement in politics from 1960 to 1965, it is doubtful he would have
developed the critique, published the articles, or made the personal contacts that
permitted him to publish The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Rather than crisis,
then, one is left with irony. The Negro intellectual who would be an artist—a
musical dramatist, a novelist, a boulevardier—could not make his own history as
he wished, yet made something of his life itself.

Notes
Thanks are due to Robin D.G.Kelley for his suggestions, and to Grace Lee
Boggs, James Finkenstaedt, Richard Gibson, Martin Sklar, William Worthy, and
Yuri Kochiyama for their recollections. Special thanks are due as well to Harold
Cruse.

1. Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in

Black America, 1945–1990, rev. 2d ed. (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,
1991), 255.
2. Robert Chrisman, “The Crisis of Harold Cruse,” Black Scholar, 1, no. 1 (1969), 78.
3. Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution (New York: William R.Morrow, 1968), 8.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 13.
6. Grace Lee Boggs telephone interview with the author, September 2,1996; letter,
Richard Gibson to the author, March 4,1996. Yuri Kochiyama in a telephone
interview with the author, October 14, 1996, remembered Cruse as “a loner,
someone who enjoyed research and studying…. A very serious person, someone
you know has really lived and suffered in many ways, not from poverty of material
things but he may have felt he didn’t have the opportunities he should have had.”
7. All otherwise unattributed quotations from Cruse are from two telephone
interviews with the author, May 29 and June 2, 1996.
8. Julian Mayfield, “Crisis or Crusade?” Negro Digest, June 1968, 14; Cruse,
Rebellion or Revolution? 15.
9. Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? 11, 7.
10. Ibid., 20, 8–9.
11. According to a later acquaintance, Cruse inherited this apartment from the eminent
Japanese painter, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, via a complicated arrangement, since at the time
there were no blacks living (or welcome) on Fourteenth Street; Kochiyama
interview, October 14, 1996. Since Kuniyoshi died in 1953, Cruse must have lived
in this apartment from the early 1950s through the late 1960s.
12. Biographical note for Harold Cruse, “Race and Bohemianism in Greenwich
Village,” Crisis, January 1960, 5.
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 39

13. Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? 8.

14. Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York:
Freundlich, 1984).
15. Notes taken by Yuri Kochiyama in Cruse’s course in “Cultural Philosophy” at the
Black Arts School, 1965, Yuri Kochiyama personal papers.
16. Mayfield, “Crisis or Crusade?” 15, 12.
17.
18. Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? 26, 11.
19. Ibid., 20–21.
20. Gibson letter, March 4, 1996.
21. Baraka, Autobiography, 168.
22. Electronic communication, Richard Gibson to the author, May 20,1996.
23. New York Times, February 16,1961,1; Baraka, Autobiography, 181.
24. Gibson letter, March 4,1996.
25. Martin Sklar, then a principal Studies editor, recalls, “I did not know Cruse, and I
don’t believe I had previously heard of him…. I read the ms. and considered it
important and I recommended publication to my fellow editors. There was only one
problem, its length, which I think was about 100 pages, more or less, and we had to
get it down to about 30+ typescript pages to accommodate our usual article-
length.” Letter, Sklar to the author, July 21,1996. Cruse had sent this massive
manuscript to Studies on the Left apparently in the same spirit as his other eclectic
bids for publication. Certainly in 1962 no other writer would or could have
simultaneously appeared in the New Leader (Cruse’s essay “The New Negro
Nationalism” appeared in 1962), organ of the most vociferously anticommunist
elements in the old Socialist Party, and in Studies, which Cruse remembers as
“supposedly going to replace the old CP” and filling “a gap” ideologically.
26.
27. Maxwell C.Stanford, “Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM): A Case Study of
an Urban Revolutionary Movement in Western Capitalist Society,” unpublished
M.A. thesis, Atlanta University, 1986,76.
28. Sklar letter to the author, July 21,1996.
29. “Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, June 15,1963.
30. Conrad Lynn, There is a Fountain: The Autobiography of a Civil Rights Lawyer
(Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1979), 183.
31. Ibid.
32. M.S.Handler, “An All-Negro party for 64 is Formed” New York Times, August 24,
1963, A1.
33. Lynn, Fountain, 184.
34. On the sit-in at the U.N., see Liberator, September 1963.
35. William Worthy interview with the author, July 4,1996.
36. Lynn, Fountain, 184.
37. William Worthy, “An All Black Party,” Liberator, October 1963. Indicating that
discussions about a possible Freedom Now Party had begun in 1962, Worthy
noted, “As late as the last part of the winter, realizing how strongly an all-Negro
party would come under false and contrived attack, some of us thought that
possibly a Freedom Now Party could be interracial.” Then describing the outright
repression he expected from a vengeful Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department,
given the FNP’s potential to deprive the Kennedys of a victory in 1964, he
40 • VAN GOSSE

concluded that “with this prospect ahead, I personally would vote on just that
ground alone to keep whites out of the party…the sad truth is that of thousands of
whites I know, I can think of only a handful who would stand up to the bitter end when
home, job, reputation, even freedom from imprisonment are imminently
threatened.” An office was listed at 81 East 125th Street in Harlem, and Pernella
Wattley as “corresponding secretary.”
38. James Boggs letter, quoted in Lynn, Fountain, 185.
39. Grace Lee Boggs, telephone interview with the author September 2, 1996.
40. For the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the larger history of U.S. involvement
with the Cuban Revolution, see Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War
America and the Making of a New Left (London: Verso, 1993), passim.
41. Electronic communication, Gibson to the author, May 24,1996.
42. See, for instance, “A Letter from Angola” in the August 1961 issue, from an
“assimilated” Angolan, denouncing the Portuguese repression in heartfelt terms,
and the announcement of “Negro History Week…Commemorating the Death of
Patrice Lumumba,” with a performance of the Freedom Suite by Max Roach and
Abby Lincoln, cosponsored by the Ghanaian, Guinean, and United Arab Republic’s
U.N. Missions (January 1962 issue).
43. Liberator, July 1963.
44. “My wife was a contributor to the Liberator, through her contact with Malcolm X,
she wrote about the Black Muslims, as well as social problems in Harlem. I was
involved with distribution, the newstand sales throughout the country with special
emphasis on the New York area. My official title was associate editor; I attended
meetings and consulted with authors, but I had no fundamental editorial function.
Likewise Lowell Beveridge, the only other white man on the staff, bore the title of
editor, but he only served as copy-editor and text-composer. The magazine centered
around Dan Watts: he was in charge; he chose the writers, enlisted celebrities, such
as James Baldwin and Ossie Davis among others, and selected the subjects. He was
to my mind an extremely competent publisher and certainly the most important
figure in the operation in every capacity—from editorial, to promotional and
financial.” Letter, James C.Finkenstaedt to the author, September 18, 1996.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. They are “Rebellion or Revolution?” in Liberator, October, November, December,
1963 and January 1964; “The Roots of Black Nationalism,” March and April,
1964; “FNP vs. SWP: Marxism and the Negro,” May and June, 1964; and “The
Economics of Black Nationalism,” July,August, 1964.
48.
49. “I do not know really why Cruse left the magazine. He may have had policy
differences with Dan Watts. Both my wife and I had great respect for him; he was a
very influential figure.” Finkenstaedt letter, September 18, 1996.
50. In Yuri Kochiyama’s notes from Cruse’s 1965 class at the Black Arts School,
another point is made: “Could have been a Harlem magazine. Should have utilized
Southern writers, and pooled the talents of specialists.” Interestingly, when the New
York Times noted the Liberator’s fifth anniversary on June 13,1965, it quoted
Watts (who asserted a circulation of 15,000) speaking in entirely Crusian terms
about his mission: “We advocate white acceptance of a multiracial, pluralistic
 MORE THAN JUST A POLITICIAN • 41

society,” and that “[a]ll black ghettos” should be treated as an “an underdeveloped
country, with massive technical assistance.”
51. Obviously, this is a one-sided view of the dispute between Cruse and Watts. It is,
however, the only account available. Several attempts were made to contact Watts,
who did not respond.
52. Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? 24–25.
53. Finkenstaedt letter, September 18, 1996.
54. Kochiyama interview, October 14, 1996.
55. Harold Cruse; emphasis in the original.
56.
57.
58.
59. These final details on Cruse in New York are from Kochiyama’s recollections. She
maintained contact with Cruse through 1967, and retyped his Liberator essays into
manuscript form for the book Rebellion or Revolution? Cruse continued to work
with LeRoi Jones, speaking at the Afro-American Festival of the Arts in Newark in
1966, along with Stokely Carmichael; see Baraka, Autobiography, 236.
42
 2
Anatomy of Black Intellectuals
and Nationalism
Harold Cruse Revisited

MARTIN KILSON

Context: Blacks as Pariahs and Marginals

Nativist Imperative in American Life

As the ethnically polygot post-Civil War American society took shape from the
late 1860s onward, a system of intergroup regulation emerged among the
culturally dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) that was premised
on the ethnic denigration of non-WASP groups. Some historians like John
Higham have characterized this WASP-initiated mode of ethnic denigration as
“nativism,” and other observers have labeled it just plain “bigotry.”1 By asserting
WASP cultural superiority, nativism also asserted the inferiority of non-WASP
ethnic newcomers. It was fashioned by the dominant host WASP community to
regulate and checkmate the status positioning of non-WASP groups who were
needed to provide a manufacturing labor force in America’s rapidly
industrializing system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Nativism also performed another function as well; it was used to create an
unequal social pecking order that favored WASPS over non-WASP ethnic
groups.
However, it was ultimately in the interaction of all white Americans with
black Americans that nativism or bigotry acquired its most potent presence in
American life. The term racism evolved as the one most common in
characterizing the unique application of nativism as a method of ethnic
denigration and the marginalization of African Americans in American society.
As applied to African Americans, nativism evolved from a method mainly
of regulating intrawhite group relations to the benefit of WASPS to a method of
regulating black/white interactions to the benefit of all white Americans.
Nativism or bigotry took on its most rigid and tormenting forms as it
metamorphosed into a method of the racist creation of pariahs and the oppression
of African Americans.
44 • MARTIN KILSON

A Political Culture of Whiteness

Out of the metamorphosis of nativism as a weapon used by all white American
groups to massively create pariahs and to marginalize blacks’ status in American
society—a development that commenced from the 1880s onward—evolved what
might be called a political culture of whiteness.2 Functionally, this political
culture of whiteness constituted an intricate web of whites’ neurotic Negrophobic
feelings, preferences, and institutional patterns that became acceptable as
culturally normal by most white Americans.
In the South, where some 90 to 95 percent of African Americans resided
between the 1880s and the 1930s, the operational features of the political culture
of whiteness translated into an authoritarian pattern of political marginalization of
blacks—the almost complete lack of voting rights and political party
membership rights, massive antiblack violence and human rights denial
generally, rigid economic marginalization and oppression, and so on. Ralph
Bunche undertook the first systematic study of this political culture of whiteness
as it operated institutionally in the South (research undertaken for Gunnar
Myrdal’s monumental study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and
American Democracy (1944), which demonstrated that since the vast majority of
blacks lived in the “deep” or “inner” South, their political status was fully
authoritarian. On the other hand, in the “outer” South—Virginia, Florida,
Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, where the second largest sector of
African Americans resided from the 1880s to World War II—some loosening of
the rigid mode of authoritarian practices did obtain, though of little systemic
significance. For instance, in Petersburg, Virginia, where in the 1930s there were
30,074 whites and 12,802 blacks, only 72 black citizens were qualified to vote,
and this number inched along to 395 by 1940. Bunche’s pathbreaking research
also revealed that the operation of the culture of whiteness in the North also
produced a broad sociopolitical marginalization of African American
communities, which resulted in a very weak political participation status for
northern African American communities.3
Thus, from the 1880s through the 1950s it can be said that the political culture
of whiteness generally prevented the viable political and institutional
incorporation of African American citizens at parity with that long seventy-five-
year period’s systemic incorporation of white ethnic groups like Irish Americans,
Italian Americans, Polish Americans, Jewish Americans, and the like. And when
the process of sociopolitical incorporation of African American citizens finally
commenced from the late 1960s onward, it required three things that the
sociopolitical incorporation of the non-WASP sector of white ethnic groups did
not require, namely (1) a militant activism on the part of African Americans
via the civil rights movement, which was viciously and violently resisted for two
decades by white supremacist governments, police systems, and vigilante (Ku
Klux Klan) white citizens in the South; (2) widespread urban ghetto riots on the
part of the African American working-class sector in both the North and South
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 45

during the late 1960s; and (3) extensive intervention on behalf of black
sociopolitical incorporation by the federal government.
Inevitably, African American responses to the long, cruel, cynical reign of an
American political culture of whiteness were variegated, not one-dimensional
The African American intelligentsia sector in general fashioned social and
political responses that sought broad-gauged inclusion into mainstream
American life and institutions at parity with white ethnic groups. This inclusion
or mainstream incorporation strategy was popularly labeled “integration” and it
became the dominant or mainline black leadership strategy as the twentieth-
century African American intelligentsia evolved. But from its onset in the
thinking and discourse of black abolitionist figures before the Civil War, like
Frederick Douglass, and in the post-Emancipation era, like W.E.B.DuBois,
Reverdy Ransom, Monroe Trotter, Ida Wells-Barnett, and others, the “integration
strategy” always confronted challenges from the black “cultural separatist” or
“black nationalist” strategy.
The Caribbean immigrant figure Marcus Garvey emerged as the most
prominent spokesperson of the black nationalist strategy in the formative phase of
the twentieth-century African American intelligentsia. Through Garvey’s keen
organizational skill—manifest in the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA)—and his special talent for tapping the everyday black-ethnic
consciousness latent among the growing African American urban working class
and lower middle class or petit-bourgeois sectors, the black nationalist strategy
gained a competitive status with the integrationist strategy throughout the era
between the two world wars. And while the black nationalist approach to
challenging the white supremacist marginalization of African Americans was
outdistanced by the integrationist outlook during the heyday of the civil rights
movement from the mid-1950s through the 1960s, it nonetheless was an
ideological force in African American life.
To date, the most influential probe of the interplay of integrationist and black
nationalist orientations in the life cycle of the twentieth-century African
American intelligentsia remains Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual (1967). No volume has delineated the complex interplay of the black
nationalist thrust and the quest of the integrationist strand of the African
American intelligentsia as provocatively as Cruse’s work.

Harold Cruse and the Black Modernist Dilemma

Attributes of Black Modernist Dilemma

A fascinating and curious dilemma has characterized the evolutionary life cycle
of the twentieth-century African American intelligentsia; namely, that despite the
quite broad grassroots appeal of black nationalist thrusts to the popular African
American mind, the sociopolitical leadership methods that have prevailed in
46 • MARTIN KILSON

institutional terms among African Americans during the twentieth century have
been associated with the integrationist or mainstream-incorporation orientation.
This means in organizational terms that when it comes to the matter of
connecting black realities with mainstream American processes, it has been the
sector of the African American intelligentsia linked to the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that has been typically chosen
by the everyday black citizen to perform African Americans’ main operational
leadership tasks.
Put another way, while what might be called the cathartic-leadership tasks
faced by black citizens have sometimes been entrusted to proponents of black
nationalist thrusts, what I call operational-leadership tasks have been
overwhelmingly entrusted to intelligentsia proponents of the integrationist or
mainstream-incorporation leadership perspective. It is, then, this longstanding
attitudinal bifurcation of the black-ethnic mind-set among the typical African
American citizen throughout most of the twentieth century that comprises what I
call the “black modernist dilemma.”
This issue of a split-minded African American outlook toward the
integrationist and black nationalist leadership perspectives is a recurrent shaping
theme throughout the six hundred pages of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
For Cruse, it was a disturbing and baffling dimension of the twentieth century
evolution of African Americans that the black nationalist view of black
peoplehood and of African Americans’ modernization needs did not vanquish the
integrationist or acculturationist outlook. The pages of The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual are riddled with many variants of Cruse’s disenchantment with the
black modernist dilemma. Indeed, Cruse’s antipathy toward the black
integrationist outlook almost assumes the quality of a religious commitment. For
Cruse, that segment of African American leadership favoring civil rights
acculturationist entry to mainstream white American institutions ought to be
rejected and stripped of its black-ethnic legitimacy. This kind of pragmatic
adjustment of African American leadership style (practiced since 1905 by the
Niagara Movement, the NAACP, the National Urban League, leaders of
mainline black religious denominations, leaders of black professional
associations, etc.) Cruse pejoratively labeled “interracialism.”

Explaining the Black Modernist Dilemma

Cruse often discusses events that relate to the black modernist dilemma, but his
discussion usually lacks conceptual clarity. That is to say, he never presents, in
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a straightforward explanation of such a
dilemma—of the seeming contradiction surrounding the African American
citizenry’s tilt during the twentieth century toward the integrationist or
acculturationist outlook in operational-leadership terms while also entertaining a
cultural cathartic interest in black nationalist options. Instead, Cruse flirts
with rather one-dimensional psychic-level explanations.
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 47

And he doesn’t get around to presenting this explanation until midway into the
book. This occurs during a critical discussion of LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka) as
a kind of bête noire among the interracialist sector of African American
intellectuals of the early 1960s. It happened that Jones had fashioned for himself
a kind of janus-faced ideological identity as a radical black intellectual—an
identity that combined a black militant demeanor with an interracialist
orientation. For Cruse this identity mode reeked of irrationality, an irrationality
that Cruse presented as a psychological explanation: “A peculiar form of what
might be called the psychology of political interracialism (for want of a better
term) has been inculcated in the Negro’s mind…. He has been so conditioned
that he cannot separate personal and individual associations with…whites in the
everyday business of striving and existing, from that interior business that is the
specific concern of his group’s [cultural] existence.”4
Thus, in Cruse’s ideological vision, the militant black intellectual like Jones,
who locates himself favorably vis-à-vis the liberal black/white integrationist
paradigm, represents a cultural perversion. The appeal of the integrationist
paradigm to such a black intellectual amounts to a pathological psychic process,
notes Cruse—a left-wing version of a generic “Uncle Tom.”

Dissecting Cruse’s Black Nationalist Sympathy

In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, the black nationalist orientation is
Cruse’s main yardstick for appraising the leadership activity of leading African
American organizations and for characterizing the production and activity of
leading African American intelligentsia personalities. In overall design, The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual presents a multilayered delineation of the
interaction between the place of black nationalist patterns in the life cycle of the
twentieth-century African American intelligentsia on the one hand, and the
mainstream-incorporation or integrationist orientation on the other. No other
writer has, I believe, so provocatively interlaced the black-nationalist/
integrationist face-off in the evolution of the African American intelligentsia.
Cruse’s analysis proceeds along two discourse trajectories. First, he presents
case-study probes of key historical phases relating to the African American
intelligentsia—the formative phase in the rise of “Black Manhattan,” or Harlem,
the Marxist phase among black intellectuals, the independent leftist phase among
black intellectuals via the National Negro Congress, the Garveyite black
nationalist phase, the post-World War II “Negroes-with-guns” phase, and so on.
Second, he presents highly polemical portraits of a variety of African American
intelligentsia personalities whose contributions, in Cruse’s analytical scheme of
things, suffered from the seductions of “interracialism.” Among those “ruined”
black intellectuals were Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, James
Baldwin, Julian Mayfield, Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones, and John Oliver
Killens.
48 • MARTIN KILSON

The endgame of Cruse’s analysis in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is, I
think, plain enough: namely, to fashion favorable black nationalist perspectives
in regard to the development of twentieth-century African American life in
general, and thus thereby to discredit the interracialist or acculturationist
paradigm. While Cruse’s goal is reasonable enough, the key issue remains how
historically valid, how analytically effective, and how intellectually viable
Cruse’s discourse is in his study. My reconsideration of Cruse’s monumental
work proceeds along the lines of these evaluative criteria.

Basic Elements of Harold Cruse’s Theory

Cruse’s discourse on the interplay of the black nationalist orientation and the
twentieth-century evolution of African American life, and especially in
relationship to the competing integrationist leadership outlook, is not presented
in a systematic manner. Instead, a variety of assumptions, predilections, and
propositions relating to the black nationalist/integrationist face-off in the
evolution of twentieth-century African American life appear in scattershot
fashion in numerous parts of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. They appear in
a kind of back-and-forth manner, depending especially upon what set of ideas
relating to the black nationalist perspective Cruse is seeking to affirm, or upon
what group of mainstream African American leadership figures and intellectuals
Cruse is seeking to debunk. Thus, it probably makes more sense to speak of the
basic elements of Cruse’s thinking about black nationalist perspective,” for there
is really not a discernible theory of black nationalist perspective in the book.
Perhaps the best starting point for fathoming Cruse’s thinking on such a
perspective is found halfway into the book, where he presents critiques of
different integrationist-minded African American intellectuals during the late
1950s and early 60s. One of these intellectuals critiqued by Cruse was Jones,
who had fashioned for himself a black intellectual persona that was
simultaneously an admixture of black radicalism and political friendliness to
white radical allies of the civil rights movement.
As Cruse viewed them, among the numerous errors of Jones’s political ways
was his ambivalence “toward black nationalism of the traditional kind. He was
dubious at first about what he called Harlem black Nats (nationalists). His first
Harlem organization, ‘On Guard for Freedom Committee,’ was an interracial
group.”5 For Cruse, this situation amounted to what might be called a pathetic
black oppositionary contradiction.
That virtually all of the strands of radicalism he uncovered among African
American intellectuals exhibited this Jones-type black oppositionary
contradiction was a source of intellectual annoyance and analytical bafflement for
Cruse. Why was this so? Because in his conceptual scheme of things relating to
African American realities, only the mainstream integrationist segment of the
African American intelligentsia (e.g., the bourgeois leadership associated with
the NAACP) should have fallen victim to such a contradiction. This failure of
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 49

symmetry between a radical black intellectual persona and simultaneous

friendship or alliance with radical white intellectuals was, then, for Cruse what
might be called the “interracialism disease writ large.”

Cruse’s Naive Psychologism

If, after reading half of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, one wanted a plain
statement of what Cruse understands as the essential crisis of black intellectuals,
I think it would be this phenomenon I call the black oppositionary flaw; namely,
the indifference of seemingly sovereign-minded black intelligentsia personalities
to sustain a viable mode of all-black or separatist intellectual thrusts and
ideological discourse. Thus, when seeking an explanation for the young Jones’s
succumbing to the pathology of the black oppositionary flaw—the mental
inability to reject interracialism—Harold Cruse observed

Negro intellectuals have been sold a bill of goods on interracialism by

white [mainly Jewish] Communists and white [mainly WASP] liberals. As
a result of this, a peculiar form of what might be called the psychology of
political interracialism (for want of a better term) has been inculcated in
the Negro’s mind. Even before the average Negro attempts to undertake
any action himself, he assumes, almost involuntarily, that he must not,
cannot, dare not exclude whites, because he cannot succeed without them.
He has been so conditioned that he cannot separate personal and individual
associations with individual whites in the everyday business of striving and
existing, from that interior business that is the specific concern of his
group’s existence. Every other ethnic group in America, a “nation of
nations,” has accepted the fact of its separateness and used it to its own social
advantage.

It should thus be underscored that fundamental to Cruse’s critique of Jones

for being a black radical but not a black separatist is his claim that African
Americans in general and the intelligentsia in particular had been
brainwashed—“conditioned” is Cruse’s term—into “individual associations
with…whites.”6
This viewpoint is reinforced by a related secondary proposition; namely,
Cruse’s claim that, unlike African Americans as an American ethnic community,
the major non-WASP white ethnic groups (like the Irish, Italians, Jews, etc.) had
forged themselves into viably modernizing ethnic communities without systemic
incorporation linkages or interactions with the WASP-hegemonic American
mainstream system. As Cruse put it, unlike African Americans, “Every other
ethnic group [he means non-WASP groups] in America, a ‘nation-of-nations,’
has accepted the fact of its separateness and used it to its own advantage.”
It should be remarked that here Cruse offers an important insight relating to
the comparative ethnic-group character of African Americans relative to white
50 • MARTIN KILSON

ethnic groups, for he is suggesting that African Americans are both a racial
group (shaped, that is, by white supremacist oppressive patterns) and an ethnic
group (shaped, that is, by generic traditional patterns)—a formulation regarding
what might be called the organic character of African Americans as a cultural
group that DuBois formulated in Dusk of Dawn (1940). But, on the other hand,
Cruse is mistaken in his deduction from this insightful fact: that white ethnic
groups possessed during their twentieth-century evolution some special variant of
ethnic cultural “separateness” that enabled them to acquire viable modernizing
capacities without linkages with the WASP-hegemonic mainstream American
system. This, however, is an ideology-driven deduction by Cruse. That is to say,
though it’s an argument that serves the critique of what Cruse called the
interracialist flaw among twentieth-century African American intelligentsia, his
argument simply lacks a basis in the actual historical development of the
aforementioned white ethnic groups.

A Critique of Cruse’s Views on White Ethnic Development

However, all of the non-WASP white ethnic groups’ successful social,
economic, and occupational modernization trajectory, compared to that available
to African Americans during the twentieth century, relied heavily upon linkages
and interactions with the dominant WASP patterns, even while of course the
Irish, Italians, Poles, and others had to challenge the nativism or bigotry
associated with dominant-WASP patterns. Moreover, as I formulated at the
beginning of this chapter, this took place within a cynical Negrophobic and racist
American political culture of whiteness whose goal was to restrict comparable
African-American linkages and interactions with the mainstream WASP-
controlled American system.
Thus, the entrepreneurial sector among white ethnic groups relied heavily on
WASP-owned banks and financial mechanisms, for example, and also relied
upon close alliances with different segments among the WASP political elites
and power brokers within the Democratic and Republican Parties. And when,
from the 1940s onward, a second-generation and third-generation middle class
and professional class emerged among white ethnics like the Irish, growing
numbers of upwardly mobile Irish men—defying strong religious resistance by
the Catholic church—sought wives among elite WASP women, as did from the
1960s onward males from the third-generation Italian professional class and,
even more aggressively, those among the Jewish professional class. Thus, the
successful fashioning of a viable modern socioeconomic mobility among white
ethnic groups from the early twentieth century onward occurred through
multilayered linkages and alliances between groups like the Irish, Italians, and
Jews on the one hand and the dominant-WASP ethnic cluster on the other.
Harold Cruse appears quite ignorant of the real social-system and political-
system interactions among white groups in twentieth-century American
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 51

development—an ignorance that conveniently serves Cruse’s black-nationalist-

friendly critique of the mainstream African American intelligentsia and
professional class he presents in the text of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.
Thus, I question Cruse’s core claim in the book that the poor modern
development of African American society, as compared with that of white ethnic
groups, was due mainly to the black intelligentsia’s failure to come to grips with
the black nationalist perspective. This failure is explained by Cruse along the
lines of two hypotheses: first, what I would call the “the low group-modernizing
hypothesis,” and second, the “brainwashed hypothesis.”
As I have noted above, Cruse’s claim that white ethnic groups possessed a
special generic ability as cultural groups to fashion their ethnic “separateness”
into a high group-modernizing trajectory without benefit of linkages with the
WASP-dominant mainstream American system lacks a serious historical basis.
And Cruse’s claim that African American intelligentsia personalities during the
twentieth century were “conditioned” into “individual associations with…
whites” (or what I call “brainwashed”) is equally fallacious historically. Cruse is
so taken by this “brainwashed hypothesis” that he reinforced it with the
observation that too many African American intelligentsia personalities suffered
“from a psychology that is rooted in the Negro’s symbiotic ‘blood-ties’ between
slave and master, bound together in the purgatory of plantations. The American
Negro has never yet been able to break entirely free of the ministrations of his
white masters….”7
Here Harold Cruse indulges a crude form of cultural reductionist argument,
one that restricts him to a one-dimensional, simpleminded explanation of the low
or weak modernization development experience of African Americans from the
late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries as compared with that of white
ethnic groups. Unfortunately for readers of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a
dialectically intricate and multidimensional explanation, rooted in a keen grasp
of the devastation of African Americans’ modernization trajectory by America’s
cruel white supremacist practices and political economy, was presumably beyond
the range of Cruse’s interests. I have in mind the kind of intricate, seminal
intellectual range that’s found in the works of African American scholars like St.
Clair Drake (Black Metropolis, 1945), Allison Davis (Deep South, 1940), Horace
Mann Bond (Negro in Alabama, 1939), E.Franklin Frazier (The Negro Family in
the United States, 1939), Hylan Lewis (Blackways of Kenty 1938), and Charles
Spurgeon Johnson (Growing Up in the Black Belt, 1940), among others.

Cruse on Interracialism among Black Intellectuals

Cruse’s View of the Interracialist Fallacy

Crucial to Cruse’s opposition to the young Jones’s choice to be simultaneously
black radical and an integrationist is his belief that integrationist-oriented black
52 • MARTIN KILSON

intellectuals depend upon “psychological umbilical ties to [white] paternalism.”

Cruse also believes that this paternalistic dependence among integrationist black
intellectuals owes much to “the Jewish [leftist] involvement in this interracial
process over the last fifty-odd years. The American Jew as political mediator
between Negro and Anglo-Saxon must be terminated by ‘Negroes
themselves.’”8
The issue of Jewish leftist intellectuals’ involvement as interracial mediators
for black intellectuals obsessed Cruse, I think, as he frequently refers to it by
employing the “umbilical…paternalism” metaphor in The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual. In his sixth chapter, titled “Jews and Negroes in the Communist
Party,” Cruse searches for an explanation of the role of Jewish leftist intellectuals
as “mediator between Negro and Anglo-Saxon….” Cruse contextualizes this
situation, writing, “In Negro-Jewish relations in the Communist Left there has
been an intense undercurrent of jealousy, enmity and competition over the prizes
of group political power and intellectual prestige. In this struggle, the Jewish
intellectuals—because of superior organization, drive, intellectual discipline,
money and the motive power of their cultural compulsions—have been able to
win out. In the name of Negro-white unity (the Party’s main interracial slogan),
the Jewish Communists acted out the role of political surrogates for the ‘white’
working class, and thereby gained the political whip of intellectual and
theoretical domination of the Negro question.”9
One might ask, why was Harold Cruse obsessed with Jewish leftists’ role in
the dynamics of African American intellectuals from the 1920s to the 1930s?
Because, I think, this issue offered Cruse at least a partial explanation for what
he considered a curious phenomenon among the twentieth-century African
American intelligentsia. That curious phenomenon was the failure of radical and
activist black intelligentsia elements to fashion a broad-gauged black-ethnic-
focused infrastructure—a black nationalist groupwide agency if you will—or at
the least accommodate the variant of a black-ethnic infrastructure provided by
the Garveyites during the era between the two world wars. For Cruse, Jewish
leftists played a major role in preventing this development. As already noted,
they did so as mediators of interracialism within the African American
intelligentsia. There was an additional role played by Jewish leftist intellectuals
as well: they sparked intrablack cleavages among the African American
intelligentsia, especially a black American/West Indian cleavage.
Cruse traces this cleavage “as far back as 1919 [when] one of the problems of
the first Negroes to enter the newly emerging Communist left wing was the
ideological split between American and West Indian Negroes.” The foundation of
this cleavage rested on generic black issues. For one thing, as Cruse observed,
“the split was exacerbated by the rise of Garvey Nationalism.”10 But in Cruse’s
analytical scheme of things, it was above all the spread of the interracialism
ethos that undercut the rise of viable black-ethnic focused intellectual and
institutional agencies broadcast among the twentieth-century African American
intelligentsia and thus within African American life in general.
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 53

The Interface of Interracialism and Black Modernization

In Cruse’s thinking, there were two main strands among black-friendly white
intellectuals who functioned as conveyer belts of interracialism among twentieth-
century African American intellectuals—the WASP/leftist intellectuals
and Jewish leftists. His preference, it would appear was clearly for WASP/leftist
intellectuals. In general, however, Cruse abhored all purveyors of interracialism
and integrationist thinking among African American intellectuals. Why? First,
because interracialism distorted African Americans’ ability to make effective
modernization uses of what he viewed as the natural “cultural separateness” of
ethnic groups in American society (“a nation of nations” as Cruse put it, quoting
the Harvard University historian Crane Brinton); second, because interracialism
in the hands of white leftists translated too often into intrablack cleavages of one
form or another; and third, because interracialism was invariably associated with
a crude white-leftist paternalistic posture toward black intellectuals. According to
Cruse’s formulation of the reasons for his staunch antipathy to white leftist
purveyors of interracialism:

During the Communist Party’s “Anglo-Saxon” period of Dunne, Minor,

William and Earl Browder, etc., there was more open inquiry into the
precise nature of the Negro question that there was to be later on…. There
was a certain flexibility and a willingness to survey and debate. But this
open-mindedness and freshness went out of the Communist Party very
rapidly. By 1929, when the West Indian-American Negro era of debate
began, an unyielding narrow-minded rigidity permeated the Party’s
thought on all questions…. [It was] a period of cheap militancy, imitative
posturing, and blind evasion of Negro realities. The West Indian-American
Negro brain-trust could not utter a single theoretical idea about themselves
unless they first invoked the precedent of the Moscow ‘line….’ This
situation led inexorably to the period of Jewish dominance in the
Communist Party. It culminated in the emergence of Herbert Aptheker and
other assimilated Jewish Communists, who assumed the mantle of
spokesmanship on Negro affairs, thus burying the Negro radical potential
deeper and deeper in the slough of white intellectual paternalism.11

There might be something to say for Cruse’s skepticism toward the relationship
of interracialism and African Americans in the American Marxist movement of
the 1920s to 1950s. But at the same time Cruse carries his antipathy to white
leftist purveyors of interracialism much too far. Above all, Cruse’s problack
nationalist predilections rule out the chance that progressive white intellectuals
could possess that combination of intellectual acumen and black-friendly
humanism/progressivism required to produce strategies for the viable
modernization development of African Americans. This paranoid black
nationalist view of white intellectuals’ incapacity to genuinely contribute to the
54 • MARTIN KILSON

advancement of African Americans’ racist-ravaged status in American society is,

I believe, axiomatic in Cruse’s thinking. Indeed, Cruse can be contemptuously
devastating and catty in the manner in which he dismisses leftist white
intellectuals as contributors to the viable advancement of blacks in American
society. “The white Left,” notes Cruse, “does not possess a single idea, tactic
or strategy in its theoretical arsenal that can make the Negro protest movement
[of the 1960s] a revolutionary one. All it can achieve is to intervene and foster
such tactics as will get some persevering Negro activist leader jailed, framed, or
exiled for utterly romantic reasons.” Cruse continues this putdown of white
leftists and thus of interracialism, positing that association with white Marxists
“warps the social perception of leftwing Negro intellectuals to the extent that
they also fail to see the factors of their own dynamic. Over the past forty-five
years many of the best Negro minds have passed in, through, and out of the
Marxist Left [some of whose experiences Cruse critiques in his book—those of
Julian Mayfield, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, Ruby Dee, and Ossie Davis].
Their creative and social perceptions have been considerably dulled in the
process, and their collective, cumulative failures over the decades have
contributed to the contemporary [1960s] poverty and insolvency of Negro
intellectuals as a class.”12
On the other hand, it is also an axiomatic given for Cruse that black
professionals potentially possess a kind of intrinsic combination of intellectual
acumen and black-friendly outlook required to produce effective approaches for
the modern development of black society. For Cruse, however, this belief applies
in practice not to the civil rights activist or progressive strand among the
twentieth-century African American intelligentsia but instead to the
establishmentarian or accommodationist bourgeois strand, as I’ll comment
further on shortly.
There’s also another constituency within the black American intelligentsia as
it evolved during the twentieth century that Cruse questions as authentic
contributors to the viable modernization of African American society—namely,
immigrant black intelligentsia personalities, especially those from the Caribbean.
The domestic black-bourgeoisie and immigrant black professional strand during
twentieth century African Americans’ development inhabit a kind of bête noire
status in Cruse’s discourse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. They inhabit
such a status in Cruse’s discourse essentially for the same reason—namely, that
they each contributed to the legitimation of interracialism and integrationist
thinking in the African American intelligentsia, albeit from different positions on
the ideological spectrum—the West Indian intellectuals functioning from the
leftist position, and the civil rights activist black bourgeoisie from the liberal
position. So for Cruse, the West Indian intellectual and the civil rights activist
black bourgeoisie strand arrive at their bête noire position through different
routes. Finally, Cruse, in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual exhibits more
antipathy toward the immigrant black professionals’ path to the role of
contributor to interracialism within African American society than toward the
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 55

role played by domestic-born black intellectuals. Why Cruse entertained a

differential animus toward immigrant-black intellectuals’ contribution to
interracialism compared to the contribution of the domestic black bourgeoisie
stratum is never made clear in his book, though in several places where
immigrant black intellectuals are discussed, one detects a certain neurotic
personal edge to the discussion.

A Note on Harold Cruse and West Indian Intellectuals

In several sections of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual dealing with the
interface of immigrant black and domestic black intellectuals, Cruse
characterizes this interface as almost generically cleavage-riddled. Why was this
so? For Cruse, the African American/Caribbean American cleavaging during the
formative era of the black American intelligentsia was due mainly to what Cruse
viewed as the pathological role of “interracialism” among these two sectors of
black intellectuals. And though Cruse mainly blamed leftist WASP and Jewish
intellectuals for planting the interracialism virus among African Americans
generally, he also believed that the leftist strand among West Indian intellectuals
(that is, the socialist and communist segments, not the Garveyite or black
nationalist segments) possessed a kind of generic need to traffic in
interracialism. As Cruse put it, during the era between the two world wars there
prevailed among West Indian intellectuals in America “a psychology of…
accommodation to American white bourgeois values [more than with the]
essentials of the American Negro struggle.”13
The veracity of Cruse’s claim about high cleavage between immigrant black
and domestic black leftist intellectuals and the special responsibility for this on
the part of immigrant black intellectuals has been seriously disputed. The
Columbia University historian Professor Winston James has demonstrated—
quite conclusively, I think—in his brilliant study Holding Aloft the Banner of
Ethiopia; Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (1998)
that West Indian intellectuals were no more generically prone to “a psychology
of…accommodation to American white bourgeois values” than were progressive
elements among domestic black intellectuals. James reveals numerous
historiographical and evidentiary errors in Cruse’s treatment of the domestic
black-immigrant black intellectual interface.14
Be that as it may, Cruse holds firm throughout The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual to a claim of pathological-type cleavage along an immigrant black/
domestic-black intellectual axis. He proceeds through a portrait of the activities
of the African Blood Brotherhood, a radical organization founded among leftist
immigrant black intellectuals in 1919, led by intellectually astute West Indian
intellectuals like Cyril Briggs, W.A.Domingo, Grace Campbell, and Richard
Moore. Operationally, the Brotherhood interlocked with several layers of radical
groups—white and black—in New York city during the 1920s and 30s. In
Cruse’s words, the Brotherhood’s followers were “predominantly West Indians
56 • MARTIN KILSON

and represented two or three simultaneous aspects of Harlem radical developments

in the 1920s.” Furthermore, the Brotherhood especially signified “a conflict
between American and West Indian Negroes over radical policies, inasmuch as
[A.Phillip] Randolph and his coeditor [Chandler] Owen considered themselves
the leaders of ‘the New Negro’ trend, a strictly American Negro development.”15
The supremely careful study of the historical record relating to the relations of
black American and West Indian intellectuals by James thus disputes
Cruse’s view of a life-and-death cleavage. In concluding a rigorous analysis of
this relationship, James observes, “Contrary to Cruse’s repeated notion of a West
Indian versus American Negro split at the Messenger (which he dates as early as
1919), the fact is that in 1923 Domingo was the only Caribbean person who
severed connections with the magazine. Caribbeans such as Frank Crosswaith
continued to write for it; so did Eric Walron and, most prodigiously, J.A.Rogers,
from Jamaica, who continued to make his distinguished contribution.”16
It would appear that Cruse was just not as careful as he should have been in
his treatment of the relationship between immigrant black and domestic black
intellectuals. For example, at another point in Cruse’s discussion, he chastises
African Blood Brotherhood intellectuals like Briggs and Moore for what might
be called their turncoat behavior toward the Garvey movement, in whose
environs they initially fashioned the Brotherhood. Between 1919 and the early
1920s, Cruse claims that they somersaulted from a black nationalist/black leftist
identity (that is, both Garvey-friendly and leftist-friendly) on the one hand to a
Garvey-averse and leftist-friendly identity on the other. Again, James’s rigorous
research of political formations among immigrant black intellectuals during the
1920s disputes Cruse’ s understanding of these developments, showing how
much more variegated they actually were.
But never mind. For fathoming Cruse’s core argument that interracialism
short-circuited viable modernization development among twentieth-century
African American society, it is important to recognize that Cruse despised
immigrant black leftist intellectuals for helping to legitimate interracialism
among intellectuals in America, and particularly their criticisms of Garvey.
Cruse viewed West Indian leftists’ “onslaught against Marcus Garvey…as one of
vituperation, rancor and bitter accusations of deceit, dishonesty, fraud, lunacy,
racial disloyalty, charlatanism and ignorance.”17 Cruse’s discussion in The Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual is vividly contemptuous of West Indian leftist
intellectuals; thus is a contemptuousness he exhibits especially in his
characterization of the Communist Party’s maneuvering of West Indian leftists
during the Garvey movement’s 1924 convention in Harlem. In Cruse’s words:

It was apparent that these infiltrators used by the Communists were none
other than the West Indian members of the African Blood Brotherhood. In
this regard it is ironic that in the legend built up around the personality of
Garvey, motion has come down that his worst enemies and detractors were
all American Negroes [e.g., DuBois, Randolph, Owens, James Weldon
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 57

Johnson, et al.] who did not appreciate the man’s nationalist genius.
However, the truth of the matter was that while Garvey’s most inspired
followers were West Indians, so were his most vitriolic and effective
enemies—both in the United States and in the West Indies…. West Indians
are never so ‘revolutionary’ as when they are away from the Islands.18

Finally, it should be noted that Cruse’s discussion of the leftist tilt among
immigrant black and domestic black intellectuals is informed by a kind
of implicit classificatory schema. This schema posits two types of black
radicalism during the evolution of the twentieth-century African American
intelligentsia: a category I’d call “secular radicalism,” and another I’d call
“sacred radicalism.” For Cruse, the only legitimate form of black radicalism was
the category of “sacred radicalism”—the category that encompassed black
nationalist leadership options (like the Garvey movement, for example), as well
as other black communitarian forms such as large evangelist black church
movements like Father Divine’s and Bishop “Daddy” Grace’s church
organizations. If the “secular radicalism” is informed by a cosmopolitan,
pluralist, and multicultural modern ethos, the “sacred radicalism” reflects
traditional, parochial, and ethnocentric patterns. Accordingly, Cruse
choreographed the role of leftist West Indian intellectuals—their machinations
via leftist organizations like the socialists, communists, Marxists, trade unions,
and the like—as intrinsic proponents of interracialism, a modern leadership
methodology that he viewed as the bane of viable modernization development of
twentieth-century African American society.
However, in the overall context of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
Cruse’s critique of West Indian leftist intellectuals was only a part of his attack
on the secular-radical patterns among black intellectuals and leadership
organizations. The main thrust of his attack on secular-radical patterns was
directed at the mainline African American professional class, the prominent
upper stratum within twentieth-century African American life that E.Franklin
Frazier labeled the “black bourgeoisie” in his famous book of the same name
(1956). After all, it was this class stratum that operated the main black institutional
infrastructures that mediated so much of African Americans’ modern
development within a white supremacist twentieth-century American
democracy—infrastructures such as Negro colleges, professional associations,
civic organizations, churches, business enterprise, trade unions, civil rights and
political organizations, and so on.
The remainder of this chapter will appraise Cruse’s thinking on the mainstream
African American professional class—the black bourgeoisie—as the prominent
leadership stratum in the twentieth-century development of African American
society. In the following discussion I will use the term black elite as synonymous
with the terms African American professional class and black bourgeoisie.
58 • MARTIN KILSON

Harold Cruse’s Interface with the Black Elite

At the heart of Cruse’s discussion of the black elite is the proposition (belief)
that the sector of the African American professional class, which by World War I
became prominent as the civil-rights activist strand of black leadership, was
intrinsically incapable of producing a leadership mode suitable to the viable
modernization development of African American society. This, of course, was the
strand of the black elite led by W.E.B.DuBois and his circle associated with the
NAACP—the strand of the evolving twentieth-century black elite
that emphasized challenging the white supremacist oppression of African
Americans’ human and citizenship rights.
On the other hand, in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Cruse celebrates a
second or alternative strand of the evolving twentieth-century black elite—the
strand concerned primarily with its class advancement through black capitalist
entrepreneurship, on the one hand, and thus on the other hand through a relative
indifference to direct action modes of challenging the white supremacist edifice
in American society. This second strand of the evolving twentieth-century black
elite was led at the national level by Booker T.Washington and his circle, from
the 1890s into the 1920s and ’30s. Washington’s so-called Tuskegee Machine
was essentially a crude patron-client mechanism that managed the transfer of
largesse from conservative white elites to Washington’s establishmentarian-
oriented sector of the black elite. The white conservative elite’s largesse that
fueled Washington’s machine consisted of political patronage, funds for selected
Negro colleges (especially the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama), loan favors from
white banks in the north for black newspaper owners and entrepreneurs
associated with Washington’s circle, and so on.
Why is there this negative view on Cruse’s part toward the civil rights activist
sector of the evolving twentieth-century African American professional class?
Because, above all, it was the civil rights activist sector of the black elite that had
a longstanding intrinsic commitment to “interracialism,” extending back in time
at least to the post-Emancipation era, when a leading proponent of
“interracialism” was the great Frederick Douglass. Of course, this longstanding
interracialist commitment on the part of the civil rights activist sector of black
leadership was fundamental to the founding of the NAACP. It not only applied to
politics, but also operated in the area of private-sector uplift activities for African
American development. For example, this interracialist approach was involved in
the founding of the National Urban League in 1916 (treated in Nancy Weiss’s
important study The National Urban League (1974). The interracialist approach
was also involved in the founding of early Negro colleges by the small liberal
sector of white elites associated with liberal church denominations like the white
Methodist Episcopals and the Presbyterians. Finally, the interracialist approach
was involved in early graduate school scholarship funds and research funds for
emergent black professionals that were provided by progressive white
philanthropists like the Jewish-American entrepreneur Julius Rosenwald.
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 59

The positive side of the interracialist approach among the civil-rights activist
sector of the evolving twentieth-century African American professional and
leadership class did not impress Harold Cruse, however. In short, for Cruse,
interracialism functioned as a pathological trap among the civil rights activist
sector of the black elite, and this attitude toward interracialism became a
doctrinaire analytical category of Cruse’s thinking throughout The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual.
As noted earlier in this chapter, Cruse never makes analytical and intellectual
peace with what I call the black modernist paradox—the seemingly
contra dictory pattern within the evolving twentieth-century African American
society whereby popular society among blacks exhibited cathartic interests in
aspects of black nationalist leadership orientations on the one hand, but on the
other hand overwhelmingly turned to the mainstream civil rights activist black
professional class for operational-leadership functions. What Cruse did not
understand is that this black modernist paradox reflected a keen variant of
pragmatism among both the civil rights activist sector of the black professional
class and black popular society. The variant of pragmatism I have in mind can be
called the activist-progressive pragmatism mode. It was, therefore, the opposite
of the vulgar variant of American pragmatism. In its core ethos, the vulgar
variant of American pragmatism (practiced most raucously by the WASP elites in
the American South throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries)
is power cynical, materialistic, opportunistic, and even authoritarian—
extraconstitutional, that is. In other words, the vulgar variant of American
pragmatism is not opportunity reformist and humanitarian enhancing, as is the
activist-progressive pragmatism mode.
Thus, it was precisely this vulgar variant of pragmatism that was adopted by
the establishmentarian or accommodationist sector of the evolving twentieth-
century black elite—that sector led Washington’s Tuskegee Machine. What is
therefore intellectually interesting about Cruse’s discourse on the black elite in
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is the extent to which his ideological tilt
favors the vulgar variant of pragmatism, as witnessed in Cruse’s preference for
the accommodationist conservative Booker T.Washington sector of the evolving
twentieth-century black elite. As I will show below, Cruse employs a veneer of
seemingly radical black nationalist narrative motifs to portray the leadership
activities of the accommodationist strand of this evolving elite, the strand averse
to civil rights activism.

Harold Cruse Celebrates Early Harlem Black Capitalists

A good starting point for an exegesis on Cruse’s sympathetic understanding of
the accommodationist conservative strand of the evolving twentieth-century
black elite is his second chapter in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, titled
“Harlem Background.” The narrative history Cruse presents on the formative
development of black capitalist entrepreneurship in New York City in the early
60 • MARTIN KILSON

1900s to the 1930s is offered with a special tendentious purpose, that being to
show that in the early era of “Black Manhattan”—as James Weldon Johnson
dubbed Harlem—what might be called the “black communitarian character” of
Harlem was at its height, and the reason for this was the dominant role played in
early black Manhattan by black capitalist entrepreneurs.
Above all, in Cruse’s eyes it was the prominence among early Harlem’s black
entrepreneurs of Booker T.Washington’s accommodationist thinking that was
crucial. T.Thomas Fortune—owner and editor of black America’s leading
weekly newspaper in this era, The New York Age—was one of the leading
pro Washington elite personalities; another such pro-Washington personality was
Philip A.Payton, a real estate developer. A unique economic development
situation also prevailed during the early era of Black Manhattan, for there was a
surplus of good middle-class housing and apartments—built initially by white
real estate speculators—that whites were slow to occupy. Therefore, this caused
black middle-class purchases in Harlem “in mass proportions around 1905,”
Cruse informs us. Above all, Cruse claims that among Harlem’s emergent black
elite there was a kind of problack nationalist ambience, so to speak. As Cruse
puts it, “The origins of Harlem’s black community are to be found in the rise of
black economic nationalism” (emphasis in the original). African American
entrepreneur Payton was the central figure in this regard, along with his Afro-
American Realty Company. Cruse waxes euphorically on the Bookerite
accommodationist strand among the evolving twentieth-century black elite that
initiated good black modernization development in Harlem’s formative years,
noting,

The spirit behind this [development] was [black] economic nationalism.

The economic organization behind this nationalism was the Afro-American
Realty Company, a group of Negro leaders, businessmen, and politicians
of whom the leading voices were Philip A.Payton, a real estate man, and
Charles V.Anderson, a Republican Party stalwart who, in 1905, was
appointed Collector of Internal Revenue in New York by [President]
Theodore Roosevelt. Behind these men stood T.Thomas Fortune, editor of
the New York Age, the oldest and most influential Negro newspaper in New
York. But behind them all stood the guiding mind of Booker T.
Washington and his National Negro Business League founded in 1900. All
of the personalities in or around the Afro-American Realty Company were
proteges of Washington and members of his business league. They were,
thus, representatives of Washington’s Tuskegee Machine, a power in
Negro affairs, and the bane of civil rights radicals led by W.E.B.DuBois
and his Niagara Movement of 1905.19

Thus, for Cruse, the early-twentieth-century experience of the Afro-American

Realty Company in Harlem was the modernization development high point in the
life cycle of the evolving African American elite. It was such a high point
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 61

because the evolving black capitalist entrepreneurial process was shaped along
the lines of Washington’s accommodationist outlook and his National Negro
Business League. Cruse’s pleasure at this pattern of development is highlighted
in the early pages of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, where he reports on the
fourteenth annual gathering of the Tuskegee Negro Conference (originally
founded in 1891). As Cruse informs us, his hero Washington waxed rosily about
the Afro-American Realty Company, advising his African American audience to
“Get some property…. Get a home of your own.” Above all, Washington
articulated one of his favorite uplift-the-black-race mantras: “When [our] Race
gets Bank Book, its Troubles will cease.”20
Of course, any member of the civil rights activist sector of early-twentieth-
century African American leadership (W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson,
Reverend Francis Grimke, Attorney Archibald Grimke, Anna Julia Cooper,
Monroe Trotter, Ida Wells-Barnett, et al.) would have added that without civil/
human rights within a nonracist democratic American system, this Bookerite
mantra was supremely naive! Furthermore, Cruse does not inform his readers that
the civil rights activist sector of African American leadership fully understood
the importance black mechanisms, institutions, and social-system arrangements
concerned with modernization development for African Americans. DuBois
himself even articulated a black-communitarian developmental perspective
during the 1930s, aspects of which are treated in Elliot Rudwick’s
W.E.B.DuBois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership (1960) and in Henry Lee
Moon’s The Emerging Thought of W.E.B.DuBois (1972).
Be that as it may, Cruse lets his readers in on just how thrilled he himself is to
have discovered the historical record of the Afro-American Realty Company’s
business successes at the founding period of modern Harlem. “The Afro-
American Realty Company lasted about five years,” Cruse informs us,
“[initiating] a wave of real estate buying among Harlem’s new [middle-class]
Negro arrivals.”21 What is more, notes Cruse, Payton and his company used
capitalist modalities for black modernization development without causing
anxiety among white Americans relating to African Americans in New York City
“getting out of their place—without causing whites to fear “uppityness” on the
part of the accommodationist-oriented business sector of the evolving twentieth-
century African American elite.
Indeed, in his research on the early development of Harlem, it was a satisfying
discovery on Cruse’s part that conservative white people easily adjusted to black
capitalist successes represented by Payton’s Afro-American Realty Company,
influenced especially by Washington’s accommodationist strand of the African
American elite. As Cruse put it, “Despite much bitter feeling [between blacks
and whites] during a fifteen year struggle of Negroes to gain a foothold, Harlem
was won [by the accommodationist sector of black leadership] without serious
violence.” This amounted to a major African American developmental
breakthrough in Cruse’s eyes, causing him to celebrate it with the observation
that the accommodationist brand of nationalism “had become aggressive and
62 • MARTIN KILSON

assertive in economics but conservative in civil rights politics….”22 Put another

way, for Cruse’s strange analytical scheme of things, the accommodationist-
oriented black entrepreneurs were the genuine African American leadership and
the civil-rights activist sector were the Uncle Toms.

Cruse’s Text Emits a Phony Aura of Militancy

In his quest to interpret the Booker T.Washington accommodationist leadership
paradigm as suitable for a black nationalism modernization development mode
that was superior to the civil-rights activist interracialism mode,
Cruse’s narrative attempts to attach a militant patina to Bookerite
accommodationism. At one point when Cruse is praising black entrepreneurs for
developing early Harlem without appearing “uppity” in the eyes of white people,
he severely chastises the civil rights activist sector of the evolving African
American elite for “the clash over [leadership] ‘program’ between Washington
and DuBois’ new civil rights ‘radicalism.’”23 Notice that Cruse places quotation
marks around “radicalism” when applying it to the civil rights activist sector of
the evolving African American elite headed by DuBois and the NAACP. Cruse
does this, I think, for one main reason: namely, his belief that only variants of the
black nationalist mode of mobilization among African Americans were
legitimate and developmentally effective.
Indeed, there is a basic argumentative and narrative strategy throughout The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual whereby Cruse—by manipulating the charge of
“interracialism” to illegitimize the DuBoisian civil rights activist sector of the
African American elite—attempts to disengage African Americans from the
popular notion that the term militant should apply to the civil rights activist
leadership sector. Through narrative maneuvers, Cruse attempts in fact to
appropriate the term militant for the accommodationist sector of African
American leadership. This is done in a variety of ways. Cruse nearly always
introduces the term economic nationalism when describing the activities of black
capitalists. He also simultaneously introduces the name of Washington, or
Washington’s National Negro Business League when describing these black
capitalists. On the other hand, whenever Cruse discusses the civil-rights activist
sector of the evolving twentieth-century black elite, he invariably uses in a
pejorative manner the term interracialism as part of his discussion and/or the
terms radicalism and civil rights. Of course, nowhere in The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual does Cruse inform his readers that his beloved black capitalists and
other professionals committed to Washington’s accommodationist paradigm also
utilized interracial ties to get loans and mortgages from white-owned banks.
In short, Cruse employs a narrative mode that suggests to his African
American readers that the accommodationist-oriented black professional sector
among the black elite in the early 1900s was more genuinely attentive to African-
American or black communitarian needs and concerns. They did this by
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 63

eschewing civil rights activism and the use of interracial networks as a means for
black activism. With such narrative/verbal maneuvers, in other words, Cruse
turns upside-down the normal understanding of the relationship between the
Bookerite accommodationist leadership mode and the DuBoisian civil rights
activist leadership mode. Thus, Cruse skillfully calibrates his narrative to give
the impression that by challenging the vicious racist denial of human rights and
civil rights of African American citizens, the civil rights activist sector of black
leadership associated with DuBois and the NAACP was not concerned with
everyday black communitarian needs and concerns. In Cruse’s turned-upside-
down analytical schema, only accommodationist-oriented black capitalists and
their professional networks performed a genuine black communitarian
leadership function. In this manner, then, Cruse surrounded the conservative
accommodationist-oriented sector of the evolving twentieth-century black elite
with a “nationalism aura”—so to speak—and thus also with a “militant aura.”
It was above all the era of the black consciousness phase of the civil rights
movement when Harold Cruse fashioned his phony aura of militancy—his facile
black militant narrative patina—for his version of the black communitarian
leadership function. During the mid-1960s era, when Cruse was writing The Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual, both the integrationist element and the black nationalist
element coexisted within the overall civil rights movement. Cruse was thus
aware that an important constituency within the civil rights movement—the
black nationalist constitutency that at this time had been influenced by Malcolm
X’s leadership role in the Nation of Islam—would be attentive to the phony aura
of militancy with which he packaged his analysis. Leftist and progressive
elements among African American professionals like myself at this period were
fascinated—and also annoyed—at Cruse’s success at deploying such a phony
aura of militancy as a critiquing theme over and against the civil rights activist
sector of black intellectuals (the genuine leftist and progressive black
professional element) throughout The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.
In this connection, I recall vividly to this day how surprised I was to discover
firsthand this aspect of the appeal of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual among
the newly expanding population of activist-oriented African American students
on white college campuses—and at Black colleges, too—during the late 1960s
and into the ’70s, the period overlapping the rise of Afro-American studies and
black studies programs on these campuses. I had numerous discussions on
Cruse’s book with black students at Harvard during this period. One discussion
with a young black administrator there—freshman Dean Archie Epps—resulted
in holding a conference on Cruse’s book. Epps suggested that one of the
discussion groups on African American issues he had put together around
Harvard since 1963 (the first one was the Leverett House Forum, which invited
Malcolm X to the campus) might be used to bring Cruse to Harvard to discuss
his book. And we did just that. We used the Alain Locke Forum (in conjunction
with the Harvard Advocate journal staff) to mount a searching discussion of The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. The discussion took place in the fall of 1973,
64 • MARTIN KILSON

featuring Cruse himself, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Ewart Guinier (professor
and chair of Afro-American studies at Harvard), and Nathan Huggins (a professor
of history at Columbia University who later succeeded Guinier as chair of Afro-
American studies at Harvard in 1979). Student commentators at this discussion
viewed Cruse’s analysis as a valid critique of the mainstream civil rights activist
sector of the black bourgeoisie as represented by the interracialist-oriented
NAACP—to my surprise, I should add. Moreover, throughout the 1970s and
’80s, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual secured a broad readership and icon
status among African American students at white and black colleges, and among
some black professionals as well, leaving its competitors in the dust. This was all
evidence of the narrative skill of Cruse’s text, especially of his text’s facile black-
militant patina.
Finally, as already noted, I classify black nationalist modes as belonging to
black mobilization patterns that might be called “sacred radicalism,” as
contrasted with black mobilization patterns that might be classified as “secular
radicalism.” The secular-radicalism form among the evolving twentieth-century
African American leadership has always done at least two crucial things: first, it
has been the black activist thrusts of the secular-radical type that typically
challenged as first priority the white supremacist oppression of African
American civil rights and human rights; second, black activist thrusts of the
secular-radical mode have typically adopted the interracialism or integrationist
outlook (something anathema to Cruse), and typically fashioned integrationist
alliances along the liberal/progressive side of the American political spectrum. On
the other hand, Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement
Association tried to strike a separatist deal with the Ku Klux Klan.
Above all, the liberal and progressive use of interracialism by the civil rights
activist sector of the evolving twentieth-century African American leadership
class was a phenomenon of enormous political significance—a significance that
completely eluded Cruse’s one-dimensional black nationalist thinking. In terms
of challenging the American white supremacist oppression and creation of
pariahs among African American citizens during the twentieth-century, the
liberal/progressive use of interracialism by the civil rights activist strand of black
leadership helped an important sector of white Americans to fashion a critical
outlook for themselves toward the racist features of American society. In time, this
development facilitated public policy advances that extended beyond the crucial
policy needs of African American citizens to include the important policy needs
of weak sectors among the white majority—sectors like the working-class
families, white women, the white disabled, and so on.
In short, whether or not Cruse was intellectually able to grasp this matter at the
time he wrote The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, the black nationalist
mobilization modes that he was ideologically committed to proved much less
effective in challenging the American white supremacist edifice in a viable
liberal and progressive manner. It was the historical task in twentieth-century
American society of the DuBoisian civil rights activist mobilization
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 65

modes—with their pragmatic use of interracialist orientations—to pose a

challenge to American racism that produced at least some effective liberal and
progressive outcomes for American society in general.

Problematics of Cruse’s Problack Nationalism

Cruse was not only clever at producing a historical narrative that elevated the
black capitalist economic activity in Harlem of Payton and other black
professionals who followed Washington’s accommodationist black leadership
methodology. He also made good use of his narrative to illegitimize the
civil rights activist sector of the black bourgeoisie in the eyes of his African
American readers. At one point in his narrative, Cruse was furious at civil-rights
oriented black scholars, noting that in their historical writings, “Even writers
such as John Hope Franklin and E.Franklin Frazier fail to mention either Payton,
his realty company or even the men around him…. This omission of the role of
[black economic] nationalism leaves much of the analysis common to Negro
historiography open to question.”24
Indeed, for Cruse, neglect by leading African American intellectuals of the
economic development successes among the accommodationist-oriented
leadership sector in the early Harlem period was unforgivable, near traitorous,
behavior. Johnson’s writings on the early period of Harlem’s development placed
him on Cruse’s traitors list, for example. As executive director of the NAACP
during the 1920s, Johnson was a high-ranking member of the civil rights activist
sector of the black bourgeoisie, so what he said about accommodationist-oriented
leadership figures like Payton carried some weight. Johnson was a fair-minded
person and did not hesitate to offer praise of Payton when he thought it
warranted. “The matter of better and still better housing for colored people in
New York became the dominating idea of [Payton’s] life,” observed Johnson,
“and he worked on it as long as he lived. When Negro New Yorkers evaluate
their benefactors in their own race, they must find that not many have done more
than Phil Payton; for much of what has made Harlem the intellectual and artistic
capital of the Negro world is a good part due to [him].”25
Yet Johnson also recognized some intrinsic flaws in Payton’s
accommodationist-oriented vantage point as a contributor to early Harlem’s
modernization development. It was Johnson’s critical observations on Payton that
annoyed Cruse, especially since Johnson’s criticism related to the eventual
bankruptcy of Payton’s Afro-American Realty Company by World War I. As
Johnson understood Payton’s business demise, it was not just a matter of the
operational breakdown of a single black capitalist’s enterprise. Rather, for
Johnson it was the systemic issues that mattered: the Afro-American Realty
Company’s demise had generic linkages to the pariah and oppressed status of
blacks and therefore to the overall white supremacist edifice in American society
that determined the stigmatizing of blacks as pariahs. As Johnson astutely put it,
“It is idle to expect the Negro in Harlem or anywhere else to build business in
66 • MARTIN KILSON

general upon a strictly racial foundation or to develop it to any considerable

proportions strictly within the limits of the patronage, credit, and financial
resources of the [Negro] race.”26 In other words, Johnson was saying that full-
fledged American citizenship rights were required for all African Americans so
that those who were entrepreneurially inclined, like Payton, could have access to
the full range of American banking and investment resources, just as white
entrepreneurs of Irish American and WASP backgrounds did. Johnson
understood correctly that it was ultimately when such full-range access to
American banking and investment resources was available that a genuinely
viable black American capitalist capacity would be achievable.
What especially perturbed Cruse about Johnson’s linkage of the Afro-
American Realty Company’s investment glass-ceiling experience in 1915 to the
racial-caste marginalization and stigmatization of black people in American
society was the reinforcement this view gave the integrationist outlook among
the civil rights activist sector of the African American professional class. What
Johnson’s comment on the bankruptcy of Payton’s company implied was that
only through the attainment of full-fledged citizenship rights for all African
Americans—a goal that could be attainable only through support of some
elements among white Americans—could capitalist elements among African
Americans become truly viable. Accordingly, in replying to Johnson’s
commentary on the demise of Payton’s company, Cruse put forth his most
strident problack nationalist thinking: “This [Johnson’s commentary] was, of
course, an old NAACP ‘integration’ type of argument, and became the
interracial rationalization for evading the issue of [black] nationalism and its
economic imperatives for the Negro community. The logic of [Johnson’s]
argument has been retarding and detrimental to the Negroes’ ghetto welfare.”27
Indeed, Cruse went on to present a full rejection of Johnson’s explanation of
the investment glass ceiling on the viable modernization development of African
American communities during the early decades of the twentieth century. Cruse
observed that the plight of the Afro-American Realty Company was not related
to the multifaceted oppressive impact of American racist practices on African
Americans in general, but that it was a matter of leadership attitudes among the
civil rights activist sector of African American leaders, their obsession with
“interracialism.” For Cruse, the only solution was for the main body of African
American leadership groups to defer to Washington’s accommodationist
leadership methodology, and especially to forgo civil rights activism.
This naked and bald Bookerite accommodationist doctrine was something
Cruse was serious about. Labeling Johnson, DuBois, Trotter, and their civil
rights activist allies as mouthpieces for “an old NAACP ‘integration’ type
argument,” Cruse observed, “The real reason Negro businessmen have not been
able to gain ‘patronage [and] credit’ outside the ‘financial resources of the
[Negro] race’ is because they failed precisely to ‘build business upon a strictly
racial foundation.’ In other words, Negroes of Harlem have never achieved
economic control inside Harlem or inside any other major black community.”28
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 67

Here, more assertively than any other place in The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual, Cruse presents a deep preference for the black nationalism
developmental approach. But in this regard it must be noted that Cruse also
exhibits a lot of conceptual confusion, because early in his discussion of his
black nationalism developmental perspective he uses as an analogy his view of
the modernization-developmental experience of white ethnic groups like Irish
Americans, Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, and the like. Earlier in this
chapter, when I evaluated Cruse’s use of an analogy with the experience of
white ethnic groups, I pointed out that Cruse was impressed by what he believed
was the ethnocentric specialness of white ethnic groups’ use of their cultural
attributes—their “separateness” was Cruse’s term. As Cruse put it: “Every other
ethnic group in America, a ‘nation of nations,’ has accepted the fact of its
separateness and used it to its own advantage.”29
This formulation rings sympathetically in Cruse’s or any other black
nationalist intellectual’s ears, but it just happens not to be historically valid. The
historical facts are that all of the non-WASP white ethnic groups (the Irish, Jews,
Italians, Poles, et al.) evolved out of the late nineteenth century and through the
twentieth century along the path of viable modernization development—that is,
viable social mobility, occupational mobility, income/wealth mobility—not as
separatistic ethnic enclaves. Quite the contrary, they evolved along the path of
viable modernization development only through multifaceted linkages and
alliances with the dominant white WASP group. And although the Irish, Italians,
Poles, and others were ethnically denigrated and despised by the WASPS, white
ethnic groups were nevertheless able to fashion interethnic interactions with the
dominant WASP group because they did not have to suffer the vicious kind of
oppressive ethnic marginalization and ethnic stigmatization on the institutional
scale and to the historical depth that African American citizens had to endure
and experience in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society.
In short, Cruse’s core thinking about the black nationalist or cultural-separatist
modernization developmental model for African Americans is based upon a
sophomoric and poor understanding of American social history. For Cruse’s
information and that of other black nationalist-prone intellectuals, WASPS were
the group that controlled America’s banks, finances, institutions of higher
education, marketing mechanisms, powerful social networks, powerful status
patterns, and so on throughout the nineteenth century and into much of the
twentieth century, while at the same time the same WASPS even despised and
denigrated white ethnics like Jews (“kikes”), Poles (“bohunks”), the Irish
(“micks”), Italians (“wops” or “dagos”), and others.
Although the massive historical literature on the modernization development of
white ethnic groups shows that the Irish, Poles, Italians, and others tinkered with
ethnic-separatist mechanisms through which to attempt viable modernization
development—mechanisms equivalent to what African American intellectuals
like Cruse have in mind when talking about black-nationalist mechanisms—none
of these white ethnic-separatist mechanisms in regard to business and industry
68 • MARTIN KILSON

were capable of producing viable modernization development for even 10 percent

of their population. The historical facts show that all of the white ethnic groups’
viable modernization development required close linkages with WASP-owned
factories, commercial firms, banks, technical and science institutions, many of
the WASP-organized colleges (even though the Catholic church started colleges
in the 1890s onward that especially aided Irish Americans), professional
organizations, and even WASP-organized political parties. Of course, white
ethnic groups’ close linkages with WASP-owned institutions did not preclude
their own efforts at fashioning Irish-run, Italian-run, or Jewish-run mechanisms
to further their viable modernization development, because in a pluralistic
American capitalist democracy it was possible for both WASP-organized and
white-ethnic-group-organized modernization development mechanisms and
institutions to coexist. But be that as it may, the main historical point to note
here is that Cruse’s view of the white-ethnic groups’ modernization development
process as having been an ethnic-separatist one—without basic linkages with the
WASP-dominant group—is simply wrong, and thus is an erroneous analogy to
support his belief in a black nationalist developmental model for the evolving
twentieth-century African American society.
Thus, whether Cruse’s deep cathartic commitment toward the black
nationalism paradigm allows him to recognize it or not, the evolving twentieth-
century African American social system was no more capable of an ethnocentric/
separatist mode of viable modernization development than white ethnic groups
were. Indeed, it’s almost weird that Harold Cruse could allow his cathartic black
nationalist commitment to prevent him from recognizing that the American white
supremacist oppression and stigmatization of African Americans had a systemic-
crippling impact on African American citizens’ ability to fashion viable black-
run modernization developmental mechanisms. It was, after all, the explicit
purpose of white racist processes to prevent viable modernization capability
among twentieth-century African Americans.
This, of course, is precisely what Johnson articulated in regard to the
bankruptcy experience of Philip Payton’s Afro-American Realty Company
during World War I. Throughout both the early and later years of the twentieth
century, it was precisely the white supremacist oppressive edifice vis-à-vis black
Americans that had to be challenged and vanquished before the entrepreneurial
talents of the great Payton and other early black entrepreneurs could begin to
gain adequate access to national-level American banking and investment
resources. It took until the last two decades of the twentieth century, under mass
pressure from the black peoples’ civil rights movement, before this could occur.
But this would not have taken place had Cruse’s preference for Washington’s
accommodationist leadership paradigm prevailed among the civil rights activist
sector of the African American professional class from the 1920s onward.
Now, some thirty-odd years after the publication of Cruse’s The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual, I still find it strange just how badly his analysis misconstrued
the importance of the tenaciously oppressive impact of American racism on
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 69

African Americans’ quest for viable modernization development. Furthermore,

in a curious way this aspect of Cruse’s discourse was a kind of prelude to the
discourse of the first-generation cohort of “true-believer” conservative black
intellectuals who emerged in the mid-1970s onward, such as Thomas Sowell,
Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury, Robert Woodson, Anne Wortham, and others. The
“true-believer” conservative black intellectuals, sharing like Cruse a preference
for the accommodationist leadership methodology fashioned a century ago by
Washington, also misconstrue and discount the tenaciously oppressive impact
of American racism on African Americans’ quest for viable modernization
development in American society.30
Of course, in terms of his ideological self-image, Cruse did not view himself
as a “true believer” conservative African American intellectual when he was
writing The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual back in the 1960s. It would thus be
fascinating indeed to have Cruse explain the anomalous situation whereby
important elements in his analysis ideologically and analytically correspond with
key aspects of conservative discourse among today’s conservative black
intellectuals.

A Concluding Note
Monumental works on core historical issues often themselves have a mixed
history, so to speak, in that they can be gauged over time by either their actual
argumentative content or by their symbolic ideological emissions. From this
vantage point, Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual can be viewed as an
important monumental work. The symbolic ideological emissions associated
with Cruse’s work have been an especially important feature of the book, a
situation related to the particular era in which it appeared and therefore to the
contemporary needs readers brought to it—a matter of “the eyes of the beholder
(reader),” as it were.
I have suggested in this chapter that Cruse’s book was one of those
monumental works whose symbolic ideological emissions overshadowed its
actual historical/argumentative content. The “beholders’ eyes” I refer to were
those of the activist black consciousness sector of African Americans during the
middle 1960s and onward, a core component of which was located among an
exploding population of black students on white campuses and on the older
Negro college campuses. Elements among this black-consciousness sector of
African Americans had experienced a certain dissatisfaction with the mainstream
civil rights activist strand among black leadership (that associated with the
NAACP, the National Urban League, the Congress Of Racial Equality, the
Southern Christian Leadership Council, the National Council of Negro Women,
etc.), and this produced in turn a leadership vacuum in African Americans’
national leadership dynamics.
A variety of black nationalist-type organizations, such as the Nation of Islam,
had appeared by the early 1960s in an attempt to fill this vacuum, as did riotous
70 • MARTIN KILSON

upheavals among working-class African Americans in numerous urban areas,

both north and south. Thus, one way to understand what I call the symbolic-
ideological-emissions impact of Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is to
view it in this context. Cruse produced a work relating to a perceived African
American leadership vacuum, and there were thousands upon thousands of
“beholders’ eyes” awaiting its message. And, above all, its ideological and
political message—conveyed in those symbolic-ideological emissions—was
skillfully rendered.
The unfortunate part, however, is that The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual’s
symbolic-ideological emissions message was wrong. It was, indeed, rather
bizarre of Cruse to advise African Americans in the late 1960s that the historical
civil rights activist sector of the national black leadership from the emancipation
era into the twentieth century (from Frederick Douglass, W.E.B.DuBois, Ida
Wells-Barnett, James Weldon Johnson, to A.Philip Randolph, J.Kunkle Jones,
Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fanny Lou Hammer, et al.)
was an error, and that, instead, African Americans from the late nineteenth
century onward to the 1960s would have been better off had Booker
T.Washington’s accommodationist conservative sector of the African-American
professional class dominated national leadership. In one example of Cruse’s
most strident formulations of his accommodationist leadership version of the
black nationalist-type outlook on twentieth-century African American
development, we read, “Failing this [the civil-rights activist leadership sector’s
refusal to bow to Washington’s accommodationist doctrine] the black
bourgeoisie has been condemned to remain forever marginal in relation to its
own innate potential within American capitalism. It has also remained politically
subservient, intellectually unfulfilled and provincial. Thus, the black bourgeoisie
was unprepared and unconditioned to play any leading sponsorship role in the
Harlem Renaissance; this class was and still is culturally imitative and
unimaginative.”31
Here Cruse lets his ideological antipathy to the civil-rights activist strand of
the evolving twentieth-century black elite run amok. His antipathy gets in the
way of good thinking and fair-minded historiography. I’ve shown above that the
accommodationist oriented sector of the emergent black elite in the early
twentieth-century could not have effected a black-separatist political economy
mode of viable modernization development for African Americans anymore than
the elite of white ethnic groups were able to do in the same period. Thus, James
Weldon Johnson’s view that the American white supremacist edifice had to be
challenged and vanquished as a precondition for viable access by black
entrepreneurs to mainstream banks and investment capital was correct.
Accordingly, Cruse’s comment that Philip Payton’s Afro-American Realty
Company—as a prototype model of a black nationalist development process—
would have prevented the evolving twentieth-century black elite from being
“condemned to remain forever marginal…to…American capitalism” is a lot of
nonsense. Until the oppressive and viciously pariah-creating patterns of
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 71

American racism were actively and legally challenged and uprooted, as Johnson
proposed, Payton’s Afro-American Realty Company and other black
entrepreneurial enterprises would forever suffer inequalities before the door of
American banks and investment houses.
It is bizarre for Cruse to suggest that the political weakness of African
Americans and their leadership during the twentieth century was also due to the
rejection of Washington’s accommodationist approach by the civil-rights activist
sector of the black elite. In Cruse’s words, this rejection of Washington’s
accommodationist approach doomed the black elite to remain “politically
subservient.” The actual historical facts are just the opposite of what
Cruse’s comment suggests. The facts are that the African American subsystem in
American society remained politically subservient because of the vicious and
oppressive functioning of America’s white supremacist edifice. Such a white
supremacist edifice was authoritarian in its interface with black people, was
juridically destructive of black people’s civil rights, and it employed police
violence and vigilante violence to violate most African Americans’ human
rights. Nothing in Washington’s crude patron-client accommodationist
leadership methodology had a chance in hell at altering America’s white
supremacist oppressive interface with black people from the 1890s throughout 70
percent of the twentieth century, and Cruse should have known this.
Note, finally, that Cruse concludes the above observations by cribbing E.
Franklin Frazier’s arguments, put forth in Black Bourgeoisie (1956). In Cruse’s
version of Frazier’s arguments, the civil rights activist sector of the black elite
played no role in the rise of the new negro movement nor its Harlem Renaissance
phase from the World War I era into the 1920s and onward. For some of us
among African American intellectuals who are near Cruse’s age cohort, however,
I dare say we know somewhat more than Cruse does of the history of the
contributions to the new negro movement by civil rights activist elements in the
black bourgeoisie. For example, the bourgeois black sociologist Charles
Spurgeon Johnson founded and ran the National Urban League’s brilliant journal
Opportunity: Journal Negro Life during the 1920s, fashioning it into a main
intellectual rallying organ of the Harlem Renaissance. Similarly, the equally
bourgeois W.E.B.DuBois utilized the NAACP’s organ the Crisis, to further the
artistic and political ambitions of the new negro movement.
Furthermore, Cruse tells us that the black bourgeoisie’s twentieth-century
sojourn left the African American professional class “intellectually unfulfilled
and provincial” as well as “culturally imitative and unimaginative.” Here again
Cruse is piggybacking Frazier’s arguments in Black Bourgeoisie. Of course, this
is essentially a charge of intellectual charlatanism against the evolving twentieth-
century African American professional class or elite, and no doubt there has been
some intellectual charlatanism in its ranks, though no more I dare say than in the
bourgeois or elite ranks of white ethnic groups like the Irish Americans, Jewish
Americans, Italian Americans, and WASPS.
72 • MARTIN KILSON

It should be mentioned, however, that Cruse’s charge of intellectual

charlatanism against the civil rights activist sector of the black elite also plays an
important role in regard to core argumentative features of The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual. Cruse often combined the charlatanism charge with his
interracialism critique of the civil-rights activist sector of the black elite when—
from the mid-way point in his book to the conclusion—he presents polemically
skewed portraits of leftist or civil rights activist African American intellectuals.
Among the intellectuals Cruse subjected to his crude polemical criticism were
Paule Marshall, Julian Mayfield, Lorraine Hansberry, John Killens, Ruby Dee,
Ossie Davis, Claude McKay, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright.
Be that as it may, in the end it is still reasonable to say that Cruse’s The Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual—published in 1967—warrants designation as a
monumental work. It is monumental in the scale and range of its attempt to
gauge the twentieth-century metamorphosis of the African American professional
class or elite from a black nationalist perspective. It gained a massive readership,
and had a massive appeal.
Yet while it is monumental in the foregoing sense, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual does not, I think, warrant the designation classic, as do, for example,
other works by African American intellectuals such as Carter G. Woodson’s The
Miseducation of the American Negro (1925), W.E.B.DuBois’s Black
Reconstruction (1935), Horace Mann Bond’s Negro Education in Alabama
(1939), Allison Davis’s Deep South (1940), Charles S.Johnson’s Growing Up in
the Black Belt (1940), E.Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United
States (1939), and St. Clair Drake and Horace B.Cayton’s Black Metropolis
(1945), among many other works by black intellectuals that might warrant such a
designation.
Why do I withhold the designation classic from Cruse’s work? Mainly
because any rigorous appraisal of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual—like that
which I have attempted in this chapter—reveals that its author’s analytical
sensibilities were on the shallow side of what strikes me as necessary authorial
traits for the production of a work warranting designation as a classic work.
Those authorial traits involve an analytical mind-set that possesses at least three
crucial attributes—namely, a mind-set that’s sophisticatedly nuanced,
intellectually disciplined, and ideologically tutored or disciplined. The absence of
these crucial authorial traits on Cruse’s part have informed my critical dissection
of his work.

Notes

1. See John Higham, Strangers In The Land (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1955).
2. See, for example, David Roedigger, Wages Of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1992)
and Noel Ignatieff, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
 ANATOMY OF BLACK INTELLECTUALLS AND NATIONALISM • 73

3. See Ralph J.Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1973), chapters 13–18.
4. Harold W.Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow,
1967), 363.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 363–64.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 169.
10. Ibid., 117.
11. Ibid., 147.
12. Ibid., 372–73.
13. Ibid., 117–18.
14. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in
Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998), 262ff.
15. Cruse, Crisis, 45.
16. James, Holding Aloft, 284.
17. Cruse, Crisis, 46–47.
18. Ibid., 19.
19. Ibid., 20; emphasis in the original.
20. Ibid., 21.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1930), 149.
26. Ibid., 283.
27. Cruse, Crisis, 25.
28. Ibid., 25–26.
29. Ibid., 364.
30. I treat the generic ideological outlook of conservative black intellectuals in Martin
Kilson, Paths To Black Conservatism: Critical Studies On Black Intellectuals
(Manuscript).
31. Cruse, Crisis, 26.
74
 3
Negro Exceptionalism
The Antinomies of Harold Cruse

NIKHIL PAL SINGH

One of the biggest differences between black experiences in the U.S.

and black experiences in Europe and elsewhere is that there hasn’t
been a major discourse on de-colonization in the U.S. Who would we
cite in America on these questions?
—bell hooks, “A Dialogue with bell hooks”

The Negro is the American Problem of underdevelopment.

—Harold Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism
and the Afro-American”

In a critical (though not unfavorable) review published in the Black Scholar in

1969, Robert Chrisman describes Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual (1967) as “five hundred pages on a razor’s edge of ambivalent
fury.”1 This eloquent characterization captures something essential about Cruse’s
great book—namely, that it is difficult to read it without being alienated by
Cruse’s relentless pursuit of the correct cultural and political line, in which
virtually no black public figure he discusses emerges unscathed. More than this,
a careful reading of Cruse’s work leaves one reeling from its apparent
contradictions: acute Marxist sensibilities coupled with relentless anticommunist
invective, abiding admiration for the ethnocultural politics of Jewish American
intellectuals combined with borderline anti-Semitism, and a ruthless
puncturing of the American pretensions to universality along with the repeated
insistence on the analytical protocols of American exceptionalism.
If this weren’t enough, Cruse’s grandiose portrayal of himself as the one black
intellectual finally bringing theoretical clarity to the cultural politics of race,
ethnicity, and nationality in America makes it almost impossible to read The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual without being disappointed by his ultimate and
often bitter default on his own ambitious promise. This might explain the fact
that while Cruse might be one of the most historically significant precursors to
the contemporary intersections of black studies, cultural studies, and
multicultural and colonial discourse analysis, his work is rarely incorporated
within the multiple genealogies and mappings of U.S. multiculturalism now
76 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

fashioned on a regular basis.2 Contemporary treatments of Cruse tend to define

his importance in narrowly political, historical and biographical terms. This
generally occurs in the specific context of African American intellectual history,
and in essays addressing the shortcomings (or the “crisis”) of modern, black
intellectual life.3 These works tend to use Cruse as a framing device and point of
departure, frequently rehearsing his tired—but powerful—counterposition of a
black nationalist politics of culture against a Left/liberal politics of “racial
integration.” Others reference Cruse in the context of their own efforts to correct
his skewed—but powerful—portraits of particular black intellectuals.4 At this
point, perhaps the most that can be said of Cruse’s intellectual legacy is that even
thirty years later his work brings forth sectarian impulses, eliciting the desire to
settle accounts and scores, mostly with Cruse himself.
Among contemporary critics, Hortense Spillers has recently offered what she
describes as a “systematic response” to The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.5
Spillers’s lengthy and complex essay situates Cruse in the context of African
American studies as a discourse and knowledge project, in an effort “to establish
a total perspective against which the work of the [African American] intellectual
unfolds.”6 Foremost, Spillers argues, the post-1960s period has witnessed the
definitive fracturing of “the black community,” as the stable site and “real world
object” of the black intellectual’s address. Spillers suggests that what is now a
largely mainstream, academically ensconced world of black intellectual
production continues to “pimp” the fiction of a homologous, coherent, black
“life-world” as its corresponding object, even as the actual situation of black
intellectual work—in terms of its institutional locations, disciplinary logics, and
discursive procedures—remains at best desultory and undertheorized, and at
worst, mystified and market-driven.7 What most angers Spillers is what she
views as the “morning news” approach to ideas, the “commercialization” of
African American intellectual discourse, and the “uptown” pursuits of certain
notable—though (mostly) nameless—black intellectuals.8 While Spillers’s essay
is actually less a “systematic response” to Cruse than an occasion for offering
her own prescription for “black creative intellectuals” today, she nonetheless
finds a great deal to admire in Cruse’s own decidedly systematic and
“conceptual” elaboration of the historical situation of the black intellectual in his
own time.9 Thus, despite what she views as Cruse’s (and our own) “dated” and
misguided allegiance to an organic, romantic, performative (and indeed
masculinist) model of the intellectual, for Spillers, Cruse’s contributions to
“mapping the terrain” of black intellectual practice remain unmatched, and, as yet,
unanswered in our own time.10
Above all, Spillers argues that the black intellectual should no longer be
conceived as a ‘race’ leader or a prophet (let alone as an entrepreneur), but rather
as someone who is located within a specific cognitive or discursive framework
with its own attendant responsibilities. What differentiates the black intellectual
qua culture worker from Cruse’s “Negro intellectual” is that she must now
negotiate the discursivities of what is a primarily academic location. This
 NEGRO EXCEPTIONALISM • 77

transition, of course, occurred in the very civil rights movement that Cruse so
disparaged, and from which he paradoxically benefited (since ensconced at the
University of Michigan), something about which he has remained dimly aware to
this day. What irks Spillers is that the contemporary black intellectual is so
unaware, so willfully oblivious of “where he/she is,” today.11 Her own
prescription notwithstanding, upon reading her essay we still do not have a
sufficient understanding of “where Cruse was,” the discursive and cognitive
framework in which his work unfolded and the historical significance of his
overall intellectual trajectory. Thus, while I cannot aspire to the broad political
resonance of Spillers’s response to Cruse, in the short essay that follows I will
provisionally “read” Cruse’s text in the manner she recommends, namely, as a
discursive production and “thought-object,” one with its own genealogy, or
determinate conditions, omissions and inconsistencies.12
In the years leading up to the completion of The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual, what most riveted Cruse was the question of decolonization and
anticolonial nationalism, making him at least one possible answer to bell hooks’s
query about the discursive formation of African American studies in the current
conjuncture.13 Indeed, as I will argue below, of the many contradictions and
ambivalent impulses that constitute The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual perhaps
the most significant is its ambiguous and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to
translate what Cruse had identified as the theory and practice of decolonization
into a “Negro-American” idiom. This undoubtedly heterodox framing of Cruse’s
book only makes sense if we read The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, most
immediately, in the context of Cruse’s work from the 1960s; in other words, if
we read it, along with the collection of essays he published under the title,
Rebellion or Revolution? (l968). Of the latter, the first essays were actually
written in the late 1940s, when Cruse was still a member of the Communist Party
(CPUSA), while the last essays were written after The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual was finished in early 1967. At the center of the anthology, and most
important, are a series of essays written in a flurry of political activity in the
early 1960s. In these essays Cruse outlines, in some detail, his conception of the
relationship between Marxism and black nationalism and begins to develop what
would later be termed “the colonial analogy” as a means of understanding the
emergent black political rebellion of the 1960s.
Cruse’s first articulation of these views occurs in one of his most important
essays from the 1960s, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,”
first published in Studies on the Left in 1962. It is in this essay that Cruse
develops a position that would become very popular in New Left circles by the
late 1960s, defining decolonization as the fulcrum of transformative politics in
the post-World War II era. “The revolutionary initiative has passed to the
colonial world and in the United States is passing to the Negro,” Cruse writes,
“while Western Marxists theorize, temporize and debate.”14 Extrapolating from
the experience of the Cuban Revolution, Cruse makes the analogy explicit,
arguing that Negroes have been able to translate the efficacy and meaning of
78 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

anticolonial struggles in a way that “Western Marxists” have failed to do.

Indeed, Cruse deepens the comparison, writing that the only significant
difference between Negro nationalists and anticolonial nationalists is that
“people in colonies can succeed and American Negro nationalists cannot,” since
the latter must “set themselves against the dominance of whites and still manage
to live in the same country.”15 Nevertheless, in the context created by
decolonization, the fact of enduring what amounted to a “semi-dependent status”
made the “Negro” the “only potentially revolutionary force in the United States.”
It is thus, Cruse concludes—in a prophetic and self-conscious recapitulation of
the vanguardism of the Old Left—the “American Negro” who will generate the
“philosophies of social change,” and forms of revolutionary action most
appropriate to this era.16
That Cruse’s public emergence as a 1960s intellectual was in one of the
founding periodicals of the New Left should give further impetus to an
exploration of his importance to the transformations in leftist discourse, theory,
and practice, since the 1960s, that his more celebrated work seems to have
foreclosed. In fact, rather than accepting such foreclosure, it might be worth
developing an analysis of the less than explicit relationship between The Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual and Rebellion or Revolution? In one of the last essays in
the latter volume, for example, first published in Les Temps Modernes—and
written after The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was finished—Cruse offers a
surprisingly personal account of the genesis of his views on domestic colonialism.
In what is surely an apocryphal story, cleverly crafted with his French audience
in mind, Cruse describes his encounter with two Arab women in Oran, North
Africa, during his tour of duty as an American soldier in World War II. The women
asked the young black serviceman if he too was Arab. When he answered that no,
he was an American, they insisted that he was wrong, that he simply did not yet
know who he was, because his father had been stolen from Africa so many years
ago. This “meeting” left an enormous impression on Cruse who recalls that it
was only an “ingrained provincialism” that had made him “feel so impossibly
remote from these people.”17 In addition, his realization that even the supposedly
“racially” tolerant French were outraged and afraid when they saw “American
Negroes” associating with Arabs, reinforced his sense that he too shared in
something of a wider, colonial condition. The fundamental lesson of “war and
race” that Cruse claims to have learned in North Africa, was that the Negro in
America represents a unique type of colonized man never before seen anywhere
else in the world…. He is no more (or less) an integral part of American
civilization than were the Arabs in Algeria before the uprising, the salient
difference being that the Negro is colonized within the geographic confines of
the United States…. [American Negroes] exist with one foot in and one foot out
of the Metropolitan country even when they imagine themselves to be well
ensconced within it. In 1942 when I landed in Oran, I was far from thinking such
thoughts. But my conversation with those two Arab women started a unique
 NEGRO EXCEPTIONALISM • 79

intellectual process which, with experiences added, has led me to these

conclusions about the nature of rebellion.18
Although a rich and adversarial kind of cosmopolitanism is foregrounded in this
story, what is most maddening and difficult about Cruse is that his “conclusions
about the nature of rebellion” were ultimately framed as a struggle that needed to
be waged against the hegemony of the “metropolitan” Left. Most of all, for
Cruse, the fact that black people were “colonized within the geographic confines
of the U.S.” required the development of a new theory and practice of political
struggle, one specifically tailored to American conditions, and wrested from the
political influence of communists and other “orthodox” Marxists. What was
most critical in this conjuncture was for American “Negroes” to recognize that
only they could create the kind of revolutionary vision that was required. Such a
struggle would necessarily have to unfold both within and against the grain of
America’s specific form of capitalist democracy, interracial history, and
multiculture. “Historically excluded from the social melting-pot,” Cruse writes
(in a characteristically vague and provocative formulation), “the Negro
subsociety in America…has become the spawning ground for a form of rebellion
that has no historical precedent in philosophical content.”19
The ambitious plan of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was precisely to
provide the theoretical “content” for this unprecedented revolution. According to
Cruse, this meant going beyond what had heretofore been thought within the
Marxist-revolutionary and liberal-democratic intellectual traditions. Less
obviously, but perhaps more important, it required a thoroughgoing
reformulation of a black nationalist idiom shorn of all fantasies of territorial
separation. Most of all, Cruse was advocating the development of a politics of
black nationality in the United States, something that he believed demanded
serious and original intellectual labor if it were to be properly conceptualized and
activated. In this sense, Spillers doesn’t actually give Cruse enough credit for
recognizing the need for a rigorous reconstruction of the African American
historical experience as a “conceptual object.”20 As Cruse was fond of reminding
his readers, “the crisis in black and white is also a crisis in social theory.”21
Although black nationalism might not be able to succeed according to the terms
established by anticolonial struggles, it could still be effectively developed and
deployed as a political language and vehicle of struggle. What was required
above all else was a willingness not to capitulate to what he called the
“pragmatic practicalities” of the American condition.
The most explicit goal of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual then was to supply
the historical lessons crucial to the conjunctural development of black nationalist
politics by analyzing the historic problem of black national subjectivity in the
context of dominant American political traditions and transformations in the
mode of cultural (re)production in the contemporary United States. Rather than
understanding the occasion of Cruse’s 1960s masterpiece as distinct from
contemporary intellectual practice—pace Spillers—his understanding of the
black intellectual as a public, culture worker is perhaps more resonant than ever.
80 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

Cruse conceived The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, in other words, precisly as
a public, theoretical intervention that sought to shape the public, institutional
practices of other black culture workers. In fact, what is most familiar about the
book to the contemporary (postmodern) reader is its insistence upon cultural
politics as the decisive instance of the political in general. In this sense, the
greatest innovation of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual may also be its
greatest shortcoming—namely, Cruse’s profoundly resonant, yet imprecise and
undifferentiated, uses of the word culture. This term carries multiple burdens in
this work, as the site for (1) articulating cohesive ideologies of group belonging
(“cultural identity”); (2) intervening in the discriminatory organization and
administration of the U.S. economy (“cultural apparatus”); and (3) rethinking
leftist theories of social transformation (“cultural revolution”).22
Of these three uses, only the first clearly coincides with what Spillers critiques
as a performative/representative model of the intellectual’s practice as it relates
to the fictive object, “the black community.” The additional, perhaps residual,
senses of culture that I have culled from Cruse’s work, by contrast, actually
correspond to a more complex sense of culture as a specific ensemble of
productive relations within a larger social formation. Thus, for example, “the
cultural apparatus” (an idea Cruse takes from C.Wright Mills) is understood as a
specific set of institutions or as an industry: “radio, television, film industries,
advertising combines, electronic recording and computer industries, highly
developed telecommunications networks, and so forth.”23 This U.S. culture
industry is important for structural reasons, or precisely because it has become a
uniquely valorized site and expanding occupational location within the overall
political economy of late imperial America. As Cruse writes, “Mass cultural
communications is a basic industry, as basic as oil, steel, and transportation….
Developing along with it, supporting it and subservient to it, is an organized
network of functions that are creative, administrative, propagandistic, educational,
recreational, political, artistic, economic and cultural…. Only the blind cannot
see that whoever controls the cultural apparatus—whatever class, power group
faction or political combine—also controls the destiny of the United States and
everything in it.”24
Thus, the concept of the “cultural revoltution”—an idea Cruse first broaches
while considering the “connection between the Negro rebellion and the African
revolution”—is understood in turn as the highest stage of revolutionary thought
and action, mingling the senses of culture as a site of national and subnational
identity formation, and culture as an industrial product and nodal economic
site.25
The revolutionary, democratic transformation of “the cultural apparatus”
would provide the key to the overall transformation of the U.S. social formation,
and to sustaining a project of black autonomy without territorial separation. The
reasons for this are structural and (once again) in a broad sense cultural, since for
Cruse, the real American dilemma is not the racial drama of segregation and
 NEGRO EXCEPTIONALISM • 81

integration, but the persistent denial of black cultural presence and consequent
degeneration of the “national culture.” As Cruse summarizes,

The Afro-American must understand that he is Africa’s cultural

contribution to “the general stream of human culture” as defined by the
Paris Society of African Culture. He must understand that his social
revolution is nothing if it is not cultural in content…. It is only the cultural
needs of the Negro that coincide with or are complementary to the main
humanistic need that goes unfulfilled in America despite this country’s
economic and administrative achievements—the need for a thriving,
creative, humanistically progressive national culture…. The entire
economic and administrative apparatus of cultural communication in
America is geared to, dependent upon, and motivated by racial exclusion
and the cultural negation of the Negro, and, having no democractic or
humanistic role to play in society, becomes of necessity more and more
commercialized and more and more unable to deal with the living truths of
American social reality…. It is the same thing as asking to join the dead
and the dying at the gates of the graveyard of dead civilizations for any
Negro to seek integration in American culture as it now stands. This is
most certainly not our historical role in world culture.26

Once again, several versions of the complex word culture are (as Raymond
Williams might say), solvent within this passage: culture as “the best that has
been thought and said,” culture as the province of new forms of mass
communication and economic accumulation, culture as the formation of a people
or nation, and culture as an arena of democratic “expression.” All these
meanings, however, devolve back upon a single idea: black intellectuals are now
strategically situated as the vanguard of a new class—that of culture workers—
and are thus the group with “the most potential” for making a cultural (which is
to say social, economic, and political) revolution in the United States.27
The reason for this extended discussion of Cruse’s theory of culture is because
the central preoccupation, and hence major failing, of The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual is its attempt to develop a fully integrated model of cultural analysis,
from his earlier, sketchy formulations. Cruse, in other words, is less interested in
exhorting black intellectuals to occupy “the romantic ground of organicity” vis a
vis “the black community” than in theorizing the efficacy of cultural work in
general, and specifically the black intellectual’s (and it’s true that for Cruse this
is a man’s) insertion into the new institutions of culture making.28 While Cruse
ultimately conflates, rather than theorizes, the relationship between cultural
production as a material activity and cultural identity (as its presumed result),
this derives less from a faulty conceptualization of the position of the intellectual
than from Cruse’s (prior) political committment to a redemptive, messianic
political theory, black nationalism; for it is the latter that leads him to privilege
the forms of polemical and rhetorical address, and to consistently fall back upon
82 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

the narrower sense of cultural politics as a politics of identity and representation

at the expense of a full analysis of the general workings of the “cultural
apparatus” vis a vis the larger economy, and the specific political implications of
the black intellectual’s location within it.
Nonetheless, when considered in this light, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual might actually be at least one indigenous source (to use one of
Cruse’s favorite notions) for theorizing the historical trajectory of a cultural
studies project as it is now widely pursued in the United States today. Although
cultural studies are often understood as a British intellectual import, primarily
through the work of Williams, E.P.Thompson, Stuart Hall, and others, Cruse’s
work might allow us to consider an alternative genealogy for U.S. cultural
studies, one that emerges partly from a rigorous engagement with the cultural
politics of Marxist theory and a history of working-class struggles (as in England),
but primarily in relation to a legacy of minoritarian—and in particular, black—
contestations of hegemonic ideologies of national belonging. Indeed, The Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual offers its own (admittedly contentious) genealogy of
black cultural and intellectual life in the twentieth century precisely in an effort
to overturn what Cruse views as the official, post-World War II national
narrative of a united front, civil rights movement toward nonracial or interracial
citizenship. Moreover, the underlying unity of this work reveals a more
ambitious and profound conceptual scope as Cruse critiques and retools the
classical American political discourses of constitutionalism, individualism, and
pluralism in order to account for the specific politicocultural existence of an
“American Negro nationality within the American nation.”29
In fact, we need to read The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual against the grain of
its own myriad antipathies if we are to truly understand Cruse’s text
genealogically and unpack all of its political and intellectual densities and
allusions. This not only includes the theory of domestic colonialism discussed
earlier, but it also includes the question of Cruse’s intellectual and political
formation within the ambit of the U.S. Communist Party.30 A figure of the 1940s
by his own admission, Cruse’s concerns might be more fully understood in the
context of a series of black Marxist mediations during the late 1930s and early
’40s by figures such as Oliver Cox, W.E.B.Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph
Ellison, E.Franklin Frazier, George Padmore, and C.L.R.James, all of whom had
started to conceptualize the political formation of blacks in the United States as a
national grouping—namely, one that not only had internal class
divisions emergent within it, but that had also begun to develop an incipient (and
dual) national consciousness, or an increasing self-awareness of the fact that its
own properly national subjectivity, more than half a century after Reconstruction,
was still in question and needed to be definitively resolved.31
What I am suggesting is that despite Cruse’s insensate hostility to American
communists for “misleading the Negro” on questions of “racial” integration, and
despite his infamous charge of a “forty-year default of the Negro
intelligentsia,”32 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is very much engaged in
 NEGRO EXCEPTIONALISM • 83

working through the relationship between black nationalism and the struggle for
democracy in America as it first unfolded under the tremendous cultural
influence of Popular Front, and American, communism. When read through the
lens of Cruse’s intellectual biography and his contributions in Rebellion or
Revolution? the extent to which The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual distorts and
conceals the historical genesis of Cruse’s theoretical and political preoccupations
as they emerged from the communist tradition becomes that much more
apparent. For it is this tradition, more than any other, that gave credence and
legitimacy to the politics and languages of national self-determination, including
the potentially self-determining power of subnationalities and national minorities
within larger state and party formations.
In other words, whether or not the communists defined “the national question”
correctly, and despite the suppression of nationality groupings within the USSR,
(and the CPUSA), it is nonetheless fair to say that for many radical black
intellectuals during the 1940s the basis for weighing the relative merits of the
U.S. and Soviet systems did not revolve primarily around the question of
socialism versus capitalism, but rather around which of these supranational states
had best resolved its own national, colonial, and minority questions—which in
America meant the “Negro Question.”33 Cruse’s extensive knowledge of and
continuing indebtedness to this intellectual tradition is nowhere more clearly
indicated than in his rather cryptic, vanguardist lament in The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual that “Negro revolutionaries” never realized that “there was no one in
America who possessed the remotest chance of Americanizing Marxism but
themselves.”34 In fact, Cruse’s compound and I would suggest that
indistinguishable hatred of communists and Jews derives less from any anti-
Semitic residues than from the fact that, in his view, the former defaulted on the
promise of resolving the historic problem of black nationality under the banner
of unifying national slogans like “Communism is Twentieth-Century
Americanism “while the latter surreptitiously hijacked the party apparatus for
their own individual and “ethnic group” interests.33
Though Cruse is quite explicit about his break with communism in all of his
writings from the 1960s, it is notable that in his self-conscious bid to construct a
comprehensive theory of black politics in the context of U.S. intranational
relations The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual refuses to foreground the global
significance of anticolonial struggles that are at the conceptual center of the
essays in Rebellion or Revolution? Instead, for reasons that remain to
be determined, Cruse abandons most of his references to questions of national
liberation, favoring instead the self-enclosed language of American ethnocultural
politics and intergroup relations. In addition, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
not only actively downplays the systematic relevance of the Marxist problematic
(while actually upping the intensity of ad hominem attacks on many existing
American communists and Trotskyists), it also expunges talk of domestic
colonialism in favor of an interrogation of the ways American leftist agendas and
liberal rights discourse misled black intellectuals and prevented them from
84 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

advancing the material and political aims of blacks as an ethnic group. What I
would highlight is the decisive displacement that occurs between Cruse’s two
important works of the 1960s: a shift from a discourse of colonialism and
national liberation to a discourse of U.S.-based ethnic pluralism and black
nationalism. Indeed, Cruse’s implicit decision not to elaborate upon questions of
colonialism and decolonization in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is
particularly interesting given that it occurred at precisely the moment when the
“colonial analogy” for blacks in the United States was being widely embraced
within certain quarters of the student new left and black power movements
around 1968.
Cruse offers a justification for this shift, suggesting that the “third world”
rhetoric of national liberation embraced by Black “Powerites” obscured the
“uniquely American conditions” of the “Negro revolution.”36 In a recent essay,
African American historian Wilson Moses favors this “exceptionlist” reading of
Cruse, arguing that the popularity of anticolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon in
the wake of 1968 has tended to overshadow the more pertinent and relevant work
of “American” intellectuals like Cruse.37 Yet by pitting Cruse against Fanon,
Moses continues to obscure what may be the deeper relationship between their
two projects. After all, in the introduction to Rebellion or Revolution? (again,
penned after The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual had been published), Cruse
argues that the popularity of Fanon among “the young black generation of 1968”
was ample repudiation of those who continued to stress “the fundamentally
American outlook of the American Negro.”38 Most important, Cruse never
explicitly discounted his earlier view that any indigenous theory of black
liberation in the United States needed to recognize that “the racial crisis in
America was the internal reflection of the contemporary world-wide readjustment
of ex-colonial masters and ex-colonial subjects.”39 Indeed, rather than stressing
discontinuities between the two works, Cruse implicitly affirms The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual as establishing “the outlines of a new radical theory” called
for in the earlier essays.40
In the current conjuncture, when the metaphors of colonialization and
decolonization now once again regularly appear in the multicultural skirmishes
over how to properly conceptualize U.S. intranational differences, what are we to
make of these many twists and turns? How should we adjudicate and assess the
shifts in Cruse’s political itinerary and intellectual vocabulary?41 Ultimately, one
of the greatest difficulties of unpacking Cruse’s thought is that his
voracious autodidacticism lead him simultaneously toward highly original,
synthetic formulations and at the same time toward fairly derivative, and even ad
hoc uses of the ideas of others. In other words, what is not always clear is the
degree to which Cruse’s intellectual choices were self-conscious and
intellectually rigorous, and the degree to which they derived from his being an
(admitted) intellectual gadfly, and his predisposition to be influenced by
whomever he happened to be reading (or attacking) at the time, whether it was
C.Wright Mills, Herbert Aptheker, Albert Camus, or the members of the Society
 NEGRO EXCEPTIONALISM • 85

of African Culture.42 In another sense, the intellectual choices that Cruse made in
order to write The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual were both self-conscious and
opportunistic as he chose to selectively develop many of the central themes of
his earlier essays without explicitly disclosing any real changes in his position.
What I would suggest is that we understand the political lexicon differentiating
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual from Rebellion or Revolution? as an effect
of Cruse’s attempt to fashion the definitive theory of the black struggle in the
United States of the 1960s, and as the result of his desire to put his own
authoritative stamp upon the public discussion of “race” in the United States.
The ambivalence of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual resides here, or in the
fact that in it Cruse’s celebrated call for a black declaration of independence
within the public cultural sphere is paradoxically and deliberately rendered in a
reworking of the public languages of the American political tradition. Thus,
while I agree with Jerry Watts, who argues that Cruse’s text established “the
intellectual groundwork for the emergence of a dominant black nationalist wing
of intellectuals” during the 1960s, I disagree with his suggestion that Cruse
“underestimated the degree to which the most vehement black nationalist
intellectual was fundamentally American.”43 My own view is that Cruse’s
relationship to dominant discourses of American national belonging is more
complex and contradictory than it may first appear to be. Here, the development
of Cruse’s position has a deeper, though unacknowledged, affinity with the
intellectual itinerary of Ralph Ellison. Indeed, I would suggest that it is hardly an
accident that Ellison is one of the few black writers who actually escapes Cruse’s
ire in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, despite the former’s firm embrace of
an integrationist politics and celebrated rejection of an explicitly politicized
aesthetic. The reason is that both writers ultimately shared a black radical, plural
reading of American exceptionalism that heralded (in Cruse’s words) “the
Negro’s” exceptional status as “the only native American culture producer”
capable of addressing “the unsolved American nationality problem.”44 Perhaps a
more troubling symmetry is that both writers made their bids for and were
accorded public authority and recognition after presenting withering portraits of
black political failure, demonstrating a decided preference for intellectual
isolationism, and following the all-too familiar Cold War trajectory of the man
who knows communists, locked in the security of the anticommunist embrace.
It is thus, however, that Cruse arrives at the paradoxical position whereby he
conceives the full expression of “the black ethnic personality” as the
completion, rather than the negation, of an American nation-building enterprise.
Herein lies what may be the core antinomy of Cruse’s work (and the complex
tradition of black nationalist thinking he exemplifies): his scathing attacks upon
white intellectual paternalism, and the politics of liberal and left-wing
“integrationism,” and his calls for black cultural and economic autonomy
notwithstanding, his argument ultimately rests upon claiming an unprecedented,
black centrality within the exceptional(ist) logics of American nationality. As
Cruse writes, “In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal,
86 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

multi-group existence in a way never before known in world history. American

Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary
significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals
take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its
manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of
revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and
artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the
ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base.”45
Indeed, what makes Cruse so interesting is not simply his influential
ruminations upon the politics of black nationalism, but the way in which he
attempts to appropriate the equally longstanding discourse of American pluralism
for his own decidedly particularist ends. In fact, Cruse was precisely engaged in
an effort to advance what he would later call “the politics of black ethnicity”
against the dominant, consensus versions of American pluralism.46 Thus, while
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is relentless in describing black aspirations in
America in terms of an overarching history and exceptionalist model of U.S.
“ethnic group” struggles, in Cruse’s text, a conception of black “ethnicity” is the
solvent and not the glue of what he contemptuously refers to as “so-called
American nationality.” What Cruse views as an irreducible history of ethnic
group consciousness and conflict in America thus becomes the basis for arguing
that there is actually no such a thing as a paradigmatic national subject in the
United States. “Behind the constitutional facade,” he writes, America has
remained what it has always been, “a ‘nation of nations.’”47
In fact, Cruse explicitly counterposes his robust conception of ethnic pluralism
to what he understands to be the ruling assimilationist view of American national
belonging as something that transcends the parochial attachments of “race,”
region, religion, or country of origin. At the root of this view, for Cruse, is a kind
of “Constitutional moralism,”48 which masks the perennial failure of what he
facetiously calls “the Great American Ideal,” when it comes to thinking about
“the social power of groups, classes, in-groups and cliques.”49 In order to
reconstruct America in its proper image—as a kind of multicultural federation of
subnations—it would therefore be necessary to begin by thoroughly
reconceptualizing America’s founding documents. Thus, Cruse writes, “The
Constitution as it now stands, does not recognize the legal validity or the rights
of groups, but only of individuals. Hence, not only must the American
Constitution be brought up to date in terms of mirroring the basic group reality
of America, but it is the American Negro who must press the fight for this
amending “50
Once again, Cruse is acutely aware that any scheme for promoting black
difference has to be posed within the framework of the existing American state.
Indeed, he views his own project as one with uniquely American implications,
drawing upon theories of so-called white ethnic groups (later understood as
parasitic on black nationalism) as a usable tradition for thinking about a more
radical form of plural belonging in America. Yet, paradoxically, such a situation
 NEGRO EXCEPTIONALISM • 87

could only be imagined from the depths of black difference itself, since, as Cruse
puts it, “the melting pot has never included the Negro.”51
Of course, the major animus behind Cruse’s argument that America is a
“nation of nations” is his raging hostility toward the politics of the mainstream
civil rights movement. “When the legal redress in civil rights reaches the point of
saturation de jure,” he writes (rather prophetically), “the civil righters will then
be disarmed and naked in the spotlight of adverse power.”52 Indeed, in a
fascinating formulation, Cruse argues that “the very premise of racial integration
negates the idea of Negro ethnic identity.”53 In other words, according to Cruse,
the idea of integration inscribes the interrelated fictions of liberal individualism
and homogeneous whiteness underpinning a unitary conception of American
nationality and thus negating the possibility of an autonomous black existence,
or (sub)national (or “ethnic”) sovereignty. As Cruse notes, “Although the three
main power groups—Protestants, Catholics and Jews—neither want nor need to
become integrated with each other, the existence of a great body of homogenized
inter-assimilated white Americans is the premise for racial integration. Thus, the
Negro integrationist runs afoul of reality in pursuit of an illusion of the ‘open
society’—a false front that hides several doors to several different worlds of
hyphenated Americans.’”54
Or, as Cruse writes elsewhere, “[E]very other ethnic group in America, a
‘nation of nations/has accepted the fact of its separateness and used it to its own
advantage” except “the Negro.” This situation,” he continues, “results from a
psychology that is rooted in the negro’s symbiotic “blood ties” to the white
Anglo-Saxon….the culmination of that racial drama of love and hate between
slave and master, bound together on the purgatory of plantations.” The only
effective solution to this irresolvable dilemma for Cruse is for the (heroic, male)
intellectual to shortcircuit the drama, “to break the psychological umbilical ties
to intellectual paternalism,” and sever the symbolic and affective kinship ties
binding what might be defined as a situation of black/white intraraciality.55 This
is finally also the source of Cruse’s heady mixture of envy and antipathy toward
Jewish intellectuals, whom he accuses of being “magnanimously free with other
people’s ethnicity” even as they assiduously pursue their own group interests in
the United States and elsewhere.56 Indeed, for Cruse, the fact of “the emergence
of Israel as a world-power-in-minuscule meant that the Jewish question in
America was no longer purely a domestic minority problem growing out of the
old immigrant status tradition.”57 Jewish intellectuals who counseled
‘racial’ integration, in other words, had actually achieved precisely the kind of
(dual) nationalist solution that was persistently denied to “Negroes.”
Yet it remains unclear in the context of his own abandonment of a more
internationalist understanding of “race” politics, just what Cruse imagines as an
alternative to this state of affairs. Indeed, his own prescription, including the
effective rewriting or “up-dating” of the U.S. Constitution, still assumes the
primary recourse to be the juridical sanction of a national master narrative. At the
same time, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual upholds what has subsequently
88 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

become a very conservative theory—namely, that blacks simply need to learn to

act like other ‘ethnics’ in the defense and assertion of their individual and group
prerogatives. This makes it possible to read this work as of a piece with the
1960s “ethnic revival” that received its intellectual imprimatur from people like
Milton Gordon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and Michael Novak.
Indeed, in an important legitimating review of The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual, first published in the New York Review of Books, Christopher Lasch
portrays Cruse in precisely these terms—namely, as an American exceptionalist
and universalist of the variety that we have come to associate with this resurgent
ethnic pluralism. Lasch even praises The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual as the
one truly tough-minded, realistic piece of black theoretical writing during the
period, calling it the one that will survive when “all the manifestoes and
polemics of the sixties are forgotten.”58 Finally, in an argument that brings us
full circle, Lasch embraces Cruse’s use of the “ethnic analogy” for blacks,
arguing that it effectively subverts the misplaced class-based arguments of the
communist Left that depicted blacks en masse as a kind of supraproletariat, as
well as the “ideologically enchanting” but highly romantic uses of the “colonial
analogy” that portrayed blacks in the vanguard of the struggles of “third world”
peoples.59
In at least one sense, however, Cruse’s embrace of the ethnicity paradigm
remains unique. As Ishmael Reed has commented, it has actually been quite rare
to speak of such a thing as “black ethnicity” in the United States; black people
are rarely conceived in terms of “ethnicity” as a result of being defined and
defining themselves primarily in terms of “race.”60 Yet, this problem is
symptomatic of the fact that the keywords race and ethnicity actually have a
common purpose and do similar kinds of cultural work—namely, constructing
and regulating different kinds of differences within the nation-state. A distinctively
American neologism, the term ethnicity gained its real currency immediately
after World War II, and precisely in the context of the deracialization of specific
immigrant groups. Today, largely as a result of the work of people like Werner
Sollors, Phillips Gleason, David Hollinger and others, the generalization of
concepts like ethnicity and ethnic difference actually knits together a kind of
neopluralist discourse that tries to stake out an independent, middle-ground in the
multiculture wars. Ethnicity, in other words, has become the preferred term for
describing relative difference, or a kind of difference that ultimately doesn’t
threaten the overall integrity and coherence of properly national belonging. The
general argument proceeds as follows: American pluralism is the complementary
face of the long process of American assimilation; narrating one’s difference—
although it is frequently pre sented by multiculturalists as a form of categorical
separation from or rejection of the American “mainstream”—is in fact the
paradigmatic way of asserting and claiming an Americanness that is
“postethnic,” or always already “beyond ethnicity.”61
This position, which is at once pluralist and universalist, is actually an updated
version of consensus history in that it is intent upon upholding the universalizing
 NEGRO EXCEPTIONALISM • 89

and democratizing claims of American nationalism tout court. It is thus not

insignificant that many of these thinkers also turn to the 1940s, celebrating this
moment as the golden age of American pluralism, when difference supposedly
wasn’t so divisive. Lamenting the state of our own multicultural dissensus, for
example, Philip Gleason pleads for a recognition of the fact that during World War
II “cultural pluralism and cultural democracy became part of the standard
terminology of a broad movement to improve intergroup relations, but its goals
were social harmony and national unity, not heightened consciousness of the
differences among cultural groups in the population.”62 To this I would add that
the broad resurgence of ‘ethnicity’ arguments in the 1960s, despite the frequent
use of anti-melting pot rhetoric, was less a departure than a continuation of this
tradition as it was ultimately built from a comparison and conflation of
America’s “ethnics”—not primarily in order to reject a national narrative that
erased specific histories of ethnic suffering, but in an effort to counter the
increasing minoritarian assertiveness among blacks.63 The so-called revival of
ethnicity in the 1960s, in other words, helped to advance the notion of ethnicity
as a relativizing term against the moral and political pressure exerted by notions
of absolute “racial” difference. Defining the claims of all “ethnics” generically, it
thus helped to institute the idea that, however contentious they may be, blacks
had no special claims upon the nationstate. Indeed, from this perspective the best
hope for black people was to continue their bootstrap striving in the hope of
joining the competitive pantheon of properly American (and implicitly white)
“ethnicities.”64
Since World War II, the “ethnic” reading of U.S. history, in other words, has
been overdetermined by an effort to bracket what is deemed to be a more
divisive and explosive history of racial difference and domination. Ethnicity, in
this sense, has become a neologism for a normative whiteness that is now
provided with its own historical alibi—namely, a legacy of subordination and
strife. Thus, there is no small irony in Cruse’s uptake of this language. In his bid
to transmute the messy “racial drama of love and hate” into a story of discrete
and self-contained ethnonational groupings struggling for survival and
supremacy, Cruse in effect reracializes “ethnicity” (which is perhaps the key to
understanding his obsessive focus on Jews) while at the same time trying to
“ethnicize” “race.” Of course, Cruse’s use of ethnicity theory in the context of an
argument that the U.S. was really a “nation of nations” was aimed at dissolving a
herrenvolk concept of American democracy which the “racial” assumptions of
integration upheld. But in the end, while unique, Cruse’s formulation is hardly a
proper theorization of the tangled social web of constitutional history, labor
migration, and “racial” slavery. Indeed, the very antinomy at the heart of his own
discourse still marks our own descriptions and contestations within the internal
borders of the U.S. nation-state, as they continuously (and sometimes even
opportunistically) oscillatate between the scripts of color and colonization,
pluralism and universalism.
90 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

In other words, rather than untangling this knotted, transactional history, Cruse
now mostly speaks to our own multicultural scepticism. With a deep knowledge
of American (yes, “racial”) history, Cruse was decidedly less sanguine than the
various Popular Front writers of the 1940s or the ethnic revivalists of the 1960s
about the possibility of an overall harmonization of America’s internal “nations.”
Indeed, this is the basis for his hostility toward American communism, which in
his view had defaulted on its promise of answering the question of black
nationality in America during World War II, by wedding itself to the vision of
America as a universal nation capable of overriding “ethnic” and national
difference and division. The same can be said for black intellectuals, whose great
failure, unlike their Jewish counterparts, was that they had been (in the words of
E.Franklin Frazier) “seduced by the lure of final assimilation.”65 Yet the question
remains, to what extent was Cruse himself “seduced” in his own efforts to set the
terms of this argument right? In his bid to secure an authoritative claim upon the
public discussion of “race” in the United States, Cruse not only distorted the
historical record of black radicalism (including his own), but he also misread the
real political tenor of ethnicity arguments. Contradicting Cruse’s intent, “a
politics of black ethnicity” is now perhaps the cornerstone of a conservative
“racial” theory that assiduously erases references to color and colonization
within a market-driven narrative of interethnic competition and functional
adjustment to American societal norms.66 Moreover, just as Cruse failed to
develop an adequate theory of cultural production, he was similarly unable to
theorize the specificity of the internal cultures of U.S. imperialism. Ironically, he
may even be said to have sacrificed the more powerful and risky
conceptualizions of the politics of black nationality from his early essays,
precisely at the moment of gaining a certain public political purchase with the
reception of his most celebrated book. If the discussion of salient, intranational
differences today invokes the worldly metaphors of colonization and
decolonization too cheaply—even as it shares in the accumulated surplus of the
U.S. (trans)nation-space—then Cruse is partially to blame. We should not forget,
however, that he is also one of our most promising precursors. His “text” then is
really a palimpsest, which, when read carefully, reveals the densely charged
layers of an intellectual terrain that remains our own.

Notes

1. Robert Chrisman, “The Crisis of Harold Cruse,” Black Scholar, November

1969, 77.
2. See for example, Avery F.Gordon and Christopher Newfield, Mapping
Multiculturalism (Minneaplois: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
3. See for example, Cornel West, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” in bell
hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston:
South End Press, 1991); and Jerry G.Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
 NEGRO EXCEPTIONALISM • 91

4. Judith Smith, “Lorraine Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun, and the Politics of Racial
Difference,” and Mary Helen Washington, “Comment”; papers presented at the
American Studies Association conference, Pittsburgh, 1995. See also Penny Von
Eschen, “The Cold War Seduction of Harold Cruse,” in this volume.
5. Hortense Spillers, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date,” Boundary 2
(Vol. 21, No. 3, Fall 1994): 67.
6. Ibid., 70.
7. Ibid., 73.
8. Ibid., 110–12.
9. Ibid., 74.
10. Ibid., 67, 85–87.
11. Ibid., 92.
12. Ibid., 99–100; For a detailed exposition of genealogical reading strategies see Michel
Foucualt, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,” in The Foucault Reader (New York:
Pantheon, 1984), translated and edited by Paul Rabinow.
13. See the first epigraph, which has been exerpted from Paul Gilroy, “A Dialogue with
bell hooks,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 217.
14. Harold Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” in Rebellion
or Revolution? (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 75.
15. Ibid.,95.
16. Ibid., 96. As Cruse puts it elsewhere, “Backward peoples must replace the white
working class as the “chosen people” of the dialectical functionings of world
society”; see Harold Cruse, “Marxism and the Negro,” in Rebellion or Revolution?
151.
17. Harold Cruse, “Les Noirs et L’idee Revolte (The Blacks and the Idea of Revolt),”
in Rebellion or Revolution? 169–70.
18. Ibid., 191.
19. Ibid., 190. As Cruse puts it elsewhere, “The Negro rebellion in America is destined
to usher in a new era in human relations and to add a throughly new conception of
the meaning and the form and content of social revolution.” Cruse, “Rebellion or
Revolution?—1,” in Rebellion or Revolution? 111.
20. Spillers, “Post-Date,” 115.
21. Cruse, “Introduction,” in Rebellion or Revolution? 27; emphasis in the originial.
Cruse, in other words, did not need Althusser to understand the distinction between
the “real object” and the “object of knowledge,” since he was already a careful
reader of Marx. Quoting the latter, Cruse writes,” ‘In the social production which
men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and
independent of their will.’” This means, Cruse continues, “that men are subject to
the blind forces of the laws of social production unless they become socially
conscious of what is happening to them. But how men become socially conscious
is a problem of the theory of knowledge and reflection, which is an inseparable
category in the dialectical method of social inquiry.” See Cruse, “Marxism and the
Negro,” in Rebellion or Revolution? 150.
22. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow,
1967); also see Cruse, “Rebellion or Revolution?—1,” 115.
23. Cruse, Crisis, 474.
24. Ibid.
92 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

25. Cruse, “Rebellion or Revolution?—1,” 119.

26. Ibid., 122
27. Cruse, Crisis, 475; also see “Rebellion or Revolution?—1,” where Cruse writes,
“The American cultural wasteland has nothing to offer the Negro who is bent upon
integrating into nothing. The political task of the Negro artist, then, is to fight for
the over-all democratization of the American apparatus of cultural communication
in order to make a place for the unrestricted expression of his own ethnic
personality, his own innate creative originality. In other words, the Negro must
become nationalistic in terms of the ethnic and cultural attributes of his art
expression” (124; emphasis added).
28. Spillers, “Post-Date,” 83, 107.
29. Cruse, Crisis, 35; As Wanheema Lubiano writes, “Afro-American studies has
always involved manifestations of what is now recognized as the cultural studies
imperative.” Lubiano emphasizes the “resonances” between African American and
cultural studies as counterhegemonic knowledge projects specifically concerned
with “the contestatory nature of the domain of culture” and its relation to the
organization of “material life.” I would argue, in a more historically specific sense,
that Cruse suggests the possiblity of conceptualizing a politics of “culture” in its
many complex aspects, making his connection to a figure like Williams less a
matter of resonance, perhaps, than of a prior—though as yet untheorized—
discursive “convergence.” See Wanheema Lubiano, “Mapping the Interstices
Between Afro-American Cultural Discourse and Cultural Studies: A
Prolegomenon” Callaloo 19, no. 1 (1996): 67–77.
30. This may be another significant parallel with with British cultural studies whose
major innovators like Thompson had a similar intellectual trajectory to Cruse,
developing many of their most important ideas in the context of their (New Left)
disillusionment with, and exit from, the Communist Party. See E.P.Thompson,
interview by, in Visions of History, ed. Henry Abelove (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
31. See Nikhil Pal Singh, “Race and Nation in the American Century: A Genealogy of
Color and Democracy” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1995). One might, for
example, do a fuller excavation of the many sophisticated, left-wing, black
nationalist writings to which Cruse was deeply indebted, like Richard Wright’s
“Blueprint for Negro Writing,” or W.E. B.DuBois’s Dusk of Dawn. In fact, the
latter text lays out DuBois’s own version of an internal ‘nationalist’ solution to the
crisis of black politics and economy in a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth”
that is very close to Cruse’s own ideas. While Cruse writes about both these texts in
some detail, he does so primarily to show how these projects have either lain
dormant due to integrationist mythologies, or how their authors were derailed from
these promising lines of thought by the perfidy of left-wing thought. He does not,
therefore, construct them as a tradition to which he himself belongs. For the
comments on Wright and DuBois see Cruse, Crisis, 188–89; 331–34.
32. Ibid., 65.
33. See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(London: Zed, 1983); James Hooker, Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s
Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (New York: Praeger, 1970).
34. Cruse, Crisis, 158.
35. Ibid., 166.
36. Ibid., 251.
 NEGRO EXCEPTIONALISM • 93

37. Wilson Moses, “Ambivalent Maybe,” in Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race,
Identity and the Ambivalence of Assimilation, ed. Gerald Early (New York:
Penguin, 1993), 193.
38. Cruse, “Introduction,” 23.
39. Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” in Rebellion or
Revolution? 95; emphasis added.
40. Cruse, “Introduction,” 27.
41. A few examples will suffice. In his seminal essay “The New Cultural Politics of
Difference,” Cornel West writes that “decolonized sensibilities fanned and fueled
the Civil Rights and Black power movements, as well as the student, anti-war,
feminist, gay, brown and lesbian movements”; in Out There: Marginalization and
Contemporary Cultures edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T.Minh-
ha, Cornel West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 25. Meanwhile, in their important
anthology, David Lloyd and Abdul Jan Mohammed blithely use the conjunction
“Third World and minority,” assuming the conjunction of U.S.-based minority
group politics and struggles around development and underdevelopment within the
world system. See Lloyd and Mohammed, The Nature and Context of Minority
Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Most recently, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak critically interrogates the tendency within varied, emergent
transnational studies of culture “to obliterate the diffrence between United States
internal colonization and the dynamics of the decolonized space.” See Spivak,
“Scattered Speculations on the Question of Cultural Studies,” Outside in the
Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 278–79. Suffice to say,
excavating Cruse’s ideas on these matters is important because of the tendency to
forget our discursive debts and conceal our discursive tangles.
42. Cruse, Crisis, 469–75.
43. Watts, Heroism, 8.
44. Cruse, Crisis, 13, 29.
45. Ibid., 189.
46. Harold Cruse, Plural but Equal (New York: William Morrow, 1985), part 5. See
also my discussion of pluralism in the context of ethnicity theory below.
47. Cruse, Les Noirs et L’idee de Revolte,” 190; As I have argued elsewhere, this
alternative, more robust, pluralism also derives from the 1930s and ’40s and from
the work of a whole range of intellectuals associated with the Popular Front. One
of the most productive groups of intellectuals coalesced around the California
writers Louis Adamic and Carey McWilliams, forming the journal Common
Ground. The search for “common ground,” while one of the characteristic metaphors
for a more inclusive vision of American nationhood and national belonging during
WWII, was also explicitly conceived as an exploration of America’s “racial-cultural
situation,” and in particular America’s “number one minority question”—the
“Negro question.” Indeed, McWilliam’s most important book Brothers under the
Skin was an unprecedented comparative look at what he calls America’s “colored
minorities,” while Adamic’s major work of this period, significantly titled, A
Nation of Nations (1944), was a prolific, differentiated analysis of the fourteen
different immigrant “nations” that made America into a “nation of nations.” See
Cary McWilliams, Brothers under the Skin (Boston: Little Brown, 1943), 8; and
Louis Adamic, A Nation of Nations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944); see
also Singh, “Race and Nation.”
94 • NIKHIL PAL SINGH

48. This term comes from Robert Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black
Civil Rights (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).
49. Cruse, Crisis, 7.
50. Ibid., 317.
51. Harold Cruse, quoted in Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion (Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 1991), 40.
52. Cruse, Crisis, 71.
53. Ibid., 13.
54. Ibid., 9.
55. Ibid., 396.
56. Ibid., 497.
57. Ibid., 480–81.
58. Christopher Lasch, “Black Power: Cultural Nationalism as Politics,” in The Agony
of the American Left (New York: Vintage, 1969), 155.
59. Ibid., 142.
60. Werner Sollers, The Invention of Ethnicity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
61. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986); David Hollinger, “Post-Ethnic America,”
Contention 2 (1992).
62. Philip Gleason, Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-
Century America (New York: Free Press, 1992), 59.
63. Steven Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1989).
64. I am indebted to Judith Smith for the idea that Americanist notions of “ethnicity”
are “generic.” See Judith Smith, “Creating Everyman after World War II:
Evaporating Ethnic and Class Distinctiveness in Postwar White Cultural Identity,”
paper presented at the American Studies Association conference, November 1992.
65. E.Franklin Frazier, “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual,” in E.Franklin Frazier
on Race Relations, Ed. G.Franklin Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1968), 278. Frazier (whom Cruse sincerely admired) was of course comparing
black intellectuals in the United States unfavorably to their counterparts in the
decolonizing world.
66. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New
York: Routlege, 1986).
 Part 2

Cruse as Cultural Critic

96
 4
Harold Cruse’s Worst Nightmare
Rethinking Porgy and Bess

JEFFREY MELNICK

Trying to get a handle on George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in his own operatic
work, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse argues that not only
should this folk opera—whose music he hates—have been written “by Negroes
themselves,” but that if it had it would “never have been supported, glorified and
acclaimed,” as Porgy and Bess has. This is a strange two-way contention,
something like the old joke about the restaurant patron who complains, “the food
here is terrible—and such small portions!” After his breathless attempt to explain
why he considers Porgy and Bess a central text for understanding the relative
failures of African American theatrical productions, Cruse settles for calling
Gershwin’s work “the most contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the
Western world”1
Cruse makes it clear that he does not like the substance of Gershwin’s work,
calling it “a rather pedestrian blend of imitation Puccini and imitation South
Carolina-Negro folk music” that participates in the hundred year-old American
tradition of making fun (and money) out of travesties of blackness.2 With this
Cruse joins earlier critics of Porgy and Bess who derided Gershwin’s attempt to
forge unity from diversity: the composer and critic Virgil Thomson wrote that
this work came “straight from the melting pot. At best it is a piquant but highly
unsavory stirring-up together of Israel, Africa and the Gaelic Isles.” Thomson
goes on to note and assail the diffuse nature of Porgy and Bess’s artistic
approach, calling it “crooked folklore and halfway opera.” Ralph Matthews, the
arts writer for the Baltimore Afro-American agreed, noting that in its hybridity
Porgy and Bess lacked the “deep sonorous incantations so frequently identified
with the racial offerings.” African American choral director Hall Johnson was
also cautiously critical, noting, “When the leaves are gathered by strange hands
they soon wither, and when cuttings are transplanted into strange soil, they have
but a short and sickly life.”3
As for the minstrel connection, at least one contemporary critic of Porgy and
Bess, Edward Morrow, thought it was time to “debunk Gershwin’s lampblack
Negroisms” and thus uncover its roots in stage blackface traditions.4 As early as
1946, music historian Rudi Blesh was elaborating further on this point, writing,
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is not Negro opera despite a Negro cast, a liberal use
98 • JEFFREY MELNICK

of artificial coloration, and the inclusion of some street cries. It is Negroesque,

and the earlier travesty of minstrelsy is continued in a form more subtle and
therefore more insidious. This work and more recent ones, like the operetta
Cabin in the Sky, betray a more deplorable tendency than mere superficiality and
lack of understanding. By enlisting actual Negroes for the public performance of
the Tin Pan Alley potpourri, a new stereotype—this time a cultural one—is being
fitted to the Negro in which he is set forth as an able entertainer singing a music
that the white public finds to be just like its own (emphasis in original).”5 I would
only add that Gershwin was hardly the only “high” art performer to repackage
minstrelsy as modernism.
But the actual “stuff” of Porgy and Bess—its music and staging—is not a
sturdy enough place from which to launch a polemic against integrationist
African Americans and manipulative, thieving Jews and WASPs. As Cruse notes,
criticism of Porgy and Bess must move beyond the content of Gershwin’s work
to its place as a powerful social actor. What bothers Cruse most about the opera
is that it successfully sold itself as embodying an authentic blackness, a
blackness that he thinks should be credited only to actual African American
productions. Here is the crux of Cruse’s complaints about Jews and how they
have blocked the full flowering of African American art. If, as Cruse writes, the
“basic impulse behind all creativity is national or ethnic-group identity,” then it
is Jews (with a little help from tired, needy WASPS like Porgy and Bess
librettist DuBose Heyward) who have been most responsible for obstructing the
passageway that leads from African Americans to their own cultural stuff.6
But because Cruse is so obsessed with the mischief performed by “Communist
Jews,” he misses the chance to make a more convincing critique, one that would
remain rooted where it really belongs—in his distaste for Porgy and Bess.
Instead, Cruse stays narrowly concerned with the demands made by certain left-
wing Jews that African Americans renounce any form of nationalism, even as
they jealously guarded their own: “The only ones who talked Americanization
but did not fall for it ‘culturally’ were the Communist Jews who never
overlooked a single stratagem for the preservation of Jewish cultural identity.”7
Here Cruse’s anticommunist bias prevents him from seeing that it was Gershwin
and his decidedly bourgeois colleagues on Tin Pan Alley and Broadway who
most effectively and lastingly competed with, and helped silence, Black cultural
productions. It bears mentioning, as a few recent commentators have, that just as
Jews were consolidating their power in the culture industries, African Americans
were simultaneously suffering through particularly lean years. Barry Singer
explains that 1907–1920 were drought years for African Americans on
Broadway, coming after a spate of productions (Clorindy, for instance) around
the turn of the century, but before the “vogue” of the 1920s—marked by the
debut in 1921 of the show Runnin’ Wild. With little adjustment this same dating
might describe the period when Jews came into their full strength in American
popular culture.8 Of course the two sides were connected: the rise of Jews in the
business of popular music opened up many new opportunities for Jewish
 HAROLD CRUSE’S WORST NIGHTMARE • 99

performers—many of whom profited by their real contact with, and imagined

closeness to, African Americans.9
Tin Pan Alley and Broadway provided congenial places for Jews and their
friends to discuss the race of Jews with the confidence that they could
successfully promote “Jewishness” as healthy mixture; Jewishness, in the
musical arena, was put on display as a prototype of melting-pot success. One
accomplishment of the Jews of Tin Pan Alley was to advertise a nonexclusive
vision of American nationality rooted not in compulsory and static concepts of
race or organic peoplehood but in mobility and union. Even when these Jews did
seem to constitute a “race,” their racialness was most often explained as a form
or a style of cultural mixing, rather than an unchanging essence. In other words,
the “race” of Jews was defined mostly by its mutability, its gift for assimilating
the racial characteristics of “other” peoples into itself. This became most clear in
the productions of such composers as Gershwin, productions that so many
Americans heard as triumphant syntheses of divergent “racial” streams.
In this respect then, it is necessary to consider Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and
their peers as major players in the construction of Jewish ethnic identity in
America. These powerful cultural actors were able, in their musical productions
and in their offstage behavior, to wear Jewishness as a kind of magic, a lucky
charm that allowed its owner good access to American stuff—especially African
American materials. The Jewish peoplehood enshrined in this process of ethnic
formation was mostly about history—sacred and secular; less invested in present-
day religious practices than in past experiences of oppression, this public
fashioning of Jewish ethnicity opened up new ways for American Jews to
demonstrate their cultural value. One major benefit of this cultural work is that it
allowed Jews—required them, really—to authenticate that they had a natural and
productive relationship to both Old World Europe and New World black
America. Jews used the field of music, that is, to establish “black-Jewish relations”
as a healthy and necessary component of the American melting pot.
One important message communicated by the success of Berlin’s early
ragtime hits, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, or Harold Arlen’s Cotton Club
compositions was that being of Jewish descent was the best possible preparation
for a career in American music. So, whatever the Jews of Broadway and Tin Pan
Alley actually did for or to African Americans, it is clear that they used
their power in the world of popular culture to organize the idiom of black-Jewish
relations as one that emphasized cultural pluralism, cooperation, and patriotism.
This is where Harold Cruse misses the boat. In staking out his particular plot of
nationalist soil, Cruse has to insist that various artistic forms spring from
completely discrete “racial” traditions. So, over here we find WASPs like
Heyward, anxiously fretting over their rapidly depleting store of cultural
valuables. Next to them, with bulging eyes fixed on the bottom line, are greedy
Jews—ready to fill the artistic void. Finally, there are (in Cruse’s formulation)
hapless African Americans—proprietors of a great store that they cannot protect.
It is not hard, in this light, to understand the etiology of Cruse’s concern with
100 • JEFFREY MELNICK

Porgy and Bess: The Anglo-Saxon “creative impulse” was more or less spent by
the 1920s, he says, so Jews rushed in to fill the vacuum, primarily by preempting
“a considerable portion of Negro thematic materials”; as a last gasp, faded Anglo-
Saxons desperately grabbed onto the coattails of increasingly successful Jews,
George Gershwin among them.10
Among other problems, Cruse’s model of cultural production subscribes too
rigidly to a model of ethnic and racial separatism that denies the multiple points
of contact in the modern American city, and indeed the multiple elements of
identity that always contribute to the constitution of a self in relation to others. A
good corrective to such a one-dimensional view comes by example from a
description that David Levering Lewis offers of the bond forged between the Jew
Joel Spingarn and the African American W.E.B.Du Bois, during their years
working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; by
suggesting this relationship was rooted in a “New England kinship of patrician
combativeness and superior culture,” Lewis subtly counteracts the tendency to fold
all the complexities of social identity into the most obvious marker.11
But Cruse’s “race into culture” example has not been ignored. For instance,
literary critic Walter Benn Michaels’ has recently discussed how the idea of
“race” was translated into the concept of “culture” in the years leading up to
World War I. He argues that the concept of distinct cultures that evolved in the
World War I era was a dodge: pretending to be nonracial, “culture” never got
much past the idea of “race” that it was meant to replace. As a result, Michaels
concludes, “the assertion of cultural identity depends upon an identity that
cannot be cultural—we are not Jews because we do Jewish things, we do Jewish
things because we are Jews.”12 But Michaels draws his interpretation from
relatively few literary, anthropological, and sociological texts, and the popular
music scene suggests some major revision might be in order.
The major lesson taught by the success of Jews in the music business is that
“Jewish things” are, quite simply, all things. Jews like Gershwin constructed
their public image as “omni-Americans”: They bypassed the frightening question
of what is lost by assimilation into mainstream culture by suggesting that
“assimilation” is something that Jews did to other people and their cultural
materials—even while they intermarried, hit the big time, and practiced no
religious Judaism.13 The work of the Jews of Tin Pan Alley and
Broadway instructed numerous sympathetic observers to understand the culture
of the Jewish “race” to be defined by fusion. These Jewish productions
positioned their makers at the heart of modern city life.
Leading a group sing of that old “E Pluribus Unum,” Jewish composers and
performers were able as Jews to justify their place at the center of American
popular culture. Arguing that their access to the melancholy Old World cantorial
sounds of their “fathers” (real and imagined) made them perfectly suited to
articulate the pathos of their African American “brothers,” these songwriters
provided an example of how Jews—in their mixedness and social agility—might
operate as an emblem of the healthy nation. The promise of these musical Jews
 HAROLD CRUSE’S WORST NIGHTMARE • 101

in American life is that they would gladly contribute cultural capital to the
American scene without making demands for political power. Berlin put some of
this into “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy,” which Al Jolson sang as he played Mr.
Bones in the 1930 movie Mammy, and which allowed the singer to not get
involved with making laws as long as he could continue singing the popular
songs of the nation. What Jewish composers like Gershwin and Berlin suggested
with such popular artifacts was an influential, if now little-noticed, form of
Jewish American cultural nationalism. This cultural nationalism, as Cruse
himself notes in Plural but Equal, was in direct competition with the African
American vogue of the Harlem, or “New Negro,” Renaissance.14
The real “victory” of Jews is not, as Cruse thinks, that a relatively small group
of them somehow dictated policy to African Americans in the Communist Party.
If finger pointing is called for at all (and I’m not saying that it isn’t) then the
Jews of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway offer a much better example than the
Communist Party of a collective that was involved with “cultural group
competition, imitation, exploitation, subordination, and patronization coupled
with creative suppression and negation.”15
Through the medium of African American entertainers and productions, a
virtually closed circle of influence was established among Jewish composers and
performers by the early 1900s. One possible response to Cruse’s argument that
Gershwin and other Jews “achieved status and recognition in the 1920s for music
that they literally stole outright from Harlem nightclubs” is to suggest that if
Cruse is going to employ the vocabulary of theft he could be more precise: Much
of the music Gershwin and his colleagues heard was written by other Jews, and
represents the yield of an earlier wave of appropriation.16
Even so, the extent of contact does raise the question of direct appropriation of
African American compositions by Jews. Claims of musical theft have been
abundant but often difficult to trace: Eubie Blake believed that Gershwin took a
Charles Luckeyth Roberts theme for his own “Swanee Ripples”; Verna Arvey,
the wife of African American composer William Grant Still, thought that
Gershwin might have nicked part of his epochal “I Got Rhythm” from a motif
her husband used to play while he was oboist in the hugely popular 1921 show
Shuffle Along; others have noted the use Gershwin makes of the Charleston
rhythm developed by his friend James P.Johnson for his own Concerto in F.17
In considering these charges of larceny it is important to remember that
however much piracy actually existed, African American musicians felt unable
to protect the fruits of their labor—especially from the Jewish composers and
publishers of Tin Pan Alley. This is nowhere more clear than in the tale of possible
theft that links two giants of the era, Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin. In an essay
published in 1991, Edward Berlin presented his remarkable findings, which show
convincingly that Joplin believed that Irving Berlin stole “Alexander’s Ragtime
Band” from a theme he had been working on for his opera Treemonisha; the
crucial data is that Joplin had brought pieces of Treemonisha to show to Henry
Waterson, a publisher with close ties to Berlin. Tracking a number of different
102 • JEFFREY MELNICK

sources, including one that portrays Joplin being reduced to tears upon first
hearing Berlin’s song, Edward Berlin wisely concludes that it is impossible to
ascertain whether Irving Berlin truly stole from Joplin. More important, he
fittingly notes, is that Joplin—not without some grounding—believed this to be
true. Perhaps the most chilling piece of evidence in Edward Berlin’s account is
this snippet, from a gossip column in 1911, the year of “Alexander’s Ragtime
Band”: “Scott Joplin is anxious to meet Irving Berlin. Scott is hot about
something.”18
Notwithstanding the countless assertions of theft and the friction caused by
various business relationships (including manager to musician), antagonism is
not the central term for comprehending the musical terrain shared by Jews and
African Americans: nearness is. It is hard to imagine any twentieth-century
conception of the “popular” in America that could leave out either Jews or
African Americans. The two most significant branches of the American culture
industry in the first decades of this century—the movies and popular music—
relied on Jews and African Americans as artists, owners, managers, theorists of
the forms, and, not least of all, as subjects of the major productions. By the
1920s, more to the point, much of what was being sold as “black” and as
“popular” was made by Jews.19 For Cruse’s analysis of Gershwin to succeed,
then, it would need to surrender the notion that members of distinct ethnic or
racial groups have “natural” access only to color-coded cultural matter. To get a
fuller sense of the harm done by Gershwin, it is essential to examine not how he
crossed over some bold and definitive boundary in order to get at black stuff, but
instead to come to terms with how he publicized himself—his body, really—as
the ideal site for the production of blackness. What Gershwin might be held most
responsible for is the part he played in constructing the role of the modern white
Negro. The rhetoric surrounding the creation of Porgy and Bess insisted that the
blackness transmitted by Gershwin in the opera came from within and was the
product of a self that had an organic connection to African American life.
Although the composer rarely romanticized the attractive dangers of blackness, a
move that now seems constitutive of the white Negro, Gershwin—with his luster
of high-art respectability—helped organize a critical modality for explaining and
perhaps justifying the presence of Jews in African American music.
Gershwin was the first important Jewish white Negro of the twentieth century;
he had been making claims to African American life and music by the second
and third decades of the 1900s. From the time of his first “mini-opera,” Blue
Monday—which Gershwin referred to in a letter to biographer Isaac Goldberg as
his “nigger opera”—Gershwin situated himself, when he wanted to, as within
African American music.20 Traditional musicology depicts Gershwin as Janus-
faced, staring off across the ocean to the musical modernists of Europe while
also keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the vernacular forms surrounding him. But
it should be clear by now that Gershwin’s greatest gift was in staking out African
American music (arrived at in the vehicle of his vague but vital Jewishness) as
the grounds for modernist innovation.21
 HAROLD CRUSE’S WORST NIGHTMARE • 103

Gershwin no doubt approved of the racially inflected interpretations of his

music advanced most vigorously by his Boswell, Harvard University professor
Goldberg. In a 1936 article Goldberg wondered whether it was “the Jew in
Gershwin” that “helped to make him our foremost writer of American-Negroid
music”; earlier Goldberg had speculated on a “common Oriental ancestry in both
Negro and Jew.”22 Gershwin’s most important productions rested on the widely
circulated idea that as a Jew he had more or less inherited African American
music, and that out of these materials he was legitimately developing an
American art music. Rhapsody in Blue (1924) had conferred significant energy
on this notion that Gershwin came to African American music through his own
racial identity. But it was with Gershwin’s crowning achievement, Porgy and
Bessy that white Negroism—as personal style and musical approach—was
installed as the explanatory structure for his success at making African American-
inspired music.
Gershwin and Heyward had first discussed doing something with Heyward’s
novel Porgy (1925) as early as 1926, but the composer did not begin work on the
music until 1934. The intervening years had seen a stage version cowritten by
Heyward and his wife Dorothy, as well as a bid by Jolson to play the character
Porgy in blackface in a musical version.23 Soon after Gershwin finally did clear
the time to work on the project he made the important decision to travel to the
South Carolina Sea Islands in order to mine that “inexhaustible source of folk
material.”24 With this, Gershwin borrowed from a public relations move
established much earlier in the development of blackface minstrelsy: as Eric Lott
explains, minstrel performers often “claimed they did ‘fieldwork’ among
southern blacks, while on tour, though in fact this required at most a trip to the
East River waterfront; it was to their professional advantage to make such
claims.”25
A central component of white Negroism is the immersion ritual. Full symbolic
identification with the African American, usually initiated by some personal
crisis or challenge, is cemented by the subject’s entry into a closed social space
defined almost exclusively by its racialness and maleness.26 Conceptions of class
position and sexuality certainly infuse the white subject’s move, but race and
masculinity (i.e., black manhood) always remain as the principal markers of
difference and affiliation for the white Negro. For most Jews carving out a
personal niche within white Negroism, the city (usually Chicago’s South Side
or New York’s Harlem) provided all the required apparatus. But Gershwin
hearkened back to an older model for his immersion ritual: “going native.”27
Gershwin went to South Carolina in 1934 with his cousin, the painter Henry
Botkin, who was painting “Negro subjects” at the time.28 They were preceded by
Gershwin’s manservant, Paul Mueller, who brought all their luggage, art supplies
and golf clubs. The men settled in on Folly Beach, which was adjacent to James
Island and heavily populated by Gullahs. Although Gershwin’s trip south was
certainly novel for a Broadway/Tin Pan Alley composer, in some important
respects he was merely participating in a cultural movement that had broad
104 • JEFFREY MELNICK

appeal in the 1930s: the rediscovery of the American “folk” by all manner of
organizations (the Works Progress Administration, the Communist Party) and
individuals. But unlike those who explored the world of the folk in order to
expose problems in the American system, Gershwin was of a more celebratory
bent. Of course, Henry’s brother Benjamin Botkin was himself a leading
folklorist, with a particular interest in African American materials; Gershwin
might well have understood his work on Porgy and Bess to be a fulfillment of
Botkin’s 1934 call for a conscious blending of native and cosmopolitan artistic
forms.29
It will simply not do, however, to imagine that Gershwin was some leftist
cultural worker out selflessly to compile African American folk materials in
order, ultimately, to further the cause of racial justice. Even so, he presents an
excellent example of the kind of “racial romanticism”—marked by a
“fundamental ambivalence of identifications”—that Kobena Mercer considers
central to the white Negroism of Norman Mailer and others.30
It is sometimes hard to take Gershwin very seriously at all, especially when
examining the superficial and romantic clichés he used to describe his trip. Soon
after arriving in South Carolina Gershwin wrote to his mother that the “place
down here looks like a battered old South Sea Island “going on to complain of
the “flies and gnats and mosquitoes.”31 But any hint of displeasure had
disappeared by the time Frank Gilbreth, a reporter from the Charleston News and
Courier, showed up for the first of two interviews with the composer; Gershwin
gushed at being at such a “back-to-nature” place and even offered up a sample of
a local corn whiskey known as “Hell Hole Swamp.”32 At this initial meeting
Gershwin was clean and neatly dressed in a “light Palm Beach coat and an
orange tie.” When Gilbreth returned for the next interview “Gershwin’s hair was
matted and uncombed, his beard was an inch thick,” and he greeted the reporter
shirtless—”Bare and black above the waist,” as Gilbreth put it. This reporter was
so taken with the blackness of the composer that he wondered whether Gershwin
intended “to play the part of Crown, the tremendous buck in ‘Porgy’ who
plunges a knife into the throat of a friend too lucky at craps and who makes women
love him by placing huge black hands about their throats and tensing his
muscles.”33 The headlong rush of this sentence, its breathless syntax, indicates that
at least this one reporter was nearly overwhelmed by Gershwin’s “native” act.
The content of the description also reminds us that, as Marianna Torgovnick has
written, within “Western culture, the idiom ‘going primitive’ is in fact
congruent in many ways to the idiom ‘getting physical.’”34 For his own part,
Gershwin reveled in the “freedom” of Folly Beach, writing in a letter to Emily
Paley that he, Botkin, and Mueller “go around with practically nothing on, [and]
shave only every other day.”35 (Of course, as a Jewish man Gershwin could not
go totally naked/native; while he might “black-up” above the waist, the telltale
mark of the male Jew was, of course, located below the waist.)
The most significant moments of this trip came when Gershwin actually had
contact with local Gullahs on James Island. A story recounted in a New York Times
 HAROLD CRUSE’S WORST NIGHTMARE • 105

article on Porgy and Bess in early October of 1935, and told more fully by Heyward
in a piece published in Stage, furnished an interpretation of Gershwin’s sojourn
in South Carolina that has formed the heart of the Gershwin Porgy and Bess
legend. In Heyward’s version, Gershwin’s trip to James Island was “more like a
homecoming than an exploration.”36 The crucial mystical moment in Heyward’s
account came when he and Gershwin observed a “shout,” a religious form which
combines vocalization, handclapping, and movement; Gershwin could not
remain a spectator, and began to “shout” with the Gullahs. To the “huge delight”
of the participants, Gershwin stole the show. Heyward concludes that Gershwin
is the “only white man in America who could have done it.”37
This anecdote carried—and continues to carry much rhetorical weight.38
Heyward’s article was first published almost simultaneously with the New York
debut of Porgy and Bessy and has been republished and cited extensively. The
arguments in Heyward’s piece quickly lost the appearance of being arguments,
just as Heyward must have wished. Instead, Heyward’s insights have come to act
as givens in the reception of not only Porgy and Bess, but indeed Gershwin’s
whole career. Typical of this process is the conclusion of one Gershwin biographer,
who suggests that Heyward’s story clearly demonstrates “Gershwin’s empathy
with the music of the Gullahs.”39 But the careful design of Heyward’s chronicle
makes it clear that he was trying to authorize Gershwin as composer of “black”
music for his own “black” story. Heyward, as a Southern white man, did not
need such validation, ostensibly because of the geographic access he had to the
African Americans who populate his story. Heyward’s journalistic account/
advocacy piece may have been inspired by the fact that Porgy and Bess was a
shaky proposition commercially; it did not have much success until an early
1940s revival after the death of both Gershwin and Heyward, and a major
contemporary public relations effort pitched it as both high art and the authentic
yield of African American folk music.
A central tenet of the cultural work surrounding the Jewish composer’s
relationship to African Americans was that Gershwin really had become one of
them. A good friend of Gershwin recounted that after experiencing the
excitement of African American churches and schools the composer would walk
around Folly Beach singing spirituals. The reporter Gilbreth wrote that during
his visit Gershwin sat at the piano to play “I Got Rhythm” and before long
“two black servants, back in the kitchen, were beating time.” The performance
ended with “30 or 40 people—mostly servants from nearby cottages”
gravitating toward Gershwin’s playing.40 Kay Halle, another Gershwin friend,
provided the white Negro capper: “George had become so deeply identified with
the black life around Folly Beach and Charleston” that he began to find whites
drab and unemotional. Gershwin, speaking about the characters in Porgy and
Bess but obviously making a broader point as well told the reporter from the
News and Courier that he found whites “dull and drab,” but was impressed that
with “the colored people there is always a song.”41 Gershwin’s white Negroism
had a life beyond Folly Beach, and the rehearsals for Porgy and Bess vouched
106 • JEFFREY MELNICK

for Gershwin’s nearness to African Americans and their culture. Alexander

Smallens, the conductor of the Porgy and Bess orchestra, noted that many of the
actors “born and educated in the North, hadn’t the slightest trace of the essential
Negro lingo, and were obliged to learn the dialect of the South.42 Who tutored
these too-white actors how to talk “black?” None other than Gershwin himself,
fresh off his immersion in African American life. In this anecdote we find
Gershwin acting as a source—rather than a beneficiary—of African American
culture. Indeed, the American popular culture industry has frequently offered up
the spectacle of African American people marvelling at white performances of
black styles.43 The comedian Phil Silvers burlesqued this tendency in a routine
he developed to satirize the perceived “blackness” of Jerome Kern’s score for
Show Boat (1927). In this bit he would impersonate Kern teaching Paul Robeson
how to sing “Ol’ Man River”—with Robeson interrupting Kern to ask him what
“taters” were.44
The central meaning of Gershwin’s Jewish white Negroism, as the conductor
of the orchestra for the first version of Porgy and Bess put it, was that
Gershwin’s “racial background and environment” had “enabled him to
understand” the African American materials he was transforming.45 Gershwin
historiography has hewed fairly closely to this line even to the present. The most
recent Gershwin biography approvingly quotes a source very close to Gershwin
(Emily Paley—sister of Leonore Gershwin, Ira’s wife) who suggests that the
composer’s affinity for African American forms derived from his belief that
“blacks and Jews [were] the same in relation to the rest of society.” The British
critic Wilfred Mellers has articulated a similar position, suggesting that although
Gershwin, unlike Porgy, was not “a physical cripple, he was a psychological
cripple: an archetypical white Negro, a poor boy who made good, a Jew who
knew about spiritual isolation.” Of course this misses the key point that even if
the white Negro is responding to some perceived lack in his home culture or some
personal misfortune, he also always operates from a position of power and
agility.46
Above all, in their conspicuous public lives Jews like Gershwin embodied a
racialness at once exotically attractive as well as reassuringly unthreatening. The
conflation of the cantorial singing that was supposedly their birthright with the
pathos supposedly at the heart of black music acts as the foundation for the sense
that African Americans and Jews are naturally linked. This forceful public
rhetoric made it possible—necessary, really—to understand African American
music as a product of the Jew’s Jewishness. With this in mind, Porgy and Bess
no longer reaches us as Harold Cruse’s “contradictory cultural symbol,” but
rather as the logical culmination of Jewish interests in black music.
 HAROLD CRUSE’S WORST NIGHTMARE • 107

Notes
Portions of this essay have been adapted from my book A Right to Sing the Blues:
African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1999).

1. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the
Failure of Black Leadership (1967; reprint New York: Quill, 1984), 102–3.
2. Ibid., 183.
3. Hall Johnson, quoted in Joan Peyser, The Memory of All That: The Life of George
Gershwin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 248–49; Hollis Alpert, Porgy
and Bess: The Story of An American Classic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990),
118; Charles Schwartz, Gershwin: His Life and Music. New York: Da Capo,
1973), 245. Matthews’s review, which calls Gershwin’s work less accomplished
than Green Pastures, is in the Baltimore Afro-American, October 19, 1935, p. 8.
Hall Johnson’s opinion is cited in the New York Times, April 3, 1983; clipping
found in the Harvard University Theatre Collection file on Porgy and Bess.
4. See also Peyser, Memory of All That, 251; Alpert, Porgy and Bess, 121; and
Schwartz, Gershwin, 245.
5. For Morrow quotations, see Mark Tucker, Ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 115; see also Rudi Blesh, Shining Trumpets:
A History of Jazz (1946; 2d ed. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1955), 204–5.
6. Cruse, Crisis, 221.
7. Ibid., 152.
8. Barry Singer, Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf (New York:
Schirmer, 1992), 79.
9. Harold Cruse, Plural but Equal: A Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and
America’s Plural Society (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 137.
10. Cruse, Crisis, 515.
11. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981; reprint New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 10.
12. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
(Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1995), 139.
13. I borrow the term “omni-Americans” from Albert Murray’s book The Omni-
Americans: Black Experience and American Culture (1970; reprint New York:
Vintage, 1983).
14. Cruse, Plural but Equal, 138.
15. Ibid., 138.
16. Cruse, Crisis, 108.
17. Terry Waldo, This is Ragtime (New York: Hawthorne, 1976), 112–13; Walter
Rimler, A Gershwin Companion: A Critical Inventory and Discography, 1916–
1984 (Ann Arbor, MI: Popular Culture, Ink, 1991), 239–41; Peyser, Memory of All
That, 105; Kenneth Kanter, The Jews on Tin Pan Alley: The Jewish Contribution to
American Popular Music, 1830–1940 (New York: Ktav/Cincinnati: American
Jewish Archives, 1982), 125. Judith Grant Still, the daughter of the composer,
corroborated her mother’s claim, adding that her father spoke often of how
Gershwin used to come up to Harlem to get ideas; see Peyser, Memory of All That,
43. Duke Ellington also suggested that Gershwin based a passage of his Rhapsody
108 • JEFFREY MELNICK

in Blue on the song “Where Has My Easy Rider Gone?” Ellington, quoted in
Tucker, Ed., Duke Ellington Reader, 115.
18. See Edward Berlin’s account, originally published in 1991 as “Scott Joplin’s
Treemonisha Years,” American Music 9, no. 3 (1991): 260–76, esp. 267–68. This
fine detective work is also incorporated into Berlin’s 1994 biography King of
Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994),
210–12.
19. Scholarly work has only begun to be undertaken on how heavily the movie and
music industries relied on adaptations of “blackness” in the early decades of the
twentieth century. A good introduction to what he calls the “surplus symbolic value
of blacks” can be found in Michael Rogin’s “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish
Jazz Singer Finds His Voice,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 3 (1992): 417–53; “Making
America Home: Racial Masquerade and Ethnic Assimilation in the Transition to
Talking Pictures.” Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (1992): 1050–77; and “‘The
Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D.W.Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” in The
New American Studies: Essays from Representations, Ed. Philip Fisher (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 346–91. Even less
attention has been paid to the music business; one excellent exception can be found
in Robert Dawidoff, “Some of Those Days,” Western Humanities Review 41, no. 3
(1987): 263–86; the article is about Sophie Tucker, Jean-Paul Sartre, and a number
of other things as well.
20. This letter, dated June 15,1931, can be found in the Gershwin file at the Harvard
University Theatre Collection. See also Peyser, Memory of All That, 114.
21. Carol Oja, “George Gershwin and American Modernists: A Reevaluation.” Paper
presented at the 1993 American Studies Association Conference, Boston.
22. Peyser, Memory of All That, 237; Isaac Goldberg, George Gershwin: A Study in
American Music, supplemented by Edith Garson (1931; reprint New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1958), 41.
23. Alpert, Porgy and Bess, 71. As late as 1933 a columnist in the New York Evening
Post wondered whether the musical version of Porgy would have a Negro
company, “or a white mammy singer, such as Mr. Jolson.” See clipping, November
3,1933, Harvard University Theatre Collection file on Porgy and Bess.
24. DuBose Heyward, “Porgy and Bess Returns on Wings of a Song,” Stage
Magazine, October 1935; reprinted in Merle Armitage, Ed., George Gershwin
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1938), 35. A few years earlier Gershwin had
written to Heyward that he was planning to be in Charleston and hoped to hear some
spirituals “and perhaps go to a colored cafe or two if there are any”; Gershwin,
quoted in Alpert, Porgy and Bess, 79.
25. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 94.
26. For Norman Mailer’s original pronouncements see his “White Negro” (1957), in
Advertisements for Myself (New York: G.P.Putnam’s, 1959), 311–31. For another
important, if neglected, statement of Jewish white Negroism, see Seymour Krim,
Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer (New York: Excelsior, 1961).
27. I was helped substantially in thinking about what it means to “go native” by
Marianna Torgovnick’s fine study Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3–41.
28. Alpert, Porgy and Bess, 88; Schwartz, Gershwin, 316 n. 24.
 HAROLD CRUSE’S WORST NIGHTMARE • 109

29. Robert Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America,
1920–1945. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 149–50;
William Stott, Documentary Expression in Thirties America (1973; reprint Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1986); Marcus Klein, Foreigners: The Making of
American Literature 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
130–81.
30. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies
(New York: Routledge, 1994).
31. Alpert, Porgy and Bess, 88; Edward Jablonski, Gershwin: A Biography (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1987), 272.
32. My attention was drawn to these articles by Jablonski, Gershwin, 273; Gilbreth
wrote under the name Ashley Cooper. See Charleston News and Courier, June 19,
1934, 12.
33. Charleston News and Courier, June 29, 1934, p. 9A. When Gershwin came back
through Charleston the next winter, the same paper made a point of noting that the
composer was now several “shades lighter than when he left Charleston.” See
Charleston News and Courier, January 31, 1935, 7.
34. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 228.
35. Charleston News and Courier, June 29, 1934, 9A.
36. DuBose Heyward, quoted in Armitage, ed., George Gershwin, 39. The New York
Times article is from October 6, 1935; Harvard University Theatre Collection
clipping file on Porgy and Bess.
37. Heyward, quoted in Armitage, Ed., George Gershwin, 39; see also Jablonski, Ed.,
Gershwin Remembered (Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1992), 99. The shout story
received wide publication at the time (not to mention in the ensuing years); see, for
instance, clippings from the New York Times, October 6,1935, and September 19,
1976, Harvard University Theatre Collection file on Porgy and Bess.
38. See, for instance, Ann Douglas’s uncritical reproduction of it in Terrible Honesty:
Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995),
102.
39. See, for instance, Schwartz, Gershwin, 316 n. 25.
40. Jablonski, Gershwin 273–74; Charleston News and Courier, June 19,1934,12.
41. Kay Halle, quoted in Jablonski, Ed., Gershwin Remembered, 100; Charleston News
and Courier, June 29, 1934, 9A.
42. Armitage, Ed., George Gershwin, 43; David Ewen, George Gershwin: His Journey
to Greatness (1956; 2nd ed. New York: Ungar, 1980), 230.
43. Ella Shohat notes, for instance, that in the film High Society (1956) it is the singing
of Bing Crosby that seems to inspire the trumpet playing of Louis Armstrong, and
not vice versa; see Shohat, “Ethnicities-in-Relation: Toward a Multicultural
Reading of American Cinema,” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the
American Cinema, Ed. Lester Friedman (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1991), 226.
44. Gerald Bordman, Jerome Kern: His Life and Music (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1980), 400. For a good account of Robeson’s involvement with Show Boat
and “Ol’ Man River” see Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
(London: BFI-Macmillan, 1986), 105–7, 126–28.
45. Conductor, quoted in Armitage, Ed., George Gershwin 45.
110 • JEFFREY MELNICK

46. Peyser, Memory of All That, 44–45, 132. See also Wilfred Mellers, Music in a New
Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (1965;
reprint Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), 392, 397. Mellers is one of the few
scholars to attempt an extended analysis of Porgy and Bess that integrates
musicology and cultural history; 392–413.
 5
The African American Musician
as Intellectual
JAMES C.HALL

In support of his argument that U.S. cultural democracy is nothing more than
pretense, Harold Cruse compellingly reminds us that Duke Ellington was turned
down for a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 1965. Cruse writes that this “turn-
down indicates that the same old, ethnic-group war for cultural supremacy in
American music is still being waged” and that “Ellington could be denied this
kind of cultural recognition only because of the undemocratic way the cultural
machine in America is run.”1 This startling snub of Ellington allows Cruse to
write eloquently about developments (or the lack thereof) in American and
African American cultural criticism that would allow such a judgment to stand
without aggressive rebuttal. The question of Ellington’s reputation—at least as
understood by the Pulitzer trustees—is for Cruse the occasion to develop some
of his most pointed remarks as to the need for informed cultural leadership.
Cruse does quote Ellington’s elegant response to the news—“Fate’s being
kind to me; Fate doesn’t want me to be famous too young”—but, unfortunately,
does not ascribe significant intellectual agency to the composer, pianist, and
bandleader. The significant players in this social drama are the Pulitzer
committee (uninformed arbiters of WASP aesthetics and values) and silent and
not-so-silent Negro commentators. Cruse notes that “Forty years after the 1920
era, Duke Ellington has outplayed, outcreated, and outlasted all the Benny Good-
mans and Paul Whitemans,” but never evaluates the substance of that legacy as it
might pertain to his own arguments (109–10). I want to explore this
complex blind spot in Cruse’s analysis. Most straightforwardly, as regards
“cultural leadership “Cruse privileges a critical discourse that is more often than
not literary in origin and intent. There is a suspicion, perhaps, of the kinds of
choices made in the pursuit of the musician’s art. As a corollary, Cruse
complains of Leroi Jones’s Blues People that it “deals adequately with the
evolution of jazz styles (i.e., the content of jazz and blues modes of expression),
but not enough with the social structure (the nature of the cultural apparatus to
which Negro jazz and its artists are subordinated)” (108). But the related error here
is, I believe, a tendency to separate the evolution of musical styles—or “content”—
from social structure. Cruse lacks an adequate politics of style and
underestimates the consciousness of the African American musician and her
ability to transform that consciousness into an art that often anticipates the
112 • JAMES C.HALL

difficulties inherent in its reception. Finally, Cruse’s celebration of Ellington,

while not to be questioned as to its accuracy or integrity, does itself reveal a
particular class and generational orientation. It is this perspective, perhaps, that
leads to the complete absence of any mention of any rhythm and blues, rock, or
gospel performer (not to mention post-swing jazz) and is evidence of some
disregard for African American popular arts and post-World War II musical
developments. The orientation here is a kind of Frankfurt-school suspicion of
mass culture intersecting with black bourgeois concerns about respectability.
What I am trying to question, then, is both Cruse’s perspective of what
constitutes culturo-critical activity and his understanding of the scope of African
American cultural accomplishment, especially in the postwar era.
To take seriously the African American musician as intellectual would mean
recognizing that musical choices, both socio-structural and content oriented, are
acts of a mind at work. The actions that are the culmination of such choices may
be self-conscious or inadvertent attempts at leadership. One need not articulate
an artistic philosophy in the pages of Phylon or Liberator in order to have one.
Neither does one need to read such a philosophy in the pages of a cultural
journal to recognize ideas at work in the art itself. By articulating this critique I
do not mean to dismiss Cruse nor his opus; rather, by expanding the scope of
African American cultural accomplishment, I think there is an important
opportunity to revisit Cruse’s central concern with the questions of autonomy
and self-determination in the cultural sphere. It has been too easy for the current
generation of cultural critics schooled in poststructuralism to dismiss Cruse as
“essentialist” and “provincial” while that same generation rides the opportunities
provided by African American studies programs. I want to suggest that a
complex cultural nationalism has been at the center of the most vibrant African
American musical cultures of the postwar period and that the products of this
nationalism have unquestionably enriched the American cultural scene. The
pessimism that is at the heart of Cruse’s evaluation of African American cultural
accomplishment might then be tempered; the broader pessimism that Cruse
brilliantly articulates as to the shape and direction of American culture as a
whole, however, seems, agonizingly accurate.

The Musical Landscape of the Crisis of the Negro

Intellectual and Accomplishment in Jazz
Cruse sees the situation of African American musics and musicians as exemplary
of the crisis. Without access to institutions whose sole function would be to
nurture African American music, African American musicians are at the mercy of
the American marketplace, and, in particular, predominantly white promoters,
producers, and critics. Cruse notes that middle-class Negroes “have rejected the
basic art expressions of the Negro folk in music” (83). This serious lacuna in
support has led to a stunted and distorted black culture. At one moment, Cruse
laments that America has never produced a “black Gershwin” (69), while at the
 THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSICIAN AS INTELLECTUAL • 113

same time excoriating Porgy and Bess as the grossest perversion of black life
imaginable.2 No African American musical figure is given any significant voice
in the text with the exception of Paul Robeson. No space, however, is dedicated
to a consideration of Robeson’s musical art. Focusing mainly on Robeson’s
relationship to the Communist Party and his efforts with Freedom magazine, Cruse
describes Robeson as “neither very independent nor much of a leader…a close
examination of his views shows that he was not at all an original thinker” (227).
This dialectic (and jeremiad), then, works itself back and forth between the
poles of absolute absence and corrupted presence. This powerful polemic can,
however, distort. His statement that the “serious Negro composer is practically a
nonentity” (70) is hyperbole. Suggestions that to become part of a popular idiom
is by definition to be “whitened” (85) are too sweeping. Again, he is at his
strongest when he utilizes the dialectic to make clear the racist blindness of
American cultural criticism, as when he criticizes Gilbert Seldes’s celebration of
the vitality of Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along for withholding the
designation “art” (98). The absence, however, of any references to blues, rhythm
and blues, soul, gospel, or rock and roll has the impact of making Crisis a kind
of self-fulfilling prophecy. By choosing to disregard what is arguably the largest
“field” or “fields” of African American artistic activity, it is not surprising that
what is left might give the appearance of a “wasteland.”3 The cultural nationalism
that is being shaped is fundamentally middlebrow in orientation. The ideological
formation Cruse is shaping must distance itself from the continuous assaults
upon the American popular imagination by African Americans—especially by the
younger generation. I will return to what I perceive to be the distortions of this
absence and distancing, but first I want to turn to Cruse’s cursory but important
engagement with and perceptions of jazz.
According to Cruse, “in quality the Negro has retrogressed in every creative
field except jazz” (69). As he mentions few musicians in any substantive way,
Ellington must (and not inappropriately so) stand in as the representative of this
quality. One suspects that it is Ellington’s virtuosity and artistic range, if not his
public persona of aristocratic and elegant creativity, that appeals to Cruse. At the
same time, Cruses powerfully acknowledges the “whole history of organized
duplicity and exploitation of the Negro jazz artist” (110). Responsibility for this
exploitation lies with the African American middle class as a whole, and the
failed “creative intellectual” stratum in particular. Of the black bourgeoisie, he
writes, they do “not publish books, [do] not own and operate theaters or music
halls. It plays no role to speak of in Negro music, and is remote from the living
realities of the jazz musician who plays out his nights in the effete and soulless
commercial jungles of American white middle-class café culture” (454). He
complains that Jones did not follow up Blues People with an attempt to “found a
critical Negro jazz publication.” Further, he writes, “Harlem could well use a
jazz institute, a type of foundation that has never existed, to further the creative,
economic, research and educational interests of the jazz musician. The problem
here is that despite Blues People, the white jazz critics are still deciding the
114 • JAMES C.HALL

status and fortunes of Negro jazzmen” (540). In Crisis, then, jazz is the single
example of African American advancement in the arts whereas at the same time
it is compromised by its relationship to white (and notably “effete”)
commercialism. A middle class cultural nationalism is necessary, he argues, but
it is unclear whether the problem is underachievement in the field or some kind
of inevitable future crash.
One difficulty with this analysis is, I think, that Cruse overestimates the power
of (white) critical authority. While the corporate capitalism that produced and
distributed jazz might utilize the statements of white critics as authorizing
gestures within their marketing, the critics were hardly a necessity. (After all, the
most important “critical” jazz publication by the mid-1960s, the Jazz Review, had
a very brief existence.) More important, what is most striking is Cruse’s
inattention to the accomplishments of African American musicians themselves in
acknowledging and struggling against “the soulless commercial jungle” and in
determining and articulating critical standards. Indeed, central to Jones’ model of
the evolution of jazz styles is an ongoing tradition of response, of attempting to
stay ahead of the artistically deadening effects of the market, and the disruptions
and thefts of white (and black) latecomers.
My argument here is that African American musical modernism itself
can constitute a cultural nationalism, a philosophy or musical approach not
completely distant from the issues Cruse saw as crucial. This musical
modernism—as a set of beliefs and practices—often led to associations similar to
those sought by Cruse. Postwar experimentation with musical forms was so
dramatic as to dramatically alter the sociology of the music. No longer primarily
a dance music, jazz began to move toward not only “café society” but also the
concert hall and the university classroom. More important, the first generation of
jazz modernists—Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, and others—
were careful “readers” of the cultural scene and developed a music critical of the
very relations and structures that Cruse despised. Not only did these musicians
actively claim for themselves the title of artist, but the music, in its ability to
parody, satirize, and suggest continuity with previous black musics, was explicit
about the existence of a “black oriented and originated” aesthetic practice. The
second generation of modernists (and some first-generation holdovers) began to
imagine new relations and structures within which music might be produced,
distributed, and criticized. Sonny Rollins’ sabbaticals, Charles Mingus’
experiments in form and musical organization, Mary Lou Williams’s attempts at
organizing philanthropic ventures for musicians, Gillespie’ ventures into Afro-
Cuban music, and Billy Taylor’s “Jazzmobile” are all suggestive encounters with
and challenges to white capitalist hegemony in the jazz field.
Paul Berliner’s important book Thinking in Jazz also documents the ways in
which the “jazz community” establishes rites of passages for young musicians
and sees to it that essential knowledge is passed down from generation to
generation.4 (He also acknowledges the important roles played by more
conventional institutional structures like universities and conservatories.) Berliner
 THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSICIAN AS INTELLECTUAL • 115

seeks to challenge the “primitivist” accounts of the creativity of black jazz

musicians; dispensing with myths of “natural” musical ability, he describes the
very specific rules and tactics learned and utilized by accomplished musical
artists. His encyclopedic account of the ways in which musicians approach the
problem of improvisation (and, secondarily, the problem of the “business” of
jazz) is further evidence that the agency of musicians needs to be taken seriously
in any account of African American cultural leadership and criticism. Eric Lott
has approached this question from a slightly different trajectory, arguing that the
early modernists developed a substantial politics of style that challenged the
duplicity of U.S. efforts to engage African Americans in the World War II effort
and the stultifying conformity of the 1950s and the Cold War.5 For Lott, the
“commercialism” of jazz is secondary to the ability of the artists to transcend the
milieu and exercise significant cultural leadership. Language and dress—areas in
which the jazz modernists had a major impact on the American cultural landscape
—are not insignificant sites of transformation. From the perspective of either
Berliner or Lott, Cruse’s emphasis upon the necessity of formal institutional
structures to cultivate an autonomous (black) critical discourse is tempered by
the efforts of the musicians themselves to declare their independence and nurture
the development of the “tradition.”
It is, however, fair to say that the resistances of the 1940s and 50s, while
effective in shaping jazz as a substantive outsider art, could not wholly displace
structures of production, distribution, and audience expectation. The musical
direction pioneered by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane—“Free” or “new” or
“anti-jazz”—more successfully challenged the aesthetic and social structural
status quo. Long, dissonant solos difficult to capture on record, a decreasing
reliance upon American popular song as the basis of the music, and the
formation of artists’ collectives to self-consciously foster intellectual exchange
all encouraged a significant break with a predominantly white jazz
establishment: the popular jazz press, major record labels and producers, and a
broad middle-class audience. (Surprisingly, Cruse seems wholly unaware of the
major debates in 1960s jazz. This is unfortunate, as musicians like Eric
Dolphy, Coltrane, and Mingus exquisitely took on the white critical
establishment and its cries of “anti-jazz.”) David Such has provocatively
described the concrete challenges of this post-1960 music to the jazz economy,
noting, “When Coltrane’s compositions written after 1964 lasted well over an
hour each, it was apparent to infuriated club owners that customers became
intoxicated more by the music than the small number of drinks they purchased.
Owners often pleaded with Coltrane to play standard tunes or shorten his pieces
to forty minutes so that afterward customers had more opportunities to walk to
the bar to order drinks.”6 Not surprisingly, Such notes, Coltrane began to find it
more difficult to find work in traditional settings. Such notes that by the
mid-1960s, “out musicians realized that if they wanted to continue pursuing their
innovative approaches to performing, they would have to take the matter of
recording, producing, and distributing the music into their own hands.”7 He goes
116 • JAMES C.HALL

on to describe the efforts by Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, among others, to start
their own record labels, and other innovative practices in marketing and
distribution (like the 1970s New York loft scene), that represent substantive
attempts to alter the relationship between black creativity and the audience.
Arguably the culmination of this modernism (in terms of viable and complex
cultural nationalisms) are the musical collectives of the post-1960 period, one of
which (the Association for the Advancement of Colored Musicians, or AACM)
has proved incredibly resilient. Charles Mingus and Max Roach led a 1960
experiment, the Alternative Newport Festival, which led to the founding of the
Jazz Artists’ Guild. The Black Artists Group in St. Louis (1968), the AACM in
Chicago (1965), the Underground Musicians Association of Los Angeles (1964),
and the Creative Musicians Association of Detroit (1968) all seem very close to
what Harold Cruse had in mind as he theorized the establishment of black
cooperative ventures toward the invigoration and support of black arts. All of these
organizations consciously took up the issue of the relationship of the performer
to the means of production and the question of the direction or content of the
music itself. Ronald Radano’s recent study of Anthony Braxton nicely describes
the complex dynamic at the heart of these collectives.8 Thoroughly a “black
cultural nationalist” organization, AACM, which had an important influence
upon Braxton, organized an ambitious set of social programs, developed a
complex analysis of the economics of creative music, and debated the question
of white membership. Most of this analysis was “performed,” which is to say it
was either worked out democratically within the meetings of the organization, or
(and not secondarily) it was embodied within the music itself. None of these
collectives has been adequately studied, but their existence (and deep roots)
would seem to complicate Cruse’s insistence upon the necessity of a literary
discourse for the vitality and sustenance of black art. The accomplishments of
free jazz players (collectively and individually) represented (and continues to
represent) the most serious challenge to the business as usual of corporate
capitalism’s control and debasement of black music.
This rupture also parallels (and arguably produces) the beginnings of important
developments in African American music criticism by Leroi Jones,
A.B.Spellman, Charles Keil, Ben Sidran, Larry Neal, and others. Cruse’s
consideration of the Harlem Black Arts Repertory Theater and School suggests
that cultural nationalist organizations require a “Negro creative intellectual” class
strata in order to anticipate and deflect incursions by whites and/or black
integrationists. The reverse is also ostensibly true. The lesson of the 1960s
musical scene may be that formal innovation is crucial to the development of a
new order of interpreters. In either case, it seems dangerous to fetishize formal
institutional structures over and against a dynamic politics of style or the
ambition and agency of individual musicians and artists. Cruse rightly critiques
“extremists” who reject all bourgeois conventions and dispense with committing
themselves to long-term conversations about the organization and direction of
vibrant cultural nationalist enterprises. (And a reasonable objection to the free
 THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSICIAN AS INTELLECTUAL • 117

jazz players is that in its separation once and for all of the tie between jazz and
black dance it dangerously undercuts the social basis of the best of African
American art.) But he errs, perhaps, in perceiving the commitment of the jazz
musician to be located in a kind of socio-cultural underground. On the one hand,
Cruse seems to object to the taint of commercialism that marks pre1960s jazz,
while on the other hand ignoring post-1960s jazz as irresponsibly avant-garde.
African American jazz musicians in the postwar period have been a dynamic
force in working against the assimilatory gestures of American capitalism in the
field of culture. The autobiographies of black jazzmen and—women suggest a
high level of awareness of the impact of the market on the health of the
profession and its artistic aims.9 More cultural historical work is necessary to
fully document the ways in which musicians effectively (or ineffectively)
resisted the hegemony of corporate capitalism, and contributed to the
development of complex nationalist experiments. Most important, we need to
recognize these reflections and actions as intellectual activity, attempts to shape
or change cultural spaces and, on occasion, society at large.10
As important as these accomplishments are, however, it is in the area of
popular musics that the most powerful impact by African American musicians
can be seen in the postwar era.

Autonomy and Self-Determination in African

American Musics
Cruse’s decision to ignore African American accomplishment in the popular arts
is unquestionably distorting. While efforts at autonomy and self-determination in
these fields are not unqualified successes, it still seems imprudent to be talking
about these themes without reference to Motown or Duke Records, the rise of
black radio, or efforts to gain control of their economic destiny by artists like
James Brown. (Nelson George’s The Death of Rhythm and Blues is an
interesting, though flawed, effort by an African American cultural critic to
examine black popular music through a Crusean lens.11) These efforts are not
unqualified successes because of the resilience of American capitalism in
neutralizing upstart competitors and the willingness of black entrepreneurs to
sell to larger interests. Of course, this is a central paradox to Cruse’s call for
African American middle-class support of the arts: Will black capitalism be any
more interested in “art” than its white counterpart? Does the virulence of the
profit motive make distinctions between white and black capitalism moot? Again,
I would argue, it is a mistake to look beyond or around the efforts of artists
themselves to preserve—however temporary—“blackness” as presence (content,
aesthetic value, and the promotion of black artistry) in the postwar period.
What we see again, I believe, are efforts to make distinct black difference in
performance and production. James Brown’s transformation of rhythm and blues
conventions into something totally new, a paring down of vocalization and
melody into something resembling pure rhythm, is exemplary of this process. It
118 • JAMES C.HALL

is a kind of cultural nationalism at work even as Brown is forced to rely upon white
record executives for distribution. (Of course, Brown tried to resist here too by
investing heavily in black radio.) George Clinton’s musical vehicles, Parliament
and Funkadelic, both largely post-Crisis, are similar attempts to reintroduce a
fundamental blackness to the practice of American popular musics. By the
mid-1970s, Clinton had introduced a complex mythology of space travel to his
music, an attempt to “colonize” a new space for black people and black
creativity. While Brown and Clinton are the most conspicuous examples of
sustaining black difference in the field of pop music, similar arguments could be
made for individuals as diverse as Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Marvin Gaye, and
Sly Stone. (The culmination of this process is, of course, hip-hop. Like bebop,
hip-hop is representative of not only particular musical developments, but also
unique assertions of style, language, politics, and, most interesting, technological
mastery.)
Cruse also errs, I think, in not taking seriously the impact of black capitalism
in the field of popular music (or considering its lack). One can begin with Black
Swan Records in the 1920s and work through any number of small rhythm and
blues labels like Duke-Peacock. The early to mid-1960s trajectory of Stax
Records, the stage marked by significant cross-racial cooperation, would
certainly have made an interesting model to which Cruse might have spoken.
(The post-Crisis demise of Stax is certainly important in evaluating Cruse’s
ideas.) Cruse’s analysis would be inevitably complicated by considering the case
of Motown Records. One suspects that it plays no part in his deliberations
because it is either fully compromised because of its unabashed commitment to
the popular arts, or because Cruse perceived its aesthetic and business policy as
determinedly assimilationist. But recent work has suggested that the relationship
of Motown to black aspiration and community consciousness may be more
complicated than noting the prevalence of slick dress, processed hair, and a
mainstream (i.e., white) professionalism.12 The problem of Motown, however, for
the critic-historian of either the cultural-nationalist or radical-pluralist
perspective is, once again, the aquisitory nature of corporate capitalism.
Motown’s success, in whatever terms, made it a target for takeover by corporate
interests, and the inevitable dilution of its product. Still, one perplexing lesson
provided by a consideration of the “blackest’ of American popular musics—
especially when there is significant evidence of black autonomy and self-
determination—is that they always attract a multiracial audience of discerning
listeners looking for the means to declare their independence from the
mainstream.
Ironically, then, the end result of the complex nationalism that I see at work is
a broad, diverse, multicultural audience for black difference in the arts, and
continued syncretism in the cultural mainstream. By complex nationalism I mean
an ideological formation and/or a social organization committed to the forceful
and permanent “presence” of blackness within American culture. At the same
time, however, this formation or organization operates self-consciously of the
 THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSICIAN AS INTELLECTUAL • 119

social construction of race in the Americas, and often generates as central to its
mission a critique of racial authenticity. At its best, African American popular
music (which is to say most all of American popular music) has pragmatically
engaged, reflected, and represented this complexity, while at the same time
recognizing the necessity of asserting black difference over and against
American mediocrity. African American popular music remains the most
important reservoir of oppositional stances and strategies available to Americans
of a variety of class, race, and ethnic backgrounds.13 One may reasonably be
skeptical of the efficacy of the available opposition, but it is unreasonable to
ignore the breadth of African American accomplishment in popular music.

Conclusion
Cruse’s argument for the importance of institutional space in which African
Americans can exercise self-determination in the development of a substantive
cultural criticism is well founded. There seems to me to be a direct relationship
between significant formal innovation and opportunities for African Americans
to exercise control over the means of production and to develop and articulate
critical standards and context. Without overstating the “oppositionality” of
African American musical accomplishment, it is also to be acknowledged that
there is a relationship—perhaps still to be fully theorized—between effective
resistance and black control. Not surprisingly, as a white critic and historian, I
hope that one of the products of such self-determination is a substantial and largely
non-essentialist race politics that allows for the existence of a variety of
complementary voices.
To best serve his argument, however, Cruse chooses to understate African
American cultural accomplishment. It is true that dynamic cultural experiments
like the Harlem Black Arts Repertory Theater and School (BARTS) were
frustratingly short-lived. On the other hand, almost all radical experiments within
American culture, black or white, have been ephemeral. The conservatism of
corporate philanthropy in the “high” arts and corporate capitalism in the popular
arts has tended to cause both to shy away from the controversial. It is also true
that the democratic polity of groups like BARTS invites fragmentation and
perpetual change. This transience—over and against the seeming permanence of
the cultural spoliation provided by American capitalism—can cause the cultural
critic to feel as if his is a voice in the wilderness. Breadth of vision, however, can
serve to undermine this negative and potentially disabling feeling. Taking
seriously the creativity and ingenuity within the production and distribution of
the popular arts and, most significantly, the specifically intellectual
accomplishment of African American artists themselves will allow for an
enabling reconstruction. Cruse’s inattention to the agency of black music and
musicians is a crucial oversight.
Ultimately, I am seeking to endorse Cruse’s project by encouraging its
ongoing evaluation. Most significantly, we need to continue to produce histories
120 • JAMES C.HALL

of black cultural organizations and actions. We need the stories of Black Swan
Records, Oscar Micheaux, the Umbra Poets, the Liberator, Johnson
Publications, the Spiral Painters, and so on. (It is awe-inspiring and frustrating to
realize, for instance, that Crisis itself remains the only useful secondary source
for information on groups like the Harlem Writers Guild.) We need these stories
to jar us out of our acceptance of American culture as a refuge for mediocrity.
This disruption, after all, is The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual’s greatest
accomplishment. Perhaps the finest of our 1960s jeremiads, it is uncompromising
in its demand for justice and its recognition of the realities of power in American
cultural relations.

Notes

1. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow,
1967), 107; hereafter, page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text.
2. I would argue that America had produced a “black Gershwin”—James P.Johnson;
or, perhaps more accurately, America produced a white James P.Johnson. Best
known for his contributions to the development of jazz piano, Johnson was a
dynamic experimenter as a composer. He ambitiously pursued projects that
provocatively mixed black and European modes. This seems to me an important
example of Cruse overlooking a notable black accomplishment; like Leroi Jones in
“The Myth of a Negro Literature,” Cruse is overly pessimistic as to the state of the
African American canon in the arts. It is important to document the absence of
African Americans in the American consciousness, but one must be careful not to
grant authority to the critical apparatus that has generated the exclusion—this
despite Cruse’s sensitive defense of Ellington. Of course, this has been the
important accomplishment of African American scholarship in the arts over the past
twenty-five years: challenging the basis upon which entry into the canon has been
granted, and recovering artists who have been lost along the way—writers like
Zora Neale Hurston and Lloyd Brown.
3. Certainly Cruse is welcome to hold to a narrower notion of culture than that which
is clearly behind my own thinking. That should not preclude any examination of
the concept of culture itself; while my focus is somewhat disciplinary (“music”
versus “literature”) it is ultimately Cruse’s framing of what constitutes (African
American) culture that represents my broadest concern.
4. See Paul Berliner, “Hangin’ Out and Jammin’: The Jazz Community as an
Educational System,” in Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 36–59. Cruse is surprisingly silent
on the question of the oral tradition in the nurturing and support of African
American art and artists. While there is no question that in the modern period total
reliance upon predominantly oral and informal cultural gatekeepers and critics is
untenable, their substantial successes through slavery and reconstruction deserve
more attention.
5. See Lott, “Double V, Double Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style,” in Krin Gabbard,
Jazz Among the Discourses, Ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1995), 243–55.
 THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSICIAN AS INTELLECTUAL • 121

6. See David Such, “The Economics of Performing Out,” in Avant Garde Jazz
Musicians: Performing Out There (University of Iowa Press, 1993), 75–92.
7. Ibid., 79.
8. Ronald Radano, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Radano’s consideration of Braxton’s
career seems to me to be an incredibly elegant challenge to Cruse. By describing
the simultaneity of Braxton’s immersion within the European musical avant garde
and the free jazz communities, Radano allows for a complex cultural nationalism to
emerge while at the same time recognizing that Braxton’s musical and intellectual
goals and his relationship to audiences may challenge the borders of that
nationalism.
9. See, for instance, Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues (New York: Penguin, 1984),
Hampton Hawes, Raise Up off Me (New York: Da Capo, 1979), and Charles
Mingus, Beneath the Underdog (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1971).
10. Important new work in musical biography is leading us in this direction. See, for
example, Radano, Figurations, and Michael Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The
Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
11. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues, (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
12. See Gerald Early, One Nation under a Groove: Motown and American Culture
(New York: Ecco Press, 1995).
13. On black popular music and opposition see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), especially “‘Jewels Brought
From Bondage’: Black Music and the Politics of Authenticity,” 72–110. Also
significant is the work of George Lipsitz; see, in particular, “‘Ain’t Nobody Here But
Us Chickens’: The Class Origins of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” in Class and Culture in Cold
War America: A Rainbow at Midnight (New York: Praeger, 1981). Cruse’s evasion
of the question of black popular music may have something to do with Lipsitz’s
assertion that it often represents a site of interracial working-class exchange and is
potentially a site of class solidarity.
122
 Part 3

Black, Jews, and Communists

124
 6
Harold Cruse on Blacks and Jews
CHERYL GREENBERG

The index to The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual contains nine page references
for “Catholicism and Catholics,” six for “Christianity,” four for “Finland and the
Finns,” seven for “Indians (American) one for “Irish” and none for “Jews.”
“Jews and Negroes,” however, yields thirty-eight references. Two entire chapters
of the book are devoted to this relationship, the only ethnic or religious group to
enjoy such treatment. What is this fixation about? Cruse’s treatment of Jews in
all these pages is certainly negative but not exclusively so, a blend of resentment,
admiration, and bitterness. I believe his complex feelings about Jews and his
fixation on them stems from the same roots: Jews and blacks have indeed been
more deeply intertwined in the United States than any other two groups, and
their relationship is full of complexity and ambiguity. From cultural production
to political action to economics, blacks and Jews have competed for and in the
same spaces. Furthermore, the grounds for Cruse’s indictment of Jews lie
squarely in the nationalist moment of the late 1960s. One way of understanding
Cruse’s attitudes toward Jews, or more properly toward black-Jewish relations, is
to examine the nature of those relationships historically, and to place Cruse’s
observations and conclusions in the context of the 1960s critique of liberals and
liberalism.
Cruse recognizes the long and deep role Jews played in the leftist and liberal
civil rights struggle from the early days of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) through the 1960s. As a nationalist,
he must critique any nonblack contribution in order to strengthen black
control of its own institutions and agendas. But more is at stake than just pulling
black people from their erstwhile allies. Jewish involvement, Cruse claims, was
pernicious. Not only did Jews (and other whites) naively mislead blacks into
believing an impossible dream, but worse, they deliberately manipulated the
movement for their own ends. He argues that Jews sought to control the civil
rights movement and the communist Left in order to promote themselves and
their interests. For example, he claims that Zionist Jews feared that black
nationalism would promote a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) right wing
nationalist backlash, which would be bad for Jews. So they advocated black
assimilation (integration) while they opposed it for themselves.1 Communist
126 • CHERYL GREENBERG

Jews, Jews involved in cultural production, and others similarly used African
Americans and their struggle for equality to enhance their own standing, and did
so by denying to African Americans the cultural and economic nationalism Jews
had utilized to foster and protect their own rise. Ironically, Cruse notes,
American Jews faced no real problems in this country (since anti-Semitism
proved no barrier to economic advancement) and were nonetheless able to
mobilize along nationalist lines while black people, who did face real problems,
were prevented from doing so.2 In other words, although Jews managed to
achieve their ascendancy by promoting their own ethnic solidarity, they
prevented African Americans from doing so in turn. They closed the door behind
themsleves, hypocritically proclaiming an integrationist or assimilationist
ideology they had rejected for themselves. Cruse argues that Jews did so in order
to maintain the high position they had attained. Both “arrogant and paternalistic,”
they appointed themselves spokespeople for black interests so that they could
control the agenda, fend off black competition, and protect their hard-won
position part way up the ladder. All this created a dynamic whereby liberal
whites, especially Jews, dictated the process of civil rights and how to solve
“Negro issues.”3 Black intellectuals, who should have recognized this, were
nonetheless so captivated by the chimeric promise of full equality and equal
opportunity through integration (“they have sold their own birthright for an
illusion called Racial Integration,”) that they could not see their manipulation,
and therefore did not challenge either the message or the messenger.4 As Cruse
notes,

Instead of being able to essay his own solutions, the Negro intellectual has
been transformed into a problem by the white liberal, who prefers to keep
him in that position. The white liberal problem-solver has been
institutionalized as an organic part of the entire civil rights movement, and
is the emasculator of the creative and intellectual potential of the Negro
intelligentsia…. The interpretation of the Negro is predominantly a white
liberal affair, an alliance between white Christian and Jewish reformism.
Within the scope of this alliance, the resulting ideology is predominantly
of Jewish intellectual origin. In fact, the main job of researching and
interpreting the American Negro has been taken over by the
Jewish intelligentsia to the extent where it is practically impossible for the
Negro to deal with the Anglo-Saxon majority in this country unless he first
comes to the Jews to get his “instructions.”5

Meanwhile, Cruse argues, average black people had a very different relationship
with Jews, one based generally on economic exploitation. That was in part
because Jews, for all their protestations of victimization, nevertheless managed
to rise within the American system to enjoy both economic and political power
well beyond their numbers. Thus, every insincere plea from Jews that they
shared the plight of blacks fell on deaf ears: “the average Negro is not going to
 HAROLD CRUSE ON BLACKS AND JEWS • 127

buy the propaganda that Negroes and Jews are ‘brother-sufferers’ in the same
boat.” Jews exploited blacks economically, culturally, and politically, and worst
of all, they would not acknowledge they were doing so but instead postured as
generous and altruistic allies.6
In this way, Cruse both explains the deep Jewish involvement with blacks and
civil rights and criticizes it. Yet this is not simple anti-Semitism. Cruse is
admiring of Jewish ability to succeed within a system he acknowledges resisted
that success. Like Marcus Garvey, he calls upon African Americans to take a
lesson from Jews’ cultural and economic nationalism, and to organize as
effectively in the political arena as Zionists did in mobilizing American support
for Israel. “Much more important than developing a critique on Jews, is the
challenge of learning the methods and techniques that the Zionists have
developed in the art of survival against all kinds of odds.”7 If there is anti-
Semitism in his arguments, it lies in an unfortunate tendency to assume that one
Jew speaks for all, that all Jews who act do so in concert or at least with a unified
sense of “Jewish interest” in mind, and that Jewish economic success suggests
there is no concrete reality to American anti-Semitism. But his critique is
otherwise based as much in fact as it is in distortion, and makes sense viewed
from the vantage point of late 1960s nationalist thought. Jews, as the
representatives of white liberal ideology, as the closest allies to moderate black
civil rights organizations, came for Cruse to embody all the limitations and evils
of liberal integrationism. If, to summarize Cruse’s argument in a sentence,
whites and co-opted black intellectuals have constrained black cultural and
artistic expression (a crucial form of black self-definition), and white capitalists
and bedazzled black integrationists have undermined economic and political
nationalism, Jews have served as intermediates and facilitators in every case.8
A look at the historical record suggests that Jews did have a great deal of self-
interest in promoting a civil rights movement based on integration, and they did
indeed turn away from the movement in the 1960s as their self-interest
increasingly conflicted with it. On the other hand, Jewish self-interest was not as
narrowly understood and selfishly implemented as Cruse claims. Furthermore, the
disillusionment of many Jews with the movement by the late 1960s occurred for
many complex reasons. Certainly, Jews had gotten what they needed in terms of
civil rights victories, and certainly they had succeeded in transcending their
disadvantage. But both had happened before the black-Jewish political
relationship had soured. Rather, Jews fled the civil rights coalition as the
movement turned from integration to embrace more nationalist and seemingly
radical goals, goals that flew in the face of the liberalism Jews continued to
endorse. The new movements of the 1960s claimed a nationalism that embraced
Palestinians and excoriated Israel, posited an unbridgeable racial divide that
placed Jews alongside white Protestants in the category of oppressor, and argued
for group-based remedies and fixed identities, both of which denied the
individualist approach of liberal pluralism and reminded Jews of their own
history of discrimination based on group identity.9 All this ensured that
128 • CHERYL GREENBERG

mainstream Jewry, already distrustful of the movement’s increasingly

confrontational style, mass demonstrations, demagogic leadership, and potential
for violence, would continue their withdrawal from the civil rights coalition.
As for Cruse’s accusations that most interactions between African Americans
and Jews occurred within hierarchical economic frameworks and that these, not
the cooperation of elites, defined black-Jewish relations, the truth is more
complex. Jews did operate businesses in black neighborhoods, and served as
teachers, social workers, and building agents there. Whether they exploited their
clients more than other whites did, or only as much, there can be no question that
black people suffered at the hands of Jews. But the antagonism targeted at Jews
exceeded their relative numbers and power, and ultimately shielded those with
true control from attack. Furthermore, Jews were in those neighborhoods
precisely because they were less racist than other whites, who often refused to
work in black areas at all. These economic battles were waged between the poor
and the near poor, while the wealthy absentee owners made their profits.
The Jewish claim that they identify with the plight of African Americans is a
relatively recent phenomenon. Jews were not closely linked to abolitionism, for
example, nor did they disproportionately staff the schools and services of the
Freedmen’s Bureau. Only with the arrival of Eastern European, often leftist,
Jews, do discussions of concern for black people emerge from the pages of
Jewish journals and newspapers. Stemming in part from the sense that as
Europe’s quintessential minority, Jews had insight into the problems of the
quintessential minority of America, it came as well from the heightened anti-
Semitism that Jewish immigration brought. Suddenly Jews in the United States
faced quotas, exclusion, and distrust greater than the generalized pro-Christian
sentiment that had always made them feel vaguely unwelcome. But Jewish
experience with persecution was hardly recent. Massacres, attempted genocide,
political disenfranchisement—none of this was new to them. Because they had
lived it in the past, and because something similar was surfacing in the United
States, Jews believed themselves well placed to recognize the threats racism
posed.
Nevertheless, Jews were also white people in a nation that awarded
opportunity on the basis of skin color. And Jews fought hard to challenge claims
that they themselves constituted a different race from the Europeans who
had emigrated earlier. Judaism was a religion, they insisted, not a racial
category. Thus, each of the defense organizations Jews established to defend
their interests in the early part of the twentieth century—the American Jewish
Committee (AJC), the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), the National
Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith
(ADL)—argued forcefully for full access of Jews to American opportunities and
challenged stereotypes of Jews that portrayed them as the unassimilable other.
And Jews took on the attitudes of their neighbors in large measure, including
their racism. Always tempered by this sense of identity with a similarly
persecuted minority (Jewish journals routinely compared race riots to pogroms
 HAROLD CRUSE ON BLACKS AND JEWS • 129

and Klansmen to Cossacks), Jews did mold their behaviors to fit local custom,
particularly around issues of race. As Everard Hughes of Wilberforce University
argued in the pages of HUC [Hebrew Union College] Monthly in 1943, “The Jew
has almost divorced himself from identity with the Negro as a minority fellow
traveler. The stigma of race in America has caused the Jew to betray the Negro in
an effort to solidify his own status and thus free Jews from racial stigma.” Every
poll of the time revealed Jews as less racist than their white Christian neighbors,
but no white group could escape some racist feeling, and Jews were no exception.10
This fact, coupled with Jews’ relative powerlessness and political weakness in
the early years of this century, meant that the liberal Jewish defense
organizations remained virtually silent on the question of black civil rights. The
ADL’s founding charter promised “to secure justice and fair treatment to all
citizens alike” but with the exception of several active individuals like Rabbi
Stephen Wise, Justice Louis Brandeis, and Lillian Wald, or those involved with
the Communist or Socialist Parties, Jews as a community did not involve
themselves formally in any civil rights struggle until the NCJW voted to support
a federal antilynching law in 1935. Most Jews, as the ADL’s Philip Frankel put
it in 1942, were reluctant to become involved with a people “whose difficulties…
are even more deplorable than our own” and were considered even more to be
outsiders than Jewswere.11
Instead, Jewish agencies spent most of the first third of the century fighting the
anti-Semitism that constrained their economic and social choices, and advocating
pluralism as an antidote to “100 percent Americanism” and similar pressures to
abandon their own ethnoreligious culture. This pluralism advocated public
equality for individuals and private celebration of cultural difference. Deeply
liberal in its commitment to individual rights and freedom of choice, it was also
assimilationist in its faith that beneath the worthy differences among cultural and
religious groups lay a fundamental unity of belief in democracy, brotherhood,
and liberal moral values. This commitment to pluralism allowed Jews to support
public equality for black people as well as for themselves, but it did mask the
fierce ethnic nationalism of most Jews with a public rhetoric of
cosmopolitanism.12
To improve their economic condition, many immigrant Jews turned
to entrepreneurship and civil service, two of the few avenues to success open to
them in an openly anti-Semitic era. Where their numbers warranted, they formed
trade unions to improve their condition. More willing than other whites to live
near black people, they maintained their businesses as blacks moved into their
neighborhoods, and more readily accepted black coworkers into Jewish-led
unions. German Jews had already moved into retail niches in the South as well as
the North. Newly middle-class Jewish housewives hired black domestic workers
in northern cities. Ironically, then, Jewish economic involvement with African
Americans arose because they were less racist than other whites, but the relations
between the two were almost always hierarchical and therefore created tensions
that would not otherwise have existed. And many of these Jewish store owners,
130 • CHERYL GREENBERG

teachers, labor leaders and landlords, more racist than their public rhetoric
implied, were exploitative and distrustful of black people. To take one
remarkably candid example, during a meeting of Jewish Harlem merchants
called by the ADL in 1943 to help soothe tensions between blacks and Jews, one
merchant insisted, “Negroes wouldn’t go into a business if they couldn’t steal
from us.” Another agreed. “The solution [to black grievances] is education of the
Negro…. A landlord in Harlem has to charge more rent because he can’t get
responsible tenants.”13
In the south, these tensions were particularly acute. Jews there, fearful of anti-
Semitism, made every effort to fit into the local, racist culture. As Harry Golden,
Jewish writer and longtime southern resident noted, “Primarily the Jews of the
South reflect to a large extent the mores, the hopes, the politics, and even the
prejudices of the society around them.” This extended quite naturally to business
relations. A 1945 Carolina Times story lambasting Jewish racist and unfair
business practices concluded that Jews did so “to impress that they are one in
intent and spirit with the Southern white in denying Negroes the chance to spend
their money on a basis of equality.” The ADL’s Committee on Labor Relations
put it bluntly: “As far as the [southern] Negro is concerned, Jews represent
exploitation.” Even after northern-based Jewish organizations joined the civil
rights struggle, southern Jews continued to treat black customers and employees
according to the dictates of Jim Crowism.14
If rank-and-file Jews did not shift their views appreciably on the race question,
the same was not true of their defense agencies. In the 1930s, the threat of
Nazism motivated organized Jewry to rethink its strategies. Fearful of offering
anti-Semites a platform, Jewish groups had worked quietly and behind the scenes
to challenge discrimination and bigotry. Unwilling to go public or to take on the
problems of others, they had resisted coalitions although African American civil
rights organizations—the National Urban League (NUL), the NAACP, and the
National Association of Colored Women (NACW), among others—had long
been fighting similar problems. With the exception of black and Jewish women’s
groups, whose history of cooperation dated back to the teens and twenties, the
mainstream organizations of the two communities had not yet worked together in
any sustained way, although their battles had certainly overlapped. But
the rescue of European Jewry and the danger of Hitler-like demagoguery in this
country were both greater challenges than the Jewish community could take on
alone. As the Left had already done, they reached out to potential allies. African
Americans, engaged in their own campaign to promote racial justice at home,
saw this as an opportunity. In response to a Jewish request in 1938 to support the
rescue of Jewish refugees, Walter White of the NAACP telegraphed Secretary of
State Cordell Hull:

AMERICAN NEGROES APPLAUD ACTION OF UNITED STATES

GOVERNMENT…IN OFFERING HAVEN TO JEWISH POLITICAL
REFUGEES…. WE SHARE…INDIGNATION AT THE OUTRAGES
 HAROLD CRUSE ON BLACKS AND JEWS • 131

BEING PERPETRATED UPON MINORITIES BY THE NAZI

GOVERNMENT. BUT WE WOULD BE EVEN MORE ENTHUSIASTIC
IF OUR GOVERNMENT COULD BE EQUALLY INDIGNANT AT
THE LYNCHING, BURNING ALIVE AND TORTURE…OF
AMERICAN CITIZENS BY AMERICAN MOBS ON AMERICAN SOIL
WHICH HAVE SHAMED AMERICA BEFORE THE WORLD FOR A
MUCH LONGER TIME THAN PERSECUTION UNDER ADOLF
HITLER.15

Out of such cooperative efforts emerged a more substantial political partnership.

It was slow to emerge. Supported by the Left (and later, by leftists who
abandoned the Communist Party and joined liberal black and Jewish civil rights
organizations), the NAACP, NUL, NACW, NCJW, ADL, AJC, AJCongress, and
two newer organizations, the Jewish Labor Committee and the National Council
of Negro Women, joined forces in the battles for civil rights, civil liberties,
social welfare programs, immigration, and economic and foreign policy. These
struggles took place on the local, state, and federal levels, and in many cases
moved beyond issues of direct self-interest. Coalitions of black and Jewish
organizations lobbied Congress, testified in hearings, proposed planks for both
Republican and Democratic party conventions, demanded investigation of
racially or religiously motivated violence, wrote anti-Klan legislation, and used
court challenges and journalistic exposées to force desegregation of playgrounds,
housing projects, restaurants, private hospitals, medical associations, and sports
clubs. They pressured for a continuation of the Fair Employment and Practices
Commission (FEPC) and lobbied United Nations delegates to support the
creation of the state of Israel.16
A firm and shared belief in the promise of liberalism motivated this political
collaboration, and the awareness that any outbreak of bigotry posed a danger to
both groups. The Holocaust had proven that to Jews, and African Americans
faced their vulnerability every day. “The Negro has to be ever mindful that as
much as the Jew may be hated in America,” observed Hubert Delany, “when it
comes to real oppression the Negro is going to be in the forefront of the Jews,
make no mistake about it, and he knows it…. We know that we are going into
the Harlem River one step ahead of you.”17
The liberalism they both supported rested on several crucial assumptions that
would later seem a betrayal to many black people. Liberalism posited as its goal
the freedom of the individual. As such, it was antinationalist and procapitalist,
and rejected any form of group-based remedies. Liberals believed that the state
could—and should—play a role in guaranteeing individual freedom, but did not
see the enforcement of group interests or the dismantling of existing social or
economic structures as appropriate activities. Assuming the basic soundness of
the existing system once properly tweaked and prodded, liberals were reluctant
to alter rules not directly and explicitly in violation of individual equality. They
believed in working within the confines of a basically ethical and democratic
132 • CHERYL GREENBERG

system, and hesitated before pressing for federal enforcement of unpopular laws,
preferring to wait for recalcitrant whites to come around. Neither blacks nor Jews
on the whole believed in the desirability of full assimilation in the sense of loss of
private identity, but few save the nationalists in both communities (Nation of
Islam and Garveyites among black folks, Zionists among Jews) considered that
identity one’s fixed and dominant descriptor, endorsed public displays of that
identity, or considered separatism an appealing solution.
By every measure the majority of American blacks and Jews genuinely
believed in this liberalism. Nevertheless, their collaborative political efforts on
behalf of a liberal civil rights vision coexisted alongside the continued economic
tensions between individual blacks and Jews in both the North and the South.
And many Jews who had finally succeeded economically behaved in as racist a
way as their gentile neighbors. After all, liberalism did not require social
integration; one could endorse equal rights for all individuals and still never have
a single equal relationship with a person of a different religion or race. In 1960
Nathan Edelstein of the AJCongress spoke candidly about the persistence of
longstanding black-Jewish tensions:

Despite the deep commitment of Jewish community relations agencies and

their genuine efforts to reach and teach equality, there is a wide and
alarming gap between the leadership and the rank and file in the Jewish
community; and in the Negro community too….
Prominent Negroes have been excluded from predominantly Jewish
clubs…. When Negroes start to move into predominantly Jewish areas,
they often encounter resentment. Genuine social acceptance by Jews is at a
minimum, and, generally, we find the usual fear, panic and flight to the
suburbs. In such situations Jews act, in the main, like other whites.18

Even on the elite political level, cooperation was not without its tensions. Jewish
leaders acted in paternalistic ways toward their black colleagues. They often
appointed themselves representatives of or spokespeople for black interests.19 But
there were more structural problems as well. Having made it under the prevailing
system, Jews were far more loath to challenge the status quo than were many
blacks. With the image of Hitler ever in their minds, they distrusted mass
movements and leaders who motivated their followers through rhetoric. They
therefore feared the more confrontational of civil rights tactics, and tried to keep
their distance from all but the most moderate of black leaders. For example, most
Jewish (as well as other white and sometimes even black) liberals opposed
A.Philip Randolph’s 1948 call for draft resistance and the proposal to seat the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in place of the traditional delegation at
the 1964 Democratic National Convention; they avoided involvement with Paul
Robeson or even Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Jewish organizations counseled
against the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation (as did the NAACP) and several
initially thought the sit-in efforts misguided. The ADL’s report on the latter,
 HAROLD CRUSE ON BLACKS AND JEWS • 133

subtitled, “The Negro Revolt,” began with a warning about the “increasing
militancy, the threat to replace the NAACP as the leading Negro organization”
and the likelihood that “some actions to be taken by Negro organizations and
people…will be distasteful to some segments of the white community.” Despite
its conclusion that “ADL has a responsibility to do what it can to accelerate the
drive toward equality,” the report revealed the ADL’s unease and its fear that the
movement had been taken over by radicals.20
And there was far less need for Jews to employ such dramatic tactics. Anti-
Semitism had retreated to the margins of society, and for most Jews, once formal
barriers to race and religion were dismantled it was relatively easy to pass.
Racism, however, was not marginal, and passing was not an option available to
most black people. If civil rights strategies to that point had not produced equal
opportunity for black people, it was time to consider new approaches. Groups
like Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) began experimenting with more confrontational
methods, and while young Jews flocked to these organizations, their more
moderate parents in Jewish organizations cringed. Still, in the early 1960s even
SNCC and CORE remained firmly liberal in their goals, devoted to individual
opportunity and to integration fully realized, eager to join rather than to
dismantle the American political and economic system.
By the mid 1960s it appeared to many that these liberal efforts had either
failed or succeeded on paper without bringing any real change for black
American life chances. In 1964 Freedom Summer brought white people into
Mississippi because the media covered whites, not blacks. In other words, the
very premise of the summer revealed the limits of the existing system. During
those months tensions emerged between college-educated, northern white
students with no experience and local black activists. In searching for the bodies
of missing white activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner (along with
their black partner James Chaney), the FBI dredged up scores of black bodies
from nearby rivers whose murders had never been investigated. And the
culmination of that summer, a delegation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party intent on replacing those delegates elected in a white-only primary, were
denied their seats, a decision supported by civil rights groups’ traditional white
(and even some black) allies. Once again, the political system had proven
impervious to black demands. Liberals had betrayed them.
When the civil rights struggle moved north to meet fierce white resistance,
when SNCC and even Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and
Martin Luther King Jr. came out against the Vietnam War and alienated white
liberals who still supported Johnson’s policies, and as the War on Poverty and
similar programs lost funding and support, the division between liberals and civil
rights activists hardened. Groups like the National Urban League continued to
press for liberal change, aided by Jewish civil rights organizations. But most
black activists had moved on. Emboldened by the confrontational, nationalist
rhetoric of people like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton and
134 • CHERYL GREENBERG

others, and frustrated by the inability of civil rights victories to bring any real
change to their lives, black ghettos burned, SNCC and CORE expelled whites,
and the Black Panther Party armed its followers with guns, breakfasts, black
history, and militancy.
It was not just liberals, but liberalism that these activist nationalists found
flawed. Liberalism was a failed ideology, and integration not only unachievable
but undesirable. As Malcolm X insisted, “the real criminal is the white man who
poses as a liberal—the political hypocrite…. You are not poor accidentally. He
maneuvers you into poverty…. There is nothing about your condition here in
America that is an accident.”21 Carmichael reminded his audience that black
liberals were as much at fault as whites, and insisted that the liberal goal of
integration must be repudiated and nationalism embraced in its place. Black and
white integrationists, he argued, labored under the misapprehension that “in the
context of present-day America, the interests of black people are identical with
the interests of certain liberal, labor, and other reform groups.” This belief was a
myth. Carmichael and Hamilton commented, “The values of this society support
a racist system; we find it incongruous to ask black people to adopt and support
most of those values. We also reject the assumption that the basic institutions of
this society must be preserved. The goal of black people must not be to
assimilate into middle-class America for that class—as a whole—is without a
viable conscience…. The values of that class do not lead to the creation of an
open society…. Black people must redefine themselves, and only they can
do that”.22
The rejection of liberalism included a rejection of its individualist focus.
Protecting individual rights would never be sufficient to overcome discrimination
long enshrined in the essentialized categories of the racial state. Institutionalized
racism and the devotion of white people to a group identity that protected them
and excluded those of non-European descent meant that racism could only be
overcome by remedies that addressed that group identity explicitly. In the words
of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, “in order to get beyond racism, we
must first take account of race.”23 Running directly counter not only to liberalism
but to pluralism, this argument for group identity and community-based
remedies, including reparations and numerical quotas, fed nationalist sentiment
and posited the primacy of one’s fixed and single racial identity. In other words,
it privileged race over other identities such as gender, sexuality, class, or politics;
repeated the arguments of white racists that one black ancestor made one fully
and exclusively black; and insisted that a fixed and unbridgeable gap separated
all whites from all nonwhites. If such was the case, and white actions to that point
had certainly suggested it might be, then the only hope for black people was a
retreat inward, to build a powerful base from which to make demands of the
white power structure. This base had to be economic because in a capitalist
system only economic independence guaranteed power and freedom from
control, but it also had to be social and cultural, a means of self-definition that
did not begin from the premises of the oppressor. Without a clear identity
 HAROLD CRUSE ON BLACKS AND JEWS • 135

defined from within, the community could not articulate or even imagine what
those demands to be made of the power structure might be.
It is into this moment of despair, nationalism, and rage that Cruse wrote his
book. It grounds his repudiation of liberalism and the white Left, his
commitment to group rather than individual rights, and his conviction that only a
full nationalist program could solve black people’s problems.24 And his views of
Jews, or more properly, his view of the relationship between blacks and Jews,
must similarly be understood as a product of this tumultuous period. Jews, once
allies in the struggle for civil rights, had left the coalition—moderates because
they were alienated by its radicalism, leftists because they had been radicalized
to see their own oppression and had moved to the antiwar, women’s and student
movements.25 Furthermore, the victories that coalitions of liberal blacks and
Jews had won seemed empty and their goal of integration suspect. Jews thus
became both betrayers and false prophets, the embodiment of the failed liberal
promise. Finally, because Jews had benefitted from civil rights successes and the
decline of overt and legal discrimination but had not brought African Americans
with them, their role in the movement was reconceived as one motivated purely
by a manipulative self-interest. After all, while African American and Jewish
American elites and intellectuals struggled for their liberal ideals, on the ground
Jews displayed little more sensitivity to the needs of black people than did other
whites, concerning themselves only with protecting their class and social
status.26 By this reading, Jews had betrayed their ostensible allies and their own
rhetoric of equality, and black intellectuals had betrayed their people.
The “golden age” of a black-Jewish alliance never existed. Nevertheless,
political collaboration among the liberal and leftist organizations in both
communities did produce substantial victories for legal equality. Those victories
fell far short of the creation of a truly egalitarian society, and clearly aided some
individuals and some communities more than others. Blacks and Jews who
labored in those coalitions obviously had a spacious understanding of self-
interest that presumed that only by securing the equality of all groups could
one’s own rights be assured. Nevertheless, this was still self-interest, and when it
ran counter to prevailing civil rights sentiments—be they liberal, nationalist, or
radical—self-interest won out. Jews thus could build an ethnic base,
stress intragroup unity, and still espouse integration and reject nationalism. They
could embrace a civil rights rhetoric and act as white members of a racist
society. And black activists could support the creation of the state of Israel when
it represented the right of an oppressed people to self-determination, and
withdraw that support when it represented the white hand of imperialism
oppressing nonwhite people. They could admire Jews’ ability to triumph over a
restrictive system, and criticize their collusion with it. To the extent that
liberalism still exists, the coalition of liberal black and Jewish organizations
continues to operate, albeit currently engaged chiefly in fighting a rearguard
action. To the extent that economic and cultural nationalism continue to appear
the best hope to many in a devastated black community, Jews will continue to
136 • CHERYL GREENBERG

represent the enemy in all its manifestations. Both the truths and the distortions of
Cruse’s observations about “Jews and Negroes” remain salient in our own time.

Notes

1. See, for example, Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York:
William Morrow, 1967), 484.
2. See, for example, Cruse, Crisis, 168–69. And in addition “One cannot deny the
horror of the European Jewish holocaust, but for all practical purposes (political,
economic and cultural), as far as Negroes are concerned, Jews have not suffered in
the United States” (483, emphasis in original). Cruse objected further that Jews
should not complain about anti-Semitism if they were themselves racist. Cruse’s
presumption that given economic advancement Jews’ fear of persecution was
unfounded displays a lack of understanding of the real and lasting power of anti-
Semitism.
3. See, for example, Crisis, 109, 260–61, 497, 516 (control of black life); 137–38, 152
(Jews in Communist Party and retention of nationalism); 147–48,158–63 (the
Communist Party and Jewish control). For “arrogant,” see 148; For “Negro issues,”
see 169. Elsewhere, oddly, Cruse demonstrates his claim that Jews distanced
themselves from blacks and civil rights concerns by describing Jewish non-
involvement in issues of concern to blacks from the nineteenth through the early
twentieth century, then skipping directly to Norman Podhoretz’s 1965 anti-civil
rights article as if nothing had happened between those two dates (478–80).
4. Cruse, Crisis, 111. Cruse is primarily arguing from a nationalist perspective; his
central point here is that without an ethnic identity, these integrationist black
intellectuals had no basis for defending black cultural production. This chapter’s
focus on black-Jewish relations prevents much discussion of Cruse’s scathing
critique of black intellectuals. For Cruse, the point of delegitimizing Jews’ role in
black cultural and political life was precisely to liberate black intellectuals from the
integrationist prison he believed they were in. He blamed Jews (and whites
generally) for manipulating black people less than he did black intellectuals who
acquiesced in their own exploitation. That is, it is crucial to remember that for
Cruse, if not for this chapter, an analysis of the Jewish role in black life was not an
end in itself.
5. Cruse, Crisis, 260, emphasis in the original. He said the same for Jews and African
Americans in the Communist Party: “American Negroes never achieved, or were
not allowed to, what other organized national groups achieved within the
Communist Left…. But they allowed Jewish leaders…to become experts on the
Negro problem in America” (57).
6. See, for example, Cruse, Crisis, 477, 488–89, 495–97. For “sufferers,” see 483.
According to Cruse these pleas were insincere not only because Jews were really
interested in promoting themselves but also because Jews themselves admitted they
had “made it” and were social and economic insiders in America. He cited Rabbi
Arthur Hertzberg’s analysis in 1965 that American Jews “were no longer among
the ‘have-nots’ but associated with the ‘haves’” (480). Certainly the vast majority of
Jews had made it into the middle class and beyond by the 1960s, although they
continued to support liberal causes and Democratic candidates long after their
 HAROLD CRUSE ON BLACKS AND JEWS • 137

pocketbook interests suggested they shift toward conservatism and the Republican
Party. See, for example, Nathan Glazer, “The American Jew and the Attainment of
Middle-Class Rank: Some Trends and Explanations,” in The Jews: Social Patterns
of an American Group, ed. Marshall Sklare (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958),
138–46; Sidney Goldstein, “American Jewry 1970: A Demographic Profile,” in
American Jewish Yearbook 1971, Ed. Morris Fine and Milton Himmelfarb
(Philadelphia: American Jewish Committee, 1971). In earlier years, most Jews who
lived and worked in black neighborhoods, while better off than those they served,
were certainly not among the well-to-do; primarily this was a case of the near-poor
servicing (and sometimes exploiting) the poor. See below.
7. Cruse, Crisis, 490. Of course, Cruse had just spent a good part of those previous
490 pages developing such a critique.
8. Of course, most of Cruse’s blame is on these black intellectuals; since he theorizes
that The relationship between groups in America “are actuated by the power
principle, not by morality and compassion for the underdog classes” (494), he
cannot blame Jews for using their power. It is black intellectuals’ fault they allowed
Jews to get away with it. Nonetheless, he is also criticizing Jews here, who, he
alleges, couch their interest in civil rights in altruistic terms but are in fact coldly
political and self-interested in their commitment to it.
In terms of art, for example, “more often than not, it is a collaboration between
WASPs and Jews, on high levels, against the Negro” (105), See also 515. Cruse
spends a great deal of time exploring Jewish exploitation of African Americans in
the arts—“In 1967 the Negro entertainer is still being used, manipulated, and
exploited by whites (predominantly Jewish whites),” (109)—but since Jeffrey
Melnick in this volume discusses black-Jewish relations in cultural production I
will not consider it further here. Instead, I will focus on the liberal Jewish
establishment and its relationship with civil rights. The vast majority of Jews in the
twentieth century identified themselves in terms of liberalism (particularly during
the era of the Red Scare) and liberal Jewish agencies were the largest organizations
in the community. Generally driven by membership, they tried hard to reflect the
attitudes of their constituents, and so are good reflections of public Jewish
sentiment on these questions. As for the communist Left, again Cruse criticizes Jews
in part because blacks and Jews competed for the same space as “the two most
prominent groups involved in [Communist Party] politics.” (161). While Jews did
appoint themselves in some sense mentors or spokespeople for African Americans,
a problematic and arrogant positioning (as Cruse notes, for example, on 57–58,
147–51, 158–70), this also demonstrates that Jews showed more interest in black
people than other white communists generally showed at all. As with Jewish
economic involvement in black neighborhoods, Jews’ greater commitment to
questions of race left them vulnerable to criticism on how they handled that
commitment.
9. The United States was to be a “nation of nations” (565), Cruse explained, and that
is how every white group has risen in this country—through ethnic nationalism. But
the United States retreated from that promise, and the twentieth-century civil rights
movement bought into those changed terms, claiming America’s highest ideal was
the protection of individuals. Thus black nationalism, or indeed any community-
based organizing, was thereby rendered illegitimate, which undermined the
possibility for true black equality. No other group succeeded without some form of
138 • CHERYL GREENBERG

nationalism, yet blacks were being asked to do so, and black intellectuals never
even noticed. And Jews were hypocritical in their use of nationalism for their own
rise, and their subsequent insistence on individualism and rejection of nationalism
when it came to black civil rights, both in the Communist Party and in the liberal
civil rights movement.
For Anti-Israel sentiments, see 487, 490; Cruse argued, correctly, that American
Jews identified closely with Israel. But his criticism of Israel came out of a
radicalized, internationalized left in the 1960s that had embraced the liberation
struggles of “third world” peoples because of their belief of the unity of experience
of all people of color. This leftist embrace of the Palestinians was matched by a
Cold War-inspired Republican embrace of Israel, America’s most staunch and
reliable Mideast ally. This helped drive Jews from the Left, and open the possibility
of an at least occasional and strategic alliance with the Right. Further intensifying
the divisions between blacks and Jews, then, was their commitment to opposing
sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Cruse’s criticism of Zionists and Israel came
directly from this international left sensibility regarding the unity of oppressed
nonwhite peoples suffering under the domination of imperialist whites.
10. Everard Hughes, “The Question of the Month: the Negro-Jewish Problem,” HUC
Monthly, April 1943, 9. The fact of this article, and indeed a flurry of interest in the
black-Jewish relationship in both Jewish and black publications in 1943, points to
the shift in thinking among Jewish leadership about the importance of coalition
building (see below) as much as it reveals the lack of such a commitment among
the rank and file. Progressive Jews had been commenting on Jewish racism for
decades. Harry Golden, the Southern Jewish writer, commented in 1956 that “The
Jew tends to reflect the attitudes of the majority, wherever he can” see Golden
AJCongress 1956 National Convention, Panel: “Integration: The Position of the
Jewish Community in the South,” transcript, 73, AJCongress papers, “National
Conventions 54–58,” AJCongress Library, New York. For a more laudatory
evaluation of the early decades of the twentieth century, see Hasia Diner, In the
Almost Promised Land (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977). For poll data, see,
for example, H.L.Lurie, “Introductory Report of the Study Project of Negro-Jewish
Relations,” December 9, 1943, AJC Vertical File (VF): “Negro Jewish Relations
(NJR): AJCongress,” AJCongress library, New York; “Anti-Semitism among
Negroes,” Editorial, Crisis (June 1938): 177 (which insisted most black anti-
Semitism was based on class resentment); Eleanor Wolf, Vin Loving, and Donald
Marsh, “Some Aspects of Negro-Jewish Relationships in Detroit, Michigan, Part
1,” 1943; report prepared at Wayne State University, with grants from the Detroit
chapter of the NAACP and Jewish Community Council of Detroit, ADL
microfilm, “Yellows 1944: Negro Race Problems” (hereafter Y 1944 NRP), ADL
library, New York; Eleanor Wolf, Vin Loving and Donald Marsh, Negro-Jewish
Relationships, pamphlet, Wayne State Studies in Intergroup Conflicts in Detroit
no. 1, 1944, AJC Inactive VF: NJR; Elmo Roper, “The Fortune Survey,” Fortune,
January 1936, April and November 1939, November 1942, 1943, October 1947;
“Confidential Report…Trend of Semitic Question,” March 1944, AJC VF: Public
Opinion Polls; Earl Dickerson to Walter White, July 5, 1938, NAACP papers, box
I C 208, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.; James
Robinson, “Some Apprehension, Much Hope,” ADL Bulletin, December 1957, 4;
 HAROLD CRUSE ON BLACKS AND JEWS • 139

L.D.Reddick, “Anti-Semitism among Negroes,” Negro Quarterly, Summer 1942,

113–17.
11. For antilynching laws, see NCJW and NCJ Juniors, National Committee on
Legislation, “Social Betterment through Legislation,” Social Legislation no. 3,
NCJW papers, box 142. “The Call: A Lincoln Emancipation Conference,” February
12, 1909, became the basis for the NAACP and was cosigned by several prominent
Jews including Rabbis Emil Hirsch and Stephen Wise, and Lillian Wald. Philip
Frankel to Richard Gutstadt, ADL, September 2, 1943, ADL Y 1943 NRP. On
noninvolvement, see Alfred Bernheim [?—illegible] to Mr. Lurie, 29 October 1943,
ADL Y 1943 NRP: “[I]t has been felt that combating Semitism is our major task
and that, excepting insofar as anti-Negro feeling relates to that task, it is not
directly in our field of operations. Accordingly, the AJC has not done very much
directly to further the cause of the Negroes.”
12. Despite the fact that most Jews of the period advocated full participation in civic
life, and opposed all forms of discrimination and segregation based on race or
religion, as late as the 1950s sociologists like Marshall Sklare documented a Jewish
social and communal life lived almost exclusively among other Jews. (This
applied, of course, only to areas with reasonably sized Jewish populations.)
Nevertheless, it is a sharp reminder of the differences between rhetoric and behavior
that Cruse criticized. Both newcomer Eastern European Jews and long-established
German and Sephardic Jews struggled against anti-Semitism and the pressures of
assimilationists. The flood of the former had increased discrimination and social
ostracism of all Jews, whether immigrant or resident, established and wealthy or
poor and unacculturated.
13. Transcript, Committee on Interracial Relations, 9 December 1943, ADL Y 1943
NRP.
14. Harry Golden, “Jews of the South,” [AJ] Congress Weekly 18 (1951): 11. Dan
Gardner, “Plain Talk,” Carolina Times, May 28, 1945, 4. On the ADL, see Charles
Sherman to Richard Gutstadt, Ben Epstein, William Sachs, members of the
Committee on Labor Relations, Memorandum re “Conditions in the South,” 23
April 1946, p. 4, ADL Y 1946 NRP. There are many examples of black protest of
Southern Jewish exploitation, and the Jewish establishment’s mixed responses
about it, on the one hand defending these merchants as having little choice but to
follow local custom, and on the other pressuring local Jews to improve. There are
also examples of southern Jews pressuring their national organizations to slow down
or stop their civil rights activities. For more detail see Cheryl Greenberg, “The
Southern Jewish Community and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” in African
Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century, Ed. V.P. Franklin, Nancy Grant,
Harold Kletnick, and Genna Rae McNeil (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
Press, 1998), 123–64.
15. Walter White to Cornell Hull, Telegram, March 25, 1938, NAACP box IC 208. See
also George Schuyler, “Abuses of Colored Citizens in U.S.,” World-Telegram,
November 21, 1938; White to Franklin Roosevelt, 14 September 1940, NAACP II
A 325; NAACP, “Sen. King, Sorry for Jews, Urged to Support Federal Anti-lynch
Bill,” press release, 18 November 1938. For women’s groups, see the papers of
NCJW and NCNW, for example, for the many instances of close contact. For more
detail see Cheryl Greenberg, “Our Politics, Ourselves: Gender and the History of
140 • CHERYL GREENBERG

Black-Jewish Relations,” paper presented at Connecticut History Seminar,

March 1995.
16. The papers of the various agencies are filled with these and other joint programs.
See also Greenberg, “Ambivalent Allies,” in Black Resistance Movements in the
United States and Africa ed. Felton Best (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press,
1995), 159–194; and “Negotiating Coalition: Black and Jewish Civil Rights
Agencies in the Twentieth Century,” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards A
History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Cornel West and Jack
Salzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 153–76.
17. Hubert Delany, address to the 1956 AJCongress National Convention panel, “The
Position of the Jewish Community in the South,” 62.
18. Nathan Edelstein, “Jewish Relationship with the Emerging Negro Community in the
North,” Address to NJCRAC, 23 June 1960, p. 5, AJC VF: NJR.
19. On representatives, see, for example, Herbert Hill, “Blacks and Jews: The Labor
Context,” Paper presented at Blacks and Jews: An American Historical
Perspective, conference, Washington University, December 3,1993; revised and
reprinted in Grant, et al., African Americans and Jews. Examples of paternalism,
unfortunately, abound. For internal analyses and critiques see, for example, Walter
White to “Jewish Leaders,” Confidential memorandum, December 1, 1947, marked
“cancel ww,” NAACP II A 325; Walter White to Will Maslow, AJCongress,
December 10, 1947, NAACP II A 360; Kenneth Clark, “Candor about Negro-
Jewish Relations,” Commentary, February 1946, Leonard Finder, ADL, to Col. A.
Ralph Steinberg, June 11,1943, ADL Y 1943 NRP; Shad Polier, AJCongress
Convention Panel, “The Struggle for Economic and Social Equality,” 1946, 32–33,
AJCongress papers: “Relatively speaking, we [Jews] are a much more privileged
group, and like all privileged groups…we tend, consciously or unconsciously to
slip into an attitude of superiority.”
20. Journey: Led by CORE to test the 1946 Supreme Court decision finding segregated
travel unconstitutional, the Journey of Reconciliation was a precursor to the 1961
Freedom Rides. On the opposition, see Samuel Markle to William Sachs,
December 28,1946; George Harrison to J.Harold Saks, memorandum, March 20,
1947,2; Sol Rabkin to George Houser, November 13, 1947; all ADL Y 1947: NRP.
See also “Negroes Cautioned on Resistance Idea,” New York Times, November 23,
1946, p. 17 (re NAACP). On the “Revolt,” see ADL, “Fact Sheet II: The Negro
Revolt,” January 1,1963,1,2, ADL “chisub” micro reel 12. The ADL suggested the
sitins were not worth the risk strategically: “The increasing militancy…do[es] not
necessarily result in better overall strategy…. One wonders whether the
tremendous effort put into the Albany movement, which has achieved little so far,
could better have been spent in trying to register Negroes [for the vote],” 1. On
Powell: “A.Clayton Powell is nothing more or less than a rough and tumble
politician, with all the earmarks of an up and coming demagogue.” Abe Rosenfeld
to Leonard Finder, ADL, July 22,1942, ADL Y 1942 NRP (note the early date of
this conclusion). The ADL distrusted Randolph well before his call for draft
resistance: “The danger of our working with a man like Randolph is that he is
considered extremely left-wing.” Gutstadt to Leonard Finder, September 14,1942.
Also see Gutstadt to Finder, September 8,1942; Finder to Gutstadt, September;
Leonard Finder to Paul Richman, September 2, 1942; Richman to Finder,
September; September 4; all in ADL Y 1942 NRP. Similar sentiments about others
 HAROLD CRUSE ON BLACKS AND JEWS • 141

considered them “Communistic,” “left-wing,” and so on. This, of course, reflects

the anticommunism that pervaded liberal civil rights organizations of the period,
and their terror of dealing with those who would taint them with a red brush.
21. Quoted in James Cone, Martin and Malcolm in America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
1991), 89.
22. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power (New York: Vintage,
1967), 37 (redefine), 40 (middle-class values), 60 (liberals); emphasis in the
original.
23. University of California Regents v. Bakke 438 U.S. 265 (1978). For an analysis of
the shift to group rights, see Lewis Killian, “Black Power and White Reactions:
The Revitalization of Race-Thinking in the United States” Annals 454 (1981): 42–
54; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 2d.
ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994) p. 20; Milton Gordon, “Models of Pluralism,”
Annals 454 (1981): 178–88. Of course the idea of group rights is not new. It can be
dated back to slavery, the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, the Gentlemen’s Agreement,
and other examples of the elevation of white rights.
24. On liberals and the left, “if it is true that white liberals have exercised a pernicious,
corrupting effect on Negro organizations, the role of white leftwingers…has
definitely been no better”; Cruse, Crisis, 199. On group rights: “At its roots this
American nationality problem is a group power problem, an interethnic group
power play” 260; (see also 565); on an antiliberal nationalism: “Because the Negro
movement is so American, it is heir to all the persuasions of the American myth of
racial democracy. Integration and assimilation have all to do with individuals but
very little to do with ethnic groups. Therefore the logic of self-defense necessitates
the group consolidation of the Negro for that very purpose. But ethnic group
unification for self-defense must also carry with it the logical commitment to
economic, political, and cultural unification which is the very opposite of individual
tendencies toward integration and assimilation” (397).
25. Moderate Jews left the coalition also because anti-Semitism had waned enough to
allow them to feel more secure in America, because many black activists had
embraced the Palestinians in a show of racial solidarity, because new concerns like
the fate of Jewry both abroad and in this country emerged as priorities, and because
with civil rights laws on the books and no racial tensions in the all-white suburbs
they had by and large moved into, it appeared to many that little remained to do.
For more on the tensions of this later period see Cheryl Greenberg, “Pluralism and
Its Discontents: The Case of Blacks and Jews,” in Insider/Outsider: American Jews
and Multiculturalism, Eds. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah
Heschel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 55–87.
26. Cruse criticizes black intellectuals because they are too bourgeois and middle class,
and thus out of step with the real issues facing black people. See, for example,
Crisis, 169–70. Perhaps part of Cruse’s anger about Jews similarly comes from the
fact that black-Jewish relations were relatively good at those elite levels but much
worse at the mass level.
142
 7
Narrating Nationalisms
Black Marxism and Jewish Communists through the Eyes
of Harold Cruse*

ALAN WALD

“The radical Left of the 1940s and 1950s was not a movement of
Anglo-Saxons or their ideology. It was an ethnic movement
dominated by Negroes and Jews, and it was the Jews who
ideologically influenced the Negroes.”
—Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 1967

From Crusade to Crisis

In the fall of 1947, left-wing African-American novelist Chester Himes endured
a “hurt” that profoundly altered the direction of his literary and personal life.
Prior to that time he felt invigorated by the modest success of his 1945 If He
Hollers Let Him Go, a proletarian novel about racial and sexual tensions in the war-
time Los Angeles workforce. Thus, he looked forward with excitement to the
publication of his new four-hundred-page gut-wrenching sensational
psychological thriller about the association of blacks and Jews in the Communist
movement. The topic anticipates by twenty years a large part of Harold Cruse’s
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), albeit the methods and conclusions
of the two narratives, one marketed as fiction and the other as scholarship, are
notably different. Furthermore, as we commence the new millennium, the
magnitude of curiosity among contemporary scholars and activists about this of
black and Jewish radicalism, and in the inheritance of black Marxism, is
unrivaled by any preceding generation.
Scholars now agree that this novel, The Lonely Crusade, is Himes’s
masterwork.1 It is his most daring self revelation; his attempt to infuse the
dramatic strategies of fictional narrative with a social and philosophical vision
equal to, if not transcending, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940).
Psychologically, The Lonely Crusade is a confessional autobiography;
intellectually, a political and social analysis of racial, gender and ethnic relations
and ideologically, a personal testament of revolutionary faith.
In his two volumes of autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life
of Absurdity (1976), Himes refrains from discussing his four years as a laborer
(1940–44) in Los Angeles, as well as his role as a sometime sympathizer and
144 • ALAN WALD

possibly even brief member of the Communist Party, probably beginning in

Cleveland in the late 1930s and ending in Los Angeles in the early 1940s. He
had, after all, already dramatized his experiences in his first two novels. In later
interviews, he acknowledges that the black and Jewish Communist characters in
The Lonely Crusade are modeled on identifiable Leftists, and the experiences of
protagonist Lee Gordon are based upon his own.2
The Lonely Crusade brought disaster from every quarter. Himes’s wife, Jean,
against Himes’s wishes, secretly read part of the manuscript while they were
staying in a shack on the California-Nevada state line. Believing that she was the
basis of the character Ruth, betrayed wife of Lee Gordon, she fled into the
mountains. Found there hours later in a dazed condition, she declared that the
marriage was over. Himes believed this was a decisive factor in the deterioration
of their relationship, which ended three years later.3
Moreover, sales were less than his first novel (four thousand copies at best, as
opposed to around seven thousand for If He Hollers Letter Him Go), publicity
events were cancelled, and the anticipated hostility from the communist press
was joined by bitter denunciations from black and Jewish publications.4 A quarter
of a century later, meditating on reactions to the risk he had taken in this novel
that frankly confronted “the truth,” Himes wrote, “Of all the hurts which I had
suffered before—my brother’s accident [blindness due to an explosion for which
Himes felt responsible], my own accident [falling down an elevator shaft and
permanently damaging his back], being kicked out of college, my parents’
divorce, my term in prison, and my racial hell on the West Coast—and which I
have suffered since, the rejection of The Lonely Crusade hurt me the most.
Because I had gone out on that limb….5
As a result, Himes decided to leave the United States. He also began suffering
from a five-year writers’ block before reemerging as a novelist more distant from
the radical, proletarian tradition.
A first reading of The Lonely Crusade might appear to confirm Harold Cruse’s
famous argument in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that the post-Depression
Communist movement was at its core a tense alliance of Jewish Americans and
African Americans, the former serving as chief ideologists. In The Lonely
Crusade, the communist movement is presented as the only game in town for
radicalizing black workers, and the leading left-wing philosopher in the book
is the elderly Jewish Communist Party member Abe Rosenberg (“Rosie”). The
most fully developed black Communist, Luther McGregor, appears as a skilled
rank-and-filer who carries out his assignment of befriending Lee Gordon (a
neophyte union organizer attempting to win a pro-union vote among white and
black workers at an aircraft plant), loyally implementing whatever line his
ideologists have determined.6
Moreover, throughout the novel, as is the case in Cruse’s Crisis, where blacks
and Jews are referred to as “The Two Nationalisms,”7 Jews are nearly always
identified by Himes as the most numerous ethnic group in the Communist Left.
Indeed, in the eyes of protagonist Lee Gordon, Jews share many features in terms
 NARRATING NATIONALISMS • 145

of personality that especially fit them for party membership. At one point, in a
line that could have come from Crisis, Lee Gordon declares to Rosie: “You
know, Rosie, you always have the answer. Is it the Jew in you or the
Communist?”8
On the other hand, there are symptomatic divergences. For Himes’s Lee
Gordon, what he views as the “Semitic stereotype” has certain unattractive
physical features, something that Cruse never remotely suggests. Rosie, for
example, is identified as “the picture of the historic Semite” and is said to be
short, fat, with a bald head and “frog-like” body (151). Party functionary Maud
Himmelstein, described as “as Jewish in appearance as the Jewish stereotype,” is
“mannish-appearing,” with a rasping voice and the stub of an arm that jerks
spasmodically (272, 244). Moreover, in arguments with Rosie, Lee Gordon gives
vent to anti-Semitic charges that extend far beyond even the most unpleasant
innuendoes of Crisis. Gordon insists that Jewish greed has confined blacks to
ghettos, Jewish mothers spoil their sons, and Jews are generally more antiblack
than white Christians (152–158, passim).
It is difficult not to be offended by all the ugly statements about Jews that spew
from the lips of Himes’s main character (and the ugly visual images that form in
his mind), and not to be skeptical of the degree of Machiavellian villainy Himes
attributes to the Party.9 Yet The Lonely Crusade ultimately strives to explode
what I call the “group caricature”—the conflation of diverse individuals to a
common behavioral pattern by virtue of ethnicity, “race,” gender, or class—to
which Lee and other characters are held victim.
In fact, as the plot lunges relentlessly through catastrophe after catastrophe,
Rosie steps outside the Jewish stereotype to emerge as the moral center of the
narrative. A devoted party member, Rosie challenges party authority on behalf of
Lee, even though it results in Rosie’s own expulsion. When Lee, facing a police
frame-up for the murder of a racist officer, feels abandoned by all and sinks into
a swamp of despair, Rosie finds him and nurtures him back to life. In the process
Rosie imbues him with the revolutionary Marxist (but non-Communist Party)
philosophy that Lee ultimately appropriates in his own way to allow his
psychological reintegration and his self-determined actions at the climax of
the work.
A parallel evolution occurs in the character of the black communist Luther.
Initially Luther seems to reaffirm two anticommunist stereotypes, that of
the “dupe” and of the cynical manipulator of others. Even worse, Luther’s
appearance, in Lee’s eyes, reproduces the most disgusting white racist
stereotypes that travesty the African American as an “ape” and sex machine (28,
81). However, as the novel gathers steam toward its climax, Luther is revealed as
an individualist first and black nationalist second, with powers of self-control
and native intelligence that outdistance all other characters in the book (318–30).
A strong hint that Lee’s antiblack, anticommunist racist stereotype of Luther is a
naive oversimplification comes earlier in the novel. Luther steps forward to sing
the full text of “Signifyin’ Monkey” before a group of black workers, quelling
146 • ALAN WALD

their disunity and establishing his community links. At the end, he adds on the
significant final statement, “Thass me!” (204).
In sum, the surface narrative of The Lonely Crusade bombards the reader
with ugly, outrageous images of Jews, blacks, communists, and white women.10
But the ideology of the text can be interpreted as a courageous—if highly
problematic—effort to transcend narrow “group caricature,” even while
recognizing the powerful emotional reality of the “dirty hell of race” (369).
Himes depicts Lee Gordon as a black man who successfully transcends the
illusion of finding his masculinity through the sexual conquest of white women.
This transcendence comes about through a combination of bitter experiences,
observation of the actions of his union comrades (especially the heroic Joe Ptak
and the loyal Smittie), and Rosie’s philosophizing, and it occurs in the precise
historical context of the industrialization of the multinational workforce in Los
Angeles. What Lee learns is that authentic dignity and “manhood” can be
acquired by playing a vanguard role in the larger cause of the militant class
struggle, which objectively benefits the short and long-range interests of African
Americans as well.11 In the final scene, the lining of the union against the police
impels every character who identifies with the union, including the racist
president of the local, to unite in protecting Lee from arrest. Even his enemies in
the Communist Party are driven by necessity to join the struggle.
In contrast, Cruse’s Crisis moves in the opposite direction. It commences with
a welcome attempt to render Marxist analysis more sophisticated by shifting
away from mechanistic class explanations toward historical materialist ideas
about the centrality of culture and ethnicity; these latter are adapted from V.F.
Calverton’s refreshing 1920s writings on “cultural compulsives” (cultural
tendencies of collectives) and Milton Gordon’s 1964 Assimilation in American
Life (which views Protestants, Catholics, and Jews as the three main power
groups). Within a short time, however, Cruse reveals himself to be a far greater
prisoner of vulgar “group caricature” regarding the reification of imagined and
exaggerated cultural traits of ethnicities, than the Communist Party ever was in
its reductive use of class analysis.
Moreover, Cruse projects conspiratorial and invidious motives onto his
various targets, who are mainly Jews, Caribbean blacks, and African American
Marxists. Cruse’s view is not merely that “Jews…ideologically influenced the
Negroes” in the Communist Party. In the same paragraph he goes much
further, adding, “Thus the radical Left in America has developed in such a way
that the Jewish ethnic group, one of the smallest in the country, had more
political prestige, wielded more theoretical and organizational power, than the
Negro who in fact represented the largest ethnic minority. Consequently, all
political and cultural standards on the radical Left were in the main established
and enforced by Jews for, and on, Negroes (Crisis, 1967, 516).12
For Cruse’s narrative, the roots of this situation can be traced to the late
1920s. Myriad scholars see the Communist Party in the United States at that time
undergoing a progressive transformation into an increasingly dependent acolyte
 NARRATING NATIONALISMS • 147

of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet foreign policy, following the expulsion of the majority
leadership led by Jay Lovestone, who was associated with Nikolay Bukharin’s
“right opposition” political current in the Soviet Union.13 Cruse, instead, sees the
seeds of destruction in the Party planted by its Caribbean-born black party
members, whose group psychological hangups prevented them from developing
political and cultural leadership. This paved the way for Jewish group control.14

The “Jewish Crusade”

At the time of its publication, Cruse’s Crisis was called “anti-Semitic” by a few
left-wing reviewers such as Black Scholar editor Robert Chrisman, but the
specificities of his treatment of Jewish Communists have never been discussed.15
The charge of anti-Semitism is complicated by Cruse’s eschewing any biological
explanation for Jewish group behavior.16 Besides, Cruse appears to be
recommending that black intellectuals act more like Jews in realizing their
“cultural compulsives.” Further, the use of the term anti-Semitic, courageous on
the part of a radical black reviewer in the context of the late 1960s when there
was a tendency to refrain from sharp public criticism of other militants, may lack
precise meaning today; since then, the term has been employed frequently and
irresponsibly to smear anyone who dares to criticize the Israeli state. What is
more important to establish is that the group caricature aspect of Cruse’s
narrative is methodologically unsound, leading to factual misrepresentations
ultimately deleterious to the assessment of past successes and failures in the
movement to eradicate racism from our society.
For example, while many scholars have remarked on the devoted work, and
the personal risks taken, by communists in their mobilization to defend the
famous “Scottsboro Boys” in Alabama.17 Cruse depicts the campaign only as a
“propaganda windfall.” He then adds that “the importance of this episode goes
far beyond its organizational and propaganda aspects. For, as Quentin Reynolds
once pointed out, it coincided with the exact period in which The Daily Worker
was able to purchase its own printing presses” (148). Yet the source of this
inference of misappropriation of contributions to the Scottsboro defense fund,
many of which came from poor people in Harlem, is groundless. Quentin
Reynolds’s book only contends that some unidentified Harlem leaders
“hinted broadly” that the source of the new party presses was “black donations.”
However, this remark is preceded by the assertion that “No one knows just how
much money was raised by the Communist Party.” In regard to the Daily Worker
presses, Reynolds notes that “there were many who joked about the source which
had supplied the money.” So Reynolds, who documents nothing in his book, is
making it plain that he places no confidence in the allegations, which might
easily be a street witticism or motivated by the envy of a party rival. Moreover,
Reynold’s book has all the features of a crude Cold War anticommunist tract;
one wonders why Cruse doesn’t go all the way and cite Reynolds’s
(undocumented) declaration that it was “certain” that the Communist Party
148 • ALAN WALD

secretly favored the victims receiving the death penalty “because nine young
Negroes executed would be far more useful?”18
Cruse then states that the “true indication” of who really benefited from the
Communist Party policy at the time can be seen in the launching in June 1937 of
a modest monthly magazine called Jewish Life. Thus Cruse “proves,” without
any reliable facts, that Jews promoted a pseudo-antiracism in order to procure
money from blacks to promote their own Jewish nationalism. He thereby
establishes the ideological precept to which his narrative becomes captive.
Even when his contentions contradict other, more dispassionate scholarship
available to him, he selects Jews as a group as being the most devious
communists. For instance, he avows, “The only ones who talked
Americanization but did not fall for it ‘culturally’ were the Communist Jews who
never overlooked a single stratagem for the preservation of Jewish cultural
identity” (152). Of course, abundant evidence exists for a range of attitudes
toward Jewish identity in the Communist Party. Six years before Cruse’s study,
Nathan Glazer published an acclaimed book that considered Communist Jews
and African Americans, a work that is not cited by Cruse. Glazer concedes that
Jews were numerically the largest ethnic group in the Communist Party, but
notes, “Once the diversity of the Jews who entered the Communist Party is
realized, any simple interpretation of the relationship between Jews and the
Communist Party fails.”19 Morris U. Schappes, who functioned for decades as a
Jewish Communist Party cultural leader before his expulsion, insisted in 1970
that the dominant view in the Communist Party was never for ethnic group
survival of Jewish Americans, but what he calls, perhaps with some exaggeration,
“national nihilism.”20
Unfortunately, the “simple” interpretation that Glazer avoided is precisely
what Cruse serves up, spiced with conspiratorial innuendoes. Cruse writes that
“the Jews, with their nationalistic aggressiveness, emerging out of the Eastside
ghettoes…demonstrate through Marxism their intellectual superiority over the
Anglo-Saxon goyim. The Jews failed to make Marxism applicable to anything in
America but their own national-group social ambitions or individual self-
elevation. As a result, the great brainwashing of the Negro radical intellectual
was not achieved by capitalism, or the capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by Jewish
intellectuals in the American Communist Party” (158).
Here again, Cruse, the prisoner of “group caricature” runs roughshod over
elemental facts. Most Jews named by Cruse—those who allegedly strived,
from Jewish nationalist motives, to establish “theoretical dominance over the
Negroes in the interpretation of the Negro Question in the United States”—hailed
from backgrounds and upbringings remote from “Eastside ghettoes.” James
Allen (born Sol Auerbach), depicted by Cruse as an ur-villain for his books and
pamphlets on African American history and politics, was a doctoral candidate at
the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the city where he was raised.
Herbert Aptheker came from a wealthy New York family and earned a doctorate
 NARRATING NATIONALISMS • 149

at Columbia. V.J.Jerome (1895–1965, born Jerome Isaac Romaine) attended high

school in England and studied philosophy at New York University.
In order to establish that these Jews identified as “white,” and saw Marxism as
“a white- (if not Jewish-) created social science [that] had to be ‘taught’ to
Negroes in the manner in which one teaches backward peoples Western
Democracy,” Cruse offers the following rationale: “In Harlem, during the 1949–
51 Negro-white inner-party conflict over white leadership, several white
Communists indignantly replied that ‘it was white people who brought the ideas
of Marxism to Harlem in the first place!’” (158). How does one refute such
evidence if one were not present? Moreover, even if such a foolish statement
were made, what does it mean? How should we weigh this contention against the
numerous autobiographical writings by former black Communists that contain no
such anecdotes?21
The problem of evidence in Cruse’s book is crucial. In essence, Cruse’s
account of the relationship between black Marxism and Jewish communists can
hardly be treated more seriously than Himes’s fiction in The Lonely Crusade.
Both accounts, whatever “truths” may be revealed through the insights of
intelligent perception applied to a certain degree of personal experience, must be
assessed in different terms than, say, the scholarly works of John Hope Franklin.
Both Crusade and Crisis are accounts by exceptionally thoughtful, passionate,
and angry intellectuals, intended to challenge prevailing notions and offer
superior visions of truth about the nature of racism.
There is no reason to dispute the likelihood that there were arrogant, racist,
chauvinist, aggressive, or otherwise insensitive Jews in the communist movement,
and that Cruse may well have encountered some. Nor should one deny that
common histories and backgrounds can produce similar patterns of thought and
behavior. The leap to conspiratorial “group caricature,” however, is positively
another affair. Cruse has scant basis to claim that: “the Jewish sense of
inferiority, or pride, or envy mixed with a challenging claim of counter-
superiority, spurred Jewish Communists to capture as many second-level posts
of command as possible. The great threat to this goal was no longer the Anglo-
Saxon in the Party, but the Negro” (163).22 Moreover, Cruse himself cites
material that patently refutes many of his arguments. For example, a passage
from a book by Melech Epstein, cited by Cruse for other polemical purposes,
notes, “The number of Negro [Communist] party organizers and officers was out
of all proportion to the small number of Negro members. It became an unwritten
rule [in the 1930s] that every committee must include a certain proportion of
Negroes. More Negroes were sent to Party schools in Moscow and here.
The South…was dotted with Negro organizers…” (164). How can these
statements be reconciled with Cruse’s earlier claim that Jews were driven by
their “cultural compulsive” to capture all the secondary leadership posts, while
seeing blacks in the party as the main threat to this objective? Are not posts such
as Party organizers and officers, and membership of leading committees
150 • ALAN WALD

adjudged secondary command posts? Aren’t party schools designed to educate

members to enlist in such leadership roles?23
Most disheartening is Cruse’s elucidation of the party’s Popular Front “turn.”
Since the 1950s, scholars have debated the extent to which the 1935 reorientation
was a knee-jerk reaction to the call of the Seventh World Congress of the
Comintern, or was the result of the accumulated wisdom of national and local
experience with sectarian misadventures. Cruse, however, offers a unique
theory: “Under Jewish Communist prodding, the Communist Party took up the
anti-Hitler crusade in the late 1930s” (168). As a result of this crusade, a “very large
corps of Negro volunteers went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–
1939 to fight and die for Spanish democracy.” Comparable to black financial
contributions to the Scottsboro defense that were sacrificed on the altar of Jewish
cultural nationalism, the blood of African Americans was spilled in Spain on
behalf of the “Jewish crusade against Hitler” (168).
In his passion to find evidence to confirm this thesis, Cruse cites a statement
by Langston Hughes to convey the impression that Hughes, too, thought that the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade exploited naive blacks “‘With so many unsolved
problems in America, I wondered why would a Negro come way over to Spain to
help solve Spain’s problems—perhaps with his very life. I don’t know. I
wondered then. I wonder still.’” (168). This passage appears at the beginning of
the section “Citation for Bravery” in Hughes’s autobiography. Yet the very next
sentence reads: “But in my heart I salute them.”24 It is clear that Hughes admires
and honors the internationalism of black American fighters in Spain, and his
“wonder” is more expression of awe at their heroism than skepticism about their
choice. Moreover, it is regrettable that Cruse did not give us a longer excerpt
from this section of Hughes’s memoir. Hughes explicitly transcends the “group
caricature” of Crisis; his interviews with black Americans in Spain show that
their motives varied and were self-selected. As Hughes notes, some thought that
“by fighting Franco they felt they were opposing Mussolini [who had invaded
Ethiopia]. Others said that they had come to Spain to fight against the kind of
people who oppress Negroes in the American South. Others said they had come
to oppose fascism, and help prevent its spread in the world” (354). Hughes
should not be enlisted for Cruse’s cynical argument.

The Lost Legacy of Black Marxism

Black Marxism at the moment is the focus of a small number of books, each
offering various interpretations of the phenomenon. Cedric Robinson’s
sympathetic but skeptical Black Marxism: The Making of the Black
Radical Tradition (1983) argues that Marxism and black radicalism frequently
merge in common cause, but ultimately are driven by incompatible social
dynamics. Robin D.G. Kelley’s celebratory Hammer and Hoe:Alabama
Communists During the Great Depression (1990) and Race Rebels: Culture,
Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994) see the communist movement as
 NARRATING NATIONALISMS • 151

providing space for a congenial blending of internationalist class struggles and

black nationalist aspirations.25 In political theory and history, African American
scholars such as Angela Davis, Manning Marable, and Gerald Horne have
continued to keep black Marxist traditions alive.26 while Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s
recent Blacks and Reds attempts to treat the relationship as a once-heroic
development whose time has manifestly passed (Hutchinson, 1995).
Chester Himes’s narrative of blacks and Jews in The Lonely Crusade shares
more with this contemporary body of scholarship than does Cruse’s Crisis. Even
though Himes’s novel is no less belligerent toward the Communist Party, it
depicts the agency and autonomy of black Communist Party members in a way
that is consonant with the views of Kelley, Mark Naison, and others. Luther and
Bart (the African-American leader of the Communist Party in California) are not
delineated as malleable instruments created top-down by party bureaucrats,
whether they be “Jewish nationalists” or “Stalinists.” Although these characters
in certain respects appear as “grotesques,”27 they have a prior history of
experiences influencing how they interact with Communist ideology and
institutions.
In Crisis, the second group, after Jews, under sustained assault by Cruse, is
not Anglo-Saxons (or Protestants or Catholics) but black Marxists themselves—
especially cultural workers. Most of the hostility is directed toward novelist John
Oliver Killens and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, although actress Ruby
Dee, actor Ossie Davis, singer Paul Robeson, novelist Julian Mayfield, and
several others come in for some hard knocks. Cruse’s method here is remarkably
similar to his relentless “expose” of the Jewish nationalists; whether in their
communist or postcommunist phases,28 these figures are characterized as middle-
class integrationists (sometimes “left-wing integrationists”), who have betrayed
the African American “cultural compulsive” rooted in Harlem, for which Cruse
stands seemingly alone as the representative.29
Hansberry, for example, is repeatedly clobbered with an unsubstantiated
newspaper report that quotes her as saying that A Raisin in the Sun is “not a
Negro play” (246, 275, 508). This quote has since been discredited;30 but it is
crucial to Cruse’s misrepresentation of the play as “One of the most significant
examples of th[e] use of Negro ‘workers’ in drama to reflect middle-class
values” (236). Moreover, Cruse claims that Killens, Hansberry, Ossie Davis and
Ruby Dee, “because of their apparent social and professional exclusiveness, as
well as their associations with Harlem leftwing cultural organizers, were
considered to be a clique by people involved in Harlem cultural life” (199). The
problem here corresponds to that in Cruse’s statements about Jewish arrogance.
One cannot disprove Cruse’s claim that an individual or even people adhered to
this view. But what is the weight of the claim? What does it mean? What
documentation does he offer that this assessment was a majority view, or even
popular?
As was the case with his assault on Jewish communists, Cruse combines his
attack on black Marxists with many clear-sighted observations about the
152 • ALAN WALD

hypocrisy of cultural institutions in the United States, the sham of the melting
pot myth, the centrality of cultural issues, the need for exacting intellectual work,
and the indispensability of African Americans’ right of self-determination. Thus
there is a temptation to assent to Cruse on other, much more problematic,
matters, especially where contrary evidence is not readily available.31
Additionally, Cruse’s book retains authority because it has secured a niche. It
is one of the few sources illuminating black cultural institutions as being
associated with Communist Party supporters, such as the American Negro
Theater, the Negro Playwrights Company, the Committee for the Negro in the
Arts, the Harlem Writers Club, the Harlem Writers Guild, and the journal
Freedomways. It is also the sole book acknowledging with details the existence
of a substantial post-World War II black Communist cultural presence in many
artistic venues and genres. Moreover, Cruse’s treatment of the Communist Party
raises a crucial problem of leftist history and culture that many subsequent left-
wing scholars of black radicalism have hesitated to address: the problem of
“Stalinism”—generally meaning the ultimate subordination of the Communist
Party to the authority of the Soviet Union, the employment of bureaucratic
organizational methods modeled on the Soviet Communist Party, and relying on
Soviet cultural dictators such as Andrey Zhdanov for literary orientation.
The issue of Stalinism, often used as a club by enemies of the Left as well as
by radical rivals of the Communist Party, has usually been ignored, sidestepped,
or dismissed by those seeking to reclaim the heritage of interracial antiracist
struggle pioneered by the communism movement; some, who have no particular
sympathy for the Soviet Union, would simply like to regard consideration of
Stalinism a dead dog of Cold War anticommunism.32 Cruse, who seems to feel
that a special category is necessary for the Soviet brand of communism, hurts his
own case by never offering an explanation for Stalinism and its influence on the
Communist Party; even worse, he frequently explains the Communist Party’s
bureaucratic methods as an exercise of Jewish power. Cruse makes enough false
steps in his handling of Stalinism to virtually discredit the whole effort. Still, a
more critical analysis of the black Marxist experience than lately prevails must
accompany the welcome celebrations of the heroic “resistance” of black radicals
if their suffering and commitment are to be rendered usable for antiracist cultural
workers and activists of the present.
Fortunately, some already published scholarship effectively contradicts many
of Cruse’s inaccurate allegations about black Marxism. His accusation that
communists were “integrationists,” and his notion that integrationism and
nationalism are necessarily one’s primary categories of analysis, are misleading,
and have been criticized as such.33 But his misconception on this topic persists
due to the dramatic appearance of “black power” in the 1960s, and the
new ultramilitant stance (often accompanied by calls to “pick up the gun”),
which renders it too easy to collapse previous radicalisms into mid-twentieth
century liberalism. However, the liberal idea of integrating African Americans
“equally” into existing socioeconomic structures is significantly different than
 NARRATING NATIONALISMS • 153

the Communist Party’s aim of joining blacks (while maintaining their cultural
identity) and whites together in an effort to overthrow the social order and
reconstruct new, egalitarian socioeconomic forms.
The Communist Party’s policy of assigning white members to do political
work in black areas, such as Harlem, and the openness of black communists to
allowing whites to contribute to black radical news and cultural magazines, has
somewhat confused the debate about integrationism. Cruse is possibly sound in
asserting that all-black Communist Party units, and perhaps even all-black
publications, would have been more inviting to potential black recruits, and
might have encouraged more black leadership and autonomy. The presence of
whites, especially if confident, articulate, and bonded together through a
common political analysis, can be intimidating and even stultifying to newly
radicalizing and perhaps younger, less-experienced members of a subaltern
group. However, the equation of integrated political units with a political strategy
of integration, or as necessarily leading to a certain cultural policy (adaptation to
middle-class values), is deceptive and can be refuted by the work of many
writers from the black Marxist tradition.

The Literary Record

In 1989, a remarkable but little-noticed novel for “young adults” appeared—Alice
Childress’s Those Other People.34 With a cover featuring four serious-looking
teenage faces with luminous eyes, two African American and two white, two
female and two male, Those Other People offers a political plot reminiscent of
the 1954 classic Marxist movie produced by blacklisted Hollywood communists,
The Salt of The Earth. The irrepressible theme of that McCarthy-era film script
was nothing less than the central message of the United States cultural Left, “the
indivisibility of equality.”35
Written by Communist screenwriter Michael Wilson, The Salt of The Earth
dramatized with subtlety and poignancy how people of color (Chicanos engaged
in a miners strike’ in New Mexico) had to discover the arduous way, through
personal experience erupting in kitchens and bedrooms as well as in the
workplace, to unite around the demands of women as well as men. It also
dramatized how working people of all ethnicities had to overcome backward
prejudice, joining together on the basis of supporting the demands of the most
oppressed, in order to win a victory for the benefit of all.
Three-and-a-half decades after Salt of the Earth, Those Other People depicts a
painful movement toward a parallel unity. This time the common struggle is in
Minitown, New York, and the unity is forged among an African American
brother and sister enduring racial discrimination; a white, very young
temporary computer instructor who faces persecution for his gay sexual
orientation; and a white, blond, fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, who is sexually
harrassed and nearly raped by a macho gym teacher.
154 • ALAN WALD

Not only does the theme of Those Other People recall earlier left-wing
cultural productions such as Salt of the Earth, but the form of this novel also
resonates with features of the radical “collective novel,” much theorized and
heavily promoted in the 1930s.36 To take some examples from the novel: each of
the nineteen chapters of Those Other People is the voice of a different character.
Moreover, the text is designed not only to bestow expression, via these dramatic
monologues, to the thoughts and perspectives of the four teenagers who become
the group protagonist; it also imparts voice to racist and sexist characters who are
allowed to rationalize in their own words their own behavior, and explain how
they formed the opinions they hold about “those other people.”
Those Other People is a text that, although relatively obscure and part of a genre
of mass cultural production that has received little attention as counterhegemonic
practice, actually expresses an extraordinary culmination of six decades of radical
resistance culture revolving around the themes of class, gender, and race. Above
all, it is a book that springs from the legacy of black Marxism in the United States.
Childress was part of the left-wing African American theater community drawn
to communism in the late 1930s; she remained a steadfast supporter, and possibly
even a member, of the Communist Party throughout the Cold War era.37 She was
also one of the “original members of the Harlem in-group” accused by Cruse of
being “pro-integration” (Crisis, 515), and she allegedly “policed” the April 1965
Negro Writers Conference on behalf of Killens’s “leftwing literary elite” (500).
Childress’s remarkable narrative not only carries on a traditional left-wing
view that unity in struggle does not necessarily mean abrogation of self-
determination, but her work also bonds that tradition with contemporary issues.
Moreover, the semiobscured legacy of black Marxist cultural work includes not
only the writing since the 1960s by dozens of subtle and thoughtful artists like
Childress, but at least one extraordinary text of the Cold War era itself, Killens’s
1954 novel Youngblood. Thus Cruse’s shallow indictment of black Marxists as
tools of Jewish communists, who cynically promote integrationism for all but
themselves, has the potential to do injury not only to our understanding of
political practice but also to literary history.
Cruse’s indictment of Youngblood as a dramatization of left liberal
integrationism and as a socialist-realist tract effectively obscures one of the key
documents of the complex double vision of postwar black Marxism. Indeed, one
finds in Youngblood a view of black-white unity far in advance of the version of
nationalism to which Cruse’s “group caricature” led him in 1967, and not
entirely incompatible with some of the “race traitor” and “whiteness” theorizing
of the 1990s.38
The primary focus of Youngblood is on one family in the black community in
Georgia, but Killens understands that a minority alone is incapable
of transforming society. Class allies must be found, so a parallel narrative to the
Youngblood family ordeal develops around a white worker named Oscar
Jefferson. Killens subtly depicts the formation of a burgeoning alternative
psychology in Jefferson;—an outlook based on a negative view of the costs of
 NARRATING NATIONALISMS • 155

identifying “white “which will one day break the social construct of the
“cracker” consciousness into which Jefferson is being socialized. This rejection
of W.E.B. DuBois’s famous “wages of whiteness” does not grow out of Oscar’s
altruism, or a sense of noble self-sacrifice, or even pity; Killens locates the
source of Oscar’s potential liberation from the illusions of his white skin
privilege in three other zones.
First, Oscar is bitter that “cracker” behavior has forever ruined his relation to
his mother, who was forced to falsely accuse Oscar’s best friend, the African
American youth Jim Kilgrow, of rape. Oscar has come to see his father’s
patriarchal relation to himself and his mother in the fashion that a class-
conscious worker sees a boss. Thus, when Oscar leaves home and goes to work,
he has the capacity of perceiving white bosses not as his friends, but as people
who will use him as his own father used his mother and himself to frustrate and
warp desire.
Second, Oscar has a reservoir of experiences in ordinary life that contradict
the “cracker” ideology into which his environment is trying to interpolate him.
Many of these experiences stem from his childhood friendship with Little Jim,
where he witnessed everyday behavior among the Kilgrows, especially the
father-son relationship. These experiences, felt but untheorized, go counter to the
racist category of “Nigger” that had been transmitted to him by his father, his
father’s boss, and the church and state authorities. Indeed, the Kilgrow family
comportment was far more attractive than the behavior model his own family
afforded.
The third and final constituent, necessary to shattering the eroding bonds
holding Oscar to the illusions of privilege through his “whiteness “is the example
of black resistance. First, the knowledge that the Kilgrow family had fought back
with arms against racists; second, the sight of Joe Youngblood standing up to his
hated boss, alone and against all odds; and third, the community resistance
demonstrated by African Americans in the town of Crossroads, Georgia, when
they transform the annual jubilee from entertainment bordering on a minstrel
show to a powerful affirmation of black cultural pride.
Here in 1954 we have dramatized a parallel perspective to the political
analysis frequently associated with the Black Trotskyist C.L.R.James, so
influential in recent decades. James’s view, articulated in the late 1930s in “The
Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem” and in other essays,39 was that the
African American political struggle serves a vanguard function—by taking the
initiative and setting an example, as it has always done throughout United States
history. The African American vanguard can best win allies by showing others
how to fight, not by subordinating its special interests out of apprehension of
being seen as divisive to the interracial unity obligatory for class struggle.
In the latter part of the novel, Oscar Jefferson sees the Youngblood men affirm
their masculinity otherwise from the abusive method of the “crackers”—by
standing up for the dignity of the oppressed, and by uniting as men with women
and entire families on an egalitarian basis in struggle. He instinctively feels that
156 • ALAN WALD

this is more meaningful, more vital, more beautiful, and more desirable than the
privileges of his white skin color that have brought only self-hate, shame, and
family discord in the past. This growing awareness leads to Oscar’s finding
himself supporting the unionization efforts of the town’s black hotel workers,
and to his walking into the woods to discover that he has joined the armed camp
of black workers defending the wounded Joe Youngblood from white vigilantes.
Youngblood can be criticized in many areas, including, perhaps, its
idealization of the proletarian family as a revolutionary site. But if Youngblood is
to be charged with advocating integrationism or assimilationism, it is integration
into the ordinary culture of African America—not for a moment into an elite,
patriarchal Eurocentric culture.40 Associating Killens with “left-wing
integrationism” misses the profoundly revolutionary implications of his book; it
is white Oscar Jefferson who finds “manhood” and family dignity, and heals the
Oedipal contradictions of his own youth, through his momentary integration into
black resistance culture.
The narrative of the “two nationalisms” in Cruse’s Crisis agonizingly blends
the insightful with the outrageous. For the antiracist political and cultural
movements of the present, however, the stakes are high in regard to whether one
accepts his version as an accurate record of the black Marxist experience. If Cold
War African American leftists are to be tossed into the dustbin as dupes of
Jewish nationalism, much will be expunged from cultural history and political
consciousness. Contemporary antiracist political practice will needlessly proceed
with an impedance, unaware of the resources to be gained from the profound
sense of continuity that might be available to it.

Notes

* This chapter was previously published in Science and Society 64, No. 4 (Winter
2000–2001): 400–423, and is reprinted here with permission.
I am grateful to Robert Chrisman, Patrick Quinn, Mark Solomon, John
Woodford, and the 1997–98 fellows at the University of Michigan Institute for the
Humanities for providing critical feedback and editorial suggestions on a draft of this
essay.
1. Stephen J.Rosen, “African American Anti-Semitism and Himes’ Lonely Crusade,
Melus 20, no. 2 (1995): 47.
2. “There wasn’t a single event in the story that hadn’t actually happened. My
characters were real people….” Chester Himes, quoted in Conversations with
Chester Himes, Eds. Michel Fabre and Robert Skinner (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1995), 126. Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre state that “[Dan]
Levin served as the prototype of Abe Rosenberg in The Lonely Crusade” in The
Several Lives of Chester Himes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997),
44. Levin was a procommunist writer who befriended Himes in Cleveland, and
who later helped him settle in Paris. My own research indicates the Los Angeles
Communist Party leader, Bart, is based on Georgia-born African American Pettis
Perry, and the pathological black communist, Luther McGregor, has many
 NARRATING NATIONALISMS • 157

biographical features in common with Mississippi-born Eluard Luchell McDaniel,

a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who published dialect stories while
working on the Writers Project in San Francisco in the 1930s. African American
novelist and former party member Lloyd Brown, who wrote the scathing
September 9, 1947 New Masses review of The Lonely Crusade, recalled Perry
telling him that Himes had been expelled from the party in Los Angeles for
sexually harassing white women, and that Himes took his revenge on Perry and
others through his vicious portraits in the novel. Neither Himes, nor any Himes
scholars, have ever acknowledged party membership, although they agree that he
attended party cell meetings and other activities, so the question of official status
remains inconclusive; Lloyd Brown, interview with the author, 1990.
3. Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 93.
4. In retrospect, however, some of the mainstream reviews seem rather favorable; in
overall context, however, they offered little solace to Himes.
5. Himes, The Quality of Hurt, 102.
6. In this case, in the spring of 1943, the party orientation was to prioritize antifascist
unity, which many leftist critics believe to have resulted in downplaying the class
struggle in general and the special needs of black workers in particular so as not to
disrupt wartime production.
7. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origins to the Present
(New York: William Morrow, 1967), 476; hereafter, page numbers will be cited
parenthetically in the text. Stalin
8. Chester Himes, The Lonely Crusade (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1947); hereafter,
page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text.
9. What he writes is little different from the depictions of communism in Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953), two
novels that were surely more influenced by Himes’s work than scholars have
acknowledged.
10. While space does not permit a discussion of gender in Himes, The Lonely Crusade
was far ahead of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in its integration of gender and
patriarchy into its analysis.
11. Twenty-three years later, Himes stated, “The situation I described was how things
were during the Second World War. All that has changed now. The political
statements I made in Lonely Crusade are no longer valid.” See Fabre and Skinner,
eds., Conversations, 94.
12. Cruse even goes further and states that this same characterization applies to liberal
civil rights organizations; see Crisis, 516.
13. The most influential case for this interpretation appears in Theodore Draper,
American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking, 1960). Subsequent
scholars have convincingly challenged the one-sidedness of Draper’s interpretation
as it relates to rank-and-file practice in the United States, but have not refuted
evidence of the party leadership’s unbreakable tie to Soviet foreign policy.
14. “The West Indian-American Negro braintrust could not utter a single theoretical
idea about themselves This situation led inexorably to the period of Jewish
dominance in the Communist Party. It culminated in the emergence of Herbert
Aptheker and other assimilated Jewish communists, who assumed the mantle of
spokesmanship on Negro affairs, thus burying the Negro radical potential deeper
and deeper into the slough of white intellectual paternalism” (Crisis, 147). Other
158 • ALAN WALD

oversimplied and negative characterizations of black Caribbeans appear elsewhere;

for example: “West Indian Americans and West Indian Britishers are forever
boasting about their origins in front of American whites and American Negroes,
but they are always ‘from there’ or ‘leaving there’ for greener pastures
elsewhere” (251).
15. According to Chrisman, “There is a vicious anti-Semitism throughout the work”;
see Robert Chrisman, “The Crisis of Harold Cruse,” Black Scholar, November
1969,78. For other useful critiques of Cruse, see Ernest Allen, “The Cultural
Methodology of Harold Cruse,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 5, no. 2, (1977): 26–49;
Robert Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (New
York: Doubleday, 1969), 171–80; Eugene D.Genovese, “Black Nationalism and
American Socialism: A Comment on Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual,” in Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-
American History (New York: Random House, 1968), 188–99); Ernest Kaiser,
“The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” Freedomways 9 (1969): 24–41; Julian
Mayfield, “Crisis or Crusade?” Negro Digest 17 (1968): 10–24; and William Eric
Perkins, “Harold Cruse: On the Problem of Culture and Revolution,” Journal of
Ethnic Studies 5, no. 2 (1977): 3–21. For a recent consideration, see Hortense
Spillers, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Postdate,” boundary 221, no. 3
(1994): 65–116.
16. Admittedly, formal repudiation of biological explanations is also a common ploy of
racists who use “cultural” and “historical” explanations to justify their attribution
of negative traits to African Americans.
17. A recent study acknowledging the Communists’ courage is Carroll Van West,
“Perpetuating the Myth of America: Scottsboro and Its Interpreters.” South Atlantic
Quarterly 80 (1981): 36–48.
18. Quentin Reynolds, Courtroom: The Story of Samuel S.Leibowitz (New York:
Farrar, Straus, 1950), 311, 260.
Of course, one can’t rule out the misappropriation, or improper channeling, of
defense funds. There are people who could have rationalized that giving money to
the Daily Worker was objectively in the interests of the case, since the paper was a
main defender of the imprisoned youth. Moreover, it is logical that the Communist
Party’s impressive work on the case brought in a slew of donations to the party
itself. However, the hypothetical plausibility of any of these explanations should
not mean a belief in the charges. Most important, the charge about
misappropriation of funds for party presses is not repeated in the major scholarship
on the case itself, even though the party is heavily criticized for ultraleft and
sectarian tactics. See Dan Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), and James Goodman,
Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon).
19. Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt,
1961), 133. Glazer insists on a range of attitudes in the party from those who were
committed to Jewish-specific interests such as the survival of Yiddish to those
“who had no interest at all in any Jewish concern” (132).
20. Morris U.Schappes, The Jewish Question and the Left—Old and New (New York:
Jewish Currents, 1973).
21. See, for example, Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an
American Communist (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1978); Nelson Perry, Black
 NARRATING NATIONALISMS • 159

Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary (New York: New Press, 1994);
and James Yates, From Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Seattle: Open Hand, 1989).
22. In some cases Cruse simply transforms a half truth into a falsehood through
overkill. In one case he states categorically, “Needless to say, no one in the
Communist Party spoke theoretically for Jews but other Jews” (163). Two party
pamphlets, Anti-Semitism: What It Means and How to Combat It (New York:
Workers Library, 1943) and Should Negroes and Jews Unite? (New York: Negro
Publication Society of America, 1943), the contributors of which include the non-
Jewish Communist Party leader Earl Browder and African American L.D.Reddick,
should suffice to check Cruse’s overzealousness. Cruse could have safely written
“it was rare that anyone” instead of “no one,” but it would have been inconsistent with
the hyperbole of his argument. Another example is his statement, “The privileges
and prerogatives of the lowest rank and file white [in the Party] outweighed those of
the highest Negro Communist leader” (127). In Blacks and Reds, hardly a
procommunist book, Earl Ofari Hutchinson cites Eslanda Robeson, wife of Paul
Robeson, as a source for an incident in which two young black party members had
a long-time party stalwart, a white woman, censured and ejected from a party
meeting because the white woman told them to stop talking during the meeting. See
Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919–1990 (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press), 231. Hutchinson also gives other
examples of similar incidents of rank-and-file black members punishing white
members.
23. Cruse is undaunted in persisting in this line of argument, in sustained passages as well
as in short references, as if the matter had been proved. In one instance he writes,
“In Negro-Jewish relations in the Communist Left there has been an intense
undercurrent of jealousy, enmity and competition over the prizes of group political
power and intellectual prestige. In this struggle, the Jewish intellectuals—because
of superior organization, drive, intellectual discipline, money and the motive of
their cultural compulsives—have been able to win out” (169).
24. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander (New York: Rinehart, 1956), 354;
hereafter, page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text.
25. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(London: Zed Press, 1983); Robin D.G.Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama
Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1990); and Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the
Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994).
There are several others of note as well. Mark Naison astutely discusses relations
between the Communist Party and Harlem cultural figures in Communists in
Harlem during the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).
Haywood’s Black Bolshevik (1978) provides considerable inside information. For
additional bibliographical references, including dissertations, see the footnotes to my
essay “Lloyd Brown and the African American Literary Left,” in Writing from the
Left (London: Verso, 1994). A more recent addition to the literature is Claudia
Rosemary May, “Nuances of Un-American Literatures(s): In Search of Claudia
Jones; A Literary Retrospective on the Life, Times and Works of an Activist-
Writer,” Ph.D. diss., University of California-Berkeley, 1996. In the past year, four
new books—by Mark Solomon, Bill Mullen, James Smethurst and William
160 • ALAN WALD

Maxwell—have added considerably to our understanding of the phenomenon. I

have tried to summarize the achieve of these scholars in my review essay, “African
Americans, Communism and Culture,” the first part of which appears in Against
the Current 84 (2000): 23–29.
26. Among Marable’s many books, the section “Radical Democracy and Socialism” in
his Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance and Radicalism
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), addresses the issue most directly. See also
Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981). Gerald Horne
has produced three informative books: Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the
Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1986); Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956
(Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), and Black Liberation/
Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (Newark, DE: Associated
University Presses, 1994).
27. This is also the case with the characters in Ellison’s acclaimed Invisible Man
(1953).
28. Cruse avows that Killens and company were “shaped by a special kind of literary
and political conditioning [with] its literary, artistic, and political origins…to be
found in the radical leftwing movement in the Harlem of the late 1940s and early
1950s,” and that they have “remained prisoners of that tradition, to date” (206).
29. Cruse states that the “entire Negro integrationist elite speaks through
Freedomways” (248); he also states that Killens’s and Hansberry’s “Robeson
idolotry” “middle class to begin with” (252); notes that the aim of Robeson’s
Freedom newspaper was to “foist middle-class social aims upon the so-called
working-class movements” (230); refers to the “left-wing integrationists” in
Killens’s group (410); and, in contrasting Richard Wright’s plebeian background
with Cruse’s antagonists, offers what is probably another example of overkill in his
categorical, undocumented statement that “not a single Negro writer or dramatist
sponsored and promoted by the leftwing has followed the difficult route traveled by
Wright” (267).
30. Robert Nemiroff, “A Cautionary Note on Resources,” Freedomways 19, no. 4
(1979): 286.
31. One can hardly disagree with Cruse’s opening claim that “America, which
idealizes the rights of the individual above everything else, is in reality, a nation
dominated by the social power of groups, classes, in-groups and cliques—both
ethnic and religious. The individual in America has few rights that are not backed
up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another” (8).
32. For example, Penny M.Von Eschen, in her excellent study Race against Empire:
Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1997), neither addresses the issue of Stalinism nor goes into
detail about party relations with the various projects of her protagonists. Another
perspective is suggested by Barbara Foley, who equates all forms of anti-Stalinism
with anti-Marxism in Radical Representations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1993).
33. One of the most lucid critiques of Cruse appears in the chapter “Escaping the
Ghost of Harold Cruse” in Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual:
Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 146–28–376, Watts writes, “In many
 NARRATING NATIONALISMS • 161

respects, Cruse’s ‘crisis’ was a sectarian ploy. He wanted to frame the issues of
black intellectual life and politics along a rather simpleminded axis between black
nationalism and integrationism” (8).
34. Alice Childress, Those Other People (New York: G.P.Putnam, 1989).
35. See The Salt of the Earth, ed. Deborah Rosenfelt (New York: Feminist Press,
1978), 94.
36. See Granville Hicks, “Complex and Collective Novels,” in Granville Hicks in the
New Masses, ed. Jack Alan Robbins (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974),
26–33. These essays were originally serialized in The New Masses, the organ of the
U.S. Communist Party, in April and May 1934.
37. Childress worked with the left-wing American Negro Theater for eleven years, and
published her first play, Florence, in the October 1950 issue of the Communist
journal Masses and Mainstream. Her procommunist convictions in the Cold War
era are clear, even if there is some uncertainty about precise organizational
affiliation. In a March 23, 1996 letter, Dr. Annette Rubinstein, a former
Communist Party member, offers her recollection that Childress was a party
member. In a March 22,1996 letter, African-American novelist Lloyd Brown, also
a former Communist Party member, recalls only that “Alice Childress [was] a
talented woman communist writer [who] hoped that not being in the party would
keep her from being labeled….” Extant scholarship on Childress, including La
Vinia Delois Jennings’s Alice Childress (New York: Twayne, 1995), is silent on
the entire subject.
38. See Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, Eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge,
1996); and Mike Hill, Ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York
University Press, 1977).
39. See Scott McLemee and Paul Le Blanc, eds., C.L.R.James and Revolutionary
Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R.James, 1939–1949 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1994).
40. It is worth noting that Cruse is accurate in reminding us that Killens published a
hatchet-job review of Ellison’s Invisible Man due to Ellison’s switch to
anticommunism; however, Cruse then proceeds to do exactly the same thing,
judging Killens’s novel through the window of his alleged politics. See Crisis, 235.
162
 8
The Crisis of Blacks and Communism
EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

Whenever Harold Cruse is mentioned I immediately think of the encounter I had

with a friend who saw me reading a copy of Cruse’s book, The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual. The friend who had very close ties with the Communist Party
sneered and asked me why I was reading that book. Momentarily caught off
guard by the question, I hesitantly asked him whether he had read the book. No,
he quickly snapped, “It’s nothing but an anti-Communist hatchet job.” This
sounded like a well-rehearsed line that he had heard somebody else say and
dutifully repeated. I asked him how could he be so hostile to a book he hadn’t
read. He didn’t answer, but I soon discovered why.
Black and white radicals were furious at Cruse for his devastating attack on
black-communist relationships. They claimed that Cruse had butchered the facts
and dirtied the record of communist contributions to the black struggle.
Communists, they insisted had fought hard even heroic battles against racism,
mob violence, and for political rights and economic justice for blacks.
After many careful readings of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual I agreed
that Cruse was unsparing toward Marxism. However, I also felt that he had
overreached in not giving any credit to the sacrifices many communists had
made in the fight for black equality. But the critics could not sidestep the main
point Cruse repeatedly returned too in his book, “This unwillingness or inability
of the communists to come to grips with the Negro national group realities was
displayed on both sides of the racial fence among the party leaders and
theoreticians.”1
This was not an academic point for Cruse. In the late 1940s, Cruse was a
Communist Party stalwart and for a time a correspondent for the party’s house
organ, the Daily Worker. When Cruse quit the party he angrily accused
communists of manipulating blacks.
With the black nationalist wave rising in the 1960s, Cruse sharpened his
criticism of the Marxists. He charged that white communists pretended to be the
allies of blacks to further their own ideological agenda: “This ‘alliance’ is meant
to build the Marxist party, not the Negro movement, in order to rescue the
Marxists from their own crisis.”2
The bitterness between blacks and communists Cruse felt stemmed from the
bittersweet historic relationship between black leaders and organizations and the
164 • EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

party. To better understand why Cruse and other blacks were either indifferent to
or hostile toward communists it’s necessary to briefly recount that history.
From its founding in 1919 until the American Communist Party’s final decline
in the 1960s, Party leaders generally understood that they could not attain their
goals of overthrowing capitalism and establishing a workers state in America
without attracting sizable numbers of black workers to their banner. But how?
And there as Cruse correctly contends, lay the root of their crisis.
Party leaders spent the better part of the first decade of their existence trying to
decide whether blacks were merely economically exploited workers ala white
workers. If so, they did not need to formulate any special programs to appeal to
them. They would simply exhort them to join with their white labor comrades
and fight as “exploited proletarians” against capitalism. But was this enough?
White workers were not lynched, denied the right to vote, required to live in
segregated neighborhoods, attend segregated schools, excluded from trade
unions, or relegated to the dirtiest and lowest pay jobs simply because of their
color; blacks were. By 1928, the Communist Party leaders realized that if they
were to have any impact on blacks they would have to change their approach.
Acting under orders from the Soviet-controlled Communist International, the
party began an intense campaign for economic and racial justice for blacks.
During the Depression years, they scored their biggest gains among blacks.3
Communist Party members could rightfully boast that they broke American
shibboleths by supporting social equality, mounting national campaigns against
Jim Crow laws, and lynching as well as running black candidates for every office
from vice president to city council. With their unemployment councils, rent
strike committees, tenant councils, and prisoner defense committees, communists
cast a long shadow over the political life of America during the Great Depression.
But even as they recorded modest triumphs and made slight inroads among
blacks, Cruse notes that by building their organizational house on the Depression
era misery and desperation of blacks they were building on shifting sands.
They failed to recognize the fundamental American racial reality “that America
is a group society, and that next to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant group, the
American Negro is the largest national minority in America.”4
The World War II and postwar decade brought prosperity and worldpower to
America but for communists it brought division, near collapse, and the
abandonment of their lofty pronouncements on civil rights. The heyday of the
Communist Party was over. The 1950s brought the bleak years of McCarthyite
political repression and disarray to the party. The 1960s brought rapid decline to
the party.
Throughout their Sturm and Drang years, communists would always claim
that they undertook their actions in the best interest of blacks. In turn, blacks
would repeatedly ask which meant more to them: Defense of Soviet policies or
social justice in America? communists could not serve two masters. If they did
indeed take their marching orders from the Soviets their intentions toward blacks
would always be suspect.
 THE CRISIS OF BLACKS AND COMMUNISM • 165

But there was more to the picture. Blacks hardly sat patiently waiting for
deliverance by the Marxists. The unrelenting hostility of white workers produced
a powerful counter reaction in blacks. Since the labor unions would not admit
them as equals, many blacks got their revenge by breaking strikes and taking
“white jobs.”
Black leaders from Booker T.Washington to the “black power” advocates of
the 1960s argued that the Marxists were guilty of perpetuating illusions about the
common interests of black and white workers. During the 1920s, black
nationalist leader Marcus Garvey even contended that since the capitalists
employed blacks, they were better friends than the labor movement.
Many blacks were more afraid of the communists than white conservatives.
Black businessmen, ministers, and professionals did not want radical change.
They were native sons and daughters who believed deeply that loyalty, patriotism,
hard work and individual achievement were the keys to success. They saw
America as a land of opportunity, where enterprising men and women could pull
themselves up by their bootstraps. They were hardheaded realists who figured
that for better or worse America was their home too, and communists had
nothing to offer them.
Other blacks condemned both capitalism and socialism. They viewed them as
European political and economic systems intended for whites only. Black leaders
from A.Phillip Randolph to Malcolm X implored blacks to be their own
advocates. They urged them to form their own organizations and devise their
own programs and philosophy. No matter what differences they had among
themselves, they agreed on one thing: whites, especially Marxists, could not do it
for them.
Former black communists such as writers Richard Wright and George
Padmore believed that the final conflict would not be between capitalists and
proletarians, but rather between nonwhites and the rich white West. American
Marxists challenged them. They claimed it was suicidal for blacks to try to go
it alone. Only the solidarity of black and white workers could lead to the socialist
land of milk and honey.5
How realistic was this, black scholar W.E.B.DuBois asked? Wasn’t America a
nation whose very premise was built on ethnic pride (and division)? Didn’t white
ethnics doggedly use their culture, traditions, history, and values, as a ladder to
march out of the ghettos, shantytowns, and Little Italys of America?
More than a few blacks noted that Communist Party members as late as the
1930s bragged about being Finns, Germans, Italians, and Irish before being
Marxists. Black newspaperman Cyril Briggs, who joined the Communist Party in
1921 and stuck it out for more than forty years constantly picked and nagged at his
party comrades to see that race was as important as class. Cruse contemptuously
notes that even as communists stubbornly refused to make any ideological
adjustment, many black leaders caved in and did not challenge the orthodoxy of
the political line of “black and white unite and fight” According to Cruse, “It was
166 • EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

the white Communist leaders who actually laid down the line, but the Negro
leaders followed it without deviation.”6
In later years, the struggle for racial justice would have the same meaning for
communists like James Ford, Harry Haywood, Angelo Herndon, Ben Davis, and
Angela Davis. Thousands of blacks would admire them as individuals. They
would also support them as leaders.
Impressed by what the “Reds” said and often did in the battle against racial
oppression, many blacks would wear the Red label with pride. In time, many
more would discard it. They would become casualties to the Red dream deferred.7
There is certainly room for many views of what went right and what went
wrong in black-communist relations in the 1930s. And Marxists put their twist on
history. They see the 1930s as the first time since the Reconstruction era in the
south that they were able to make white Americans face up to their racism.
Communists take credit for putting the issues of segregation and racial violence
firmly on the nation’s agenda. Old timers who fought in the Communist Party
battles of the 1930s always speak fondly of the days when Reds did make a
difference. They have every right to be proud of their contributions; they were
real.
As I have stated before, Cruse is dead wrong to minimize the racial gains that
were made or to ridicule the sincerity of many Communists who fought hard for
those gains. In fact, during the 1930s, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League
worked with the communists on campaigns to get Congressional antilynching
legislation, freedom for the Scottsboro Boys, and the National Negro Congress.8
The alliance was short-lived. These small triumphs couldn’t paper over the
differences and dissolve the tensions that arose when communists refused to
recognize or worse opposed the quest by black leaders for cultural identity and
independent organizing. Cruse’s judgment on this point is harsh but for the most
part accurate: “The Communist Party assumed that neither the American Negro
at large nor his Negro brethern in the ranks of the party had any real cultural identity
to defend.”9
While Cruse is guilty of downplaying the contribution communists made to
the fight for equality in the 1930s, some former communists are equally guilty of
overplaying and over romanticizing that struggle. They view the past through an
idyllic prism; they don’t mention the 1940s and the downplaying of civil rights
by communists; nor are they willing to reflect on why they failed to influence
black groups from Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association
to the National Urban League and the NAACP. They also don’t admit they erred
badly when they branded black leaders and organizations that did not agree with
their aims and tactics as traitors, lackeys, and “Uncle Toms.” The Communist
Party made enemies of many blacks who were not socialists, but who also were
neutral toward communists.
Cruse was not surprised that relations between the communists and the black
moderates would degenerate into name calling and finger pointing. He warned
 THE CRISIS OF BLACKS AND COMMUNISM • 167

that this pattern would repeat itself continually over the next forty years in their
relationship. Even after the McCarthyite repression and mass defections during
the 1950s reduced the Communist Party to a shell of its former self, and it tried
to revive itself by riding the tide of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, it still
did not adapt to changing times and rid itself of the ambivalence and hostility
toward independent black organizing. The two best examples of this continuing
failure was their approach to the Nation of Islam and the Black Power
movement.
Party leaders completely failed to understand why black nationalism could stir
and attract large numbers of poor urban blacks. Cruse noted that the historic
blinders on communists were still wrapped painfully tight when it came to
recognizing new trends among blacks: “The old Communist Party doctrine did
not include the Northern ghetto in this scheme as the black power exponents do.
Moreover the communists did not envision any separatist black party movements
as part of self-determination.”10
With the Nation of Islam, communists were faced with a vibrant new
movement unwilling to compromise with the white left. In 1961, party leaders
prepared to fight back. As secretary of the party’s Negro Commission, Claude
Lightfoot had to develop a strategy for attack. At first he dismissed the black
Muslims: “the Moslem movement is divisive of Negro-white unity and will lead
not to Negro freedom but to just the opposite.” But Lightfoot quickly realized
that the Muslims were not fading, they were gaining in strength.11
Party leaders scrambled to find a position that would not feed the anti-Muslim
hysteria of the mainstream press nor endorse the Muslims. Lightfoot tried to
walk the tightrope: Muslims, he claimed, were “not the main danger” to the
freedom struggle. “The bankers, industrialists, and big brass that support the
racists,” he declared, were the real “enemy of the people.” He quickly added that
the party could not approve of the Muslims’ “go-it-alone policy.”
Excluding whites from the black struggle, he insisted, would “only throw them
into the lap of the common enemy.”12
With Malcolm X steadily drawing more press coverage, the Nation of Islam
rode higher on the crest of their publicity. By 1962, thousands of blacks had
flocked to the organization. Lightfoot’s criticisms had done nothing to blunt their
appeal. At a party forum in February, 1962, he admitted, “The Muslim
organization is a phenomenon which must be examined and assessed from the
point of view of its impact in meeting the major problems of the Negro people.”
While Lightfoot stretched his analysis to the limits of party dogma, he did not
cross the line: “Nationalism as expressed today in the United States, unlike in
Africa, and other places, is an obstacle in the path toward freedom.” He
concluded that the only hope for blacks was “a movement which would actively
seek and promote Negro unity in the context of an alliance with labor.” In July
1963, the National Committee of the Communist Party notified its district
committees to be on alert against the “sharpening danger of the counter-
revolutionary role being played by the Muslim organization.”13
168 • EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

“For the Communists then, and forever more,” insists Cruse, “trade unionism
was of paramount importance.”14 They still buried their heads deep in the sands
and refused to recognize that the battle among blacks was for power and cultural
identity. To Cruse this was the ultimate proof that Communists were hopelessly
trapped in a time warp and that Marxist dogma was bankrupt.
The black power movement also drew an equally hard threshold that whites
could not cross. The white Left especially took the rejection hard. It was one
thing for blacks to browbeat white liberals for their patronizing attitudes. Now
communists and white radicals, much as Cruse warned would happen and
delighted at, were coming under fire too. In his first public statement on black
power in 1967 Stokely Carmichael taunted white radicals for their “paternalistic
attitude.”15
Carmichael’s shrill words grated on the ears of party leaders. If blacks did
indeed want to do things for themselves, as he and the black militants
proclaimed, where did that leave Communists? Black power was hardly
compatible with the party’s plan for a Negro-labor alliance. Party leaders needed
to come up with a quick response to the new challenge. They realized it was
fruitless to hurl invectives at Carmichael and Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) since they clearly had the ear of black students and the
ghetto poor.
Party leaders made a feeble attempt to stay in step with the times by spinning
off a national network of W.E.B.DuBois Clubs in June 1964. Designed to draw
young black and white activists into the party, the clubs were largely a flop.
Young black activists were more excited by Malcolm X, Africa, and dashikis
than Marxism—which many considered outdated and even racist.
While it was harsh and unfair to brand all communists as racists and denounce
their motives as purely selfish and opportunistic, Cruse applauded and hailed the
bitternesss that the black activists expressed toward Marxism and Marxists. He
even went a step further, noting that “it has become mandatory today that every
pro-nationalist tendency within the Negro movement take stringent steps to ban
all Marxist-Communist influences from controlling positions within the
movement.”16
Cruse was pretty much beating a dead horse. By the close of the 1960s the
party was clearly on its dying legs. During the 1970s it would draw some national
and international attention with its campaign to free Angela Davis; it would rally
much black support for her. But blacks did not rally to the Communist Party
banner. They supported Davis because they viewed her as a black woman under
attack from the white establishment, not a Communist.
Yet even as the prodemocracy movements triumphed in Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union, party leaders tried to maintain the political status quo. They
deluded themselves that they could still be major players among blacks. In 1990,
a prominent party leader still insisted “that the American Communist Party
didn’t go out of business in the 1940s and it will remain an important institution
in the 1990s among blacks.”17
 THE CRISIS OF BLACKS AND COMMUNISM • 169

This was pathetically wishful thinking. A year later, the Soviet Union would
dissolve. And democratic governments would replace communist regimes in
Eastern Europe. By the end of 1991, the American Communist Party had broken
up into competing factions with the old guard still refusing to concede that times
had changed and democracy had won out.
Perhaps with the passage of even more time those who still call themselves
American communists will honestly confront their racial past—both the bad and
the good. If they do they will find that during this century many Communist
Party members believed deeply in racial equality. And as accurate as Cruse’s
critique of Marxist failings on race is, it is wrong to suggest otherwise. Their
campaigns against segregation, political repression, and economic equality
resulted in many landmark decisions that advanced the cause of civil rights and
racial justice in America.
But despite their efforts, black leaders have repeatedly asked Communist
leaders two questions: First, did they fight for black freedom because they
sincerely believed in it? Second, given the volatile mix of racism and anti-
communism in America, could blacks afford to be Red too?
Black leaders such as W.E.B.DuBois, A.Phillip Randolph, Marcus Garvey,
Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, the Black
Muslims and blacks in general have not been satisfied with the answers
communists gave to either question. Cruse, however, never had any doubt that
the answer was a resounding no to both questions. But then again, how could
communists satisfactorily answer those questions?
With the exception of one short moment in American history, the Depression
years, Marxists have never had the type of mass following that would allow them
to offer blacks an iron clad assurance of their sincerity, or their security. Cruse felt
that that inability colored Marxist attitudes toward blacks and led to many
duplicit actions by them: “American Marxists have for over forty years,
misled, disoriented and retarded Negro intellectuals.”18 And by extension they
sought to control and subvert all independent movements by blacks for political,
and economic power and cultural identity.
So while blacks could at brief times throughout recent history applaud them for
their civil rights efforts, and even rally behind black communist leaders when
they were under fire, they could never really embrace the Reds. It’s been that
way because wherever the two groups have met there has been a clash of race
and ideology that more than a near century of struggle has not resolved—and
now perhaps never will.
It definitely couldn’t resolve it for Cruse who argued that the reason that race
and class conflict could never be resolved was not because of flawed individuals
but the flaw in the ideology of Marxism that could not come to grips with the
American ethnic dynamic: “They have never understood—have in fact refused to
understand—the native American social dynamic. They have misinterpreted
America and the American Negro’s social role in America and misinterpreted the
Negro to himself.”19
170 • EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

Put simply, African Americans are among America’s oldest native sons and
daughters. They have been totally shaped by American ideals and values. If it
weren’t for the great stumbling blocks of racism and economic exclusion, blacks
would have gladly trod the same path to assimilation as the European
immigrants. Marxism and Marxists did not understand this, and Cruse’s major
contribution on the issue of class and race was that he did.

Notes

1. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, (New York: William Morrow,
1967), 150.
2. Cruse, Marxism and the Negro Struggle, (New York: Pioneer, 1963), 6.
3. See David A.Shannon, The Decline of American Communism (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1959); and Robert L.Allen, Reluctant Reformers (Washington
D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974), 207–47.
4. Cruse, Crisis, 150.
5. For a broad view of the roots of the cleavage between and the Marxist Left, see
Tony Martin, Race First (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1976); and Thoedore
G.Vincent, Ed., Voices of a Black Nation (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1973).
6. Cruse, Crisis, 151.
7. See Wilson Record, Race and Radicalism, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1964), 84–131.
8. See Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York:
Viking Press, 1960).
9. Cruse, Crisis, 148.
10. For background on the Black Power movement, see Floyd B.Barbour, Ed., The
Black Power Revolt (Boston: Porter Sargeant, 1968); and Robert L.Allen, Black
Awakening in Capitalist America (New York: Doubleday, 1969). For background
on the deteriorating economic plight of urban blacks during the 1960s, see Daniel
R.Fusfield, The Political Economy of the Ghetto, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1984); Hollis R.Lynch, The Black Urban Condition (New York:
Thomas Y.Crowell, 1973); [Fortune magazine editors], The Negro and the City
(New York: Time, 1968); and Cruse, Crisis, 547.
11. C.Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963);
E.U.Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1962); and Claude Lightfoot, “The Negro Liberation Movement Today,” Political
Affairs 39 (1961): 90.
12. Claude Lightfoot, “An Open Letter to the Negro People” (Negro Commission,
CPUSA), June 1961, 3–4; Dorothy Healey Papers, California State University at
Long Beach.
13. Lightfoot, “Negro Nationalism and the Black Muslims,” Political Affairs 41 (July
1962): 4, 13, 20; “To All Districts,” CPUSA, 11 July 1963, CP File—1963.
14. Cruse, Crisis, 547.
15. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V.Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of
Liberation (New York: Random House, 1967), 86–120; Black Power: SNCC
Speaks For Itself (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Radical Education Project, 1966), 5;
 THE CRISIS OF BLACKS AND COMMUNISM • 171

Carmichael gave his first public explanation of the idea of Black Power in a speech
at the University of California-Berkeley on October 29, 1966 (New York Times,
October 30, 1966); Carmichael, “Toward Black Liberation,” Massachusetts Review
7 (1966), 639–51; Stokely Carmichael, “Power and Racism,” in Barbour, ed., Black
Power Revolt, 69.
16. Cruse, Crisis, 263.
17. Charlene Mitchell, interview with the author, December 18, 1989.
18. Cruse, Crisis, 262.
19. Ibid., 262.
172
 Part 4

Cruse as Cold Warrior

174
 9
The Cold War Seduction of Harold Cruse
PENNY M.VON ESCHEN

No one was subjected to more vituperative denunciation in the pages of Harold

Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual than Paul Robeson. Branded an
integrationist communist dupe, for Cruse, Robeson “remained an unoriginal
thinker and social critic who could do no more than expound elaborately
muddled variations on the interracial themes already laid down for him by the
Communist leftwing.”1 Indeed, Robeson epitomized for Cruse the untethered and
naive black artist. There is powerful evidence that Cruse’s views on Robeson
were animated by a deeply personal vendetta, nursed from the days when Cruse
was a bodyguard for Robeson. Moreover, subsequent scholarship on Robeson,
including work by Sterling Stuckey, Martin Duberman’s biography, and recent
work on Robeson’s anticolonial politics has shown Cruse’s characterizations of
Robeson’s politics to be so wrong headed as to be ludicrous.2 But if in retrospect
Cruse’s misreading appears as transparent as it is blatantly personal, it was
hardly idiosyncratic or accidental. Cruse’s reading of Robeson was dependent not
only on a selective presentation of Robeson’s activities but on a profound
blindness to the new American political, economic, and military global
dominance that was rapidly transforming the international dimensions of politics
and culture. In this essay, through a discussion of Robeson’s anticolonial
politics, I will argue that Cruse’s attack on Robeson’s reputation was
symptomatic of the Cold War conditions in which historical amnesia thrived; and
this habitual silence on black and anticolonial struggles starkly inform Cruse’s
truncation of black nationalism and black independent radical politics in the
pages of the The Crisis.3 The Crisis can be read not only as a quintessential
American exceptionalist document but also as a Cold War text.
The Cold War era’s “end of ideology” blithely celebrated the exceptionalism—
and superiority—of America when the United States was still a Jim Crow nation.
That period witnessed the struggles of millions of Africans and other colonized
peoples not only for political independence, but against the economic
exploitation of colonialism, which was further solidifying under new forms of
U.S. domination.”4 Indeed, Cruse echoed dominant assumptions of
exceptionalism in The Crisis, asserting that race in America is a fundamentally
domestic issue. Hence his dismissal of Robeson’s internationalism and his
176 • PENNY M.VON ESCHEN

insistence that Robeson must be examined “as a Negro symbol purely within the
context of American race relations.”5 Here, race and racism are not products of
global processes at the heart of the shaping of the modern world, but exclusively
an American dilemma.
But if this was ironically in keeping with dominant liberalism, Cruse was not a
liberal. In his reading of U.S. politics as competing ethnic nationalisms, Cruse
could only make race a purely American issue by equating internationalism with
communism and then dismissing the former as irrelevant. Cruse’s explicit move
toward American exceptionalism is outlined in his introduction to the 1968
collection of essays, Rebellion or Revolution? In a cryptic intellectual
autobiography, Cruse sought to explain why, in the period from 1945 to 1952, he
“was such a glaring intellectual misfit—an incomprehensible gadfly to some, and
a pretentious neophyte to others, those whose politics I criticized.”6 As Cruse
charged that his former allies were treating the “postwar era with intellectual and
critical tools more applicable to the vanished world of the thirties,” his laudable
attempt not to blame outsiders but to locate American social ills in American
history crossed over into an exceptionalism in which the rest of the world didn’t
matter. Indeed, typifying the silences and lacunae of many American anti-
Stalinist leftists while claiming to possess the critical tools most relevant to the
postwar world, Cruse ignored emergent global power relations and was
particularly indifferent to African and Asian anticolonial and national building
projects, expressing bafflement in The Crisis that Freedom newspaper “roamed all
over the world—to China, Africa, British Guiana elections, the war in
Korea….”7 Thus while Cruse did not explicitly endorse U.S. global hegemony, he
implicitly accepted a bipolar reading of global politics. And here Cruse, like
much of the U.S. anti-Stalinist Left, was right on anti-Stalinism but wrong on
everything else. Their anti-Stalinism, however warranted, blinded them to the
displacement of democratic projects by empire. Such an anti-Stalinist position
led to a fundamental refusal to foreground the consolidation of U.S. dominance at
the very moment of the rise of new African and Asian nations.
Cruse’s systematic misconceptions about Robeson appear further layered with
oedipal irony. Robeson’s politics, and specifically the anticolonialism that eluded
Cruse, constituted precisely the independent black radicalism that
Cruse appealed for in his text and found, in his version of history, sorely lacking
in the black past. Moreover, his dismissal of Robeson’s politics and his ultimate
blindness to global power relations appear even more strange when one
considers Cruse’s own forays into internationalism. Cruse traveled to Cuba in
July 1960 with Robert Williams, the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People activist who had organized armed militias to fight the Ku Klux
Klan in Monroe, North Carolina; the novelist Sarah Wright; painter Ed Clark,
and the radical writer Julian Mayfield.8 In Cruse’s influential 1962 essay,
“Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American” (reprinted in Rebellion and
Revolution? and in Black Fire in 1968) he not only embraced “revolutionary
nationalism” but did so in a language reminiscent of the left internationalists of
 THE COLD WAR SEDUCTION OF HAROLD CRUSE • 177

the 1940s and ’50s, asserting “the bond between the Negro and the colonial
peoples of the world….”9 Thus, for at least a short time, Cruse applauded a new
generation looking to the former colonial world for its leaders and insights.10 In
fact, the assertion of bonds between black Americans and colonized peoples that
Cruse attacked Western Marxists “for failing to understand” had constituted the
core of Robeson’s politics, as well as that of a generation of intellectuals and
activists Cruse had written off as Communist dupes. Here Cruse appears to have
needed to kill off the father, so to speak, to assert himself as the originator of
revolutionary nationalism. And by the time of the publication of The Crisis in
1967, even those who he had championed in “Revolutionary Nationalism and the
Afro-American” were accused, like Robeson, of inappropriately attempting to
apply “foreign ideologies to the United States.”11
Thirty years after Cruse consigned Robeson to the dustbin of history, the
contours and fate of Robeson’s anticolonial politics offer a window into the
political dynamics obscured by Cruse’s tendentious reading of internationalism.
During World War II, as the collapse of European hegemony was applauded by
an international black press, African American anticolonial activists argued that
their struggles in the U.S. against Jim Crowism were inextricably bound to the
struggles of African and Asian peoples for independence. Ever since World War
I, nationalists and Pan-Africanists had trenchantly debunked myths of white
supremacy and the civilizing mission, and challenged the political and economic
order on which they rested. Significantly, in The Crisis, Cruse insisted that
contemporary nationalism “stems from a tradition dating back to the period of
World War I,” but he located this primarily in Garveyism, slighting the leftist
nationalists who had challenged Garvey. Also absent from Cruse’s account was
the wide sweep of black American support of Asian and African nation-building
projects in the decades following Garvey. In the 1930s, the scholarship of C.L.
R.James and W.E.B.DuBois had placed black peoples at the center of world
events. And as the weakness of colonial powers opened up an unprecedented
array of challenges to colonialism, these ideas took on a new urgency and
meaning as anticolonial movements gathered momentum. Activists in
organizations such as the Council on African Affairs (CAA), founded by Max
Yergan and Paul Robeson and also led by W.Alphaeus Hunton, Eslanda
Robeson, Charlotta Bass, and DuBois; the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), led by Walter White; and the
National Council of Negro Women, led by Mary McLeod Bethune not only
supported anticolonial efforts in Africa and Asia; they also argued that the
independence of new Asian and African nations would help black Americans in
their struggles for political, economic, and civil rights.
To place Robeson in the world of anticolonial politics, it is critical to
appreciate, as his biographer Duberman has pointed out, that the CAA “was the
one organizational interest among many with which he was identified that was
closest to his heart.”12 Chaired by Robeson, the CAA was founded in 1937 as
the International Committee on African Affairs. The early ICAA represented a
178 • PENNY M.VON ESCHEN

cross-section of interwar left and liberal politics, including social gospel

Christians and corporate philanthropists. The reorganization of the group as the
CAA in 1942, the addition of Hunton as its educational director (later executive
director) in 1943, and the growing day-to-day involvement of Paul and Eslanda
Robeson marked a distinct shift to a militant black international diaspora
consciousness as well as a shift to independent black leadership. Anticolonial
activists built on and reshaped Pan-Africanist visions, from Martin R.Delany to
Marcus Garvey and Hubert Harrison, and redefined the thought and practice of
leftist internationalism. Their work also drew on the rich black oppositional
politics of the 1930s, including opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the
Scottsboro defense, and “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns.
Anticolonial challenges were invigorated by their portrayal in a lively
international black press. There, for example, the Trinidadian-born George
Padmore publicized African anticolonial work, trade union activity, and the work
of the London-based International African Service Bureau on a weekly basis in
nationally circulated black American newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier
and the Chicago Defender. Such reportage of international anticolonial politics
heralded the coalescing of a black popular front.
This anticolonial popular front, embracing the full ideological range of black
America, including leftists, liberals, church leaders, and professional and
middleclass organizations, and steeped in a world of black popular culture
including such artists as Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams and the Golden
Gate Quartet, endured until the dawn of the Cold War. Through DuBois and the
NAACP, and Henry Lee Moon of the CIO political action committee, African
Americans participated in and supported the 1945 Manchester Pan-African
Congress. During World War II, while lobbying the U.S. government for a
stronger anticolonial policy, the CAA organized support for a free India and
following the war, supported African trade union efforts such as the 1946
Nigerian general strike and the Nigerian fight against the British suppression of
the press.13
Of course, these are precisely the projects and the political formations that
Cruse consistently interpreted as communist controlled. However, the
independence of these historical developments from the Communist Party is
evident from the wide political spectrum that defies simple ideological
or organizational definition. Even more striking is the fact that the militant
anticolonialism of the CAA was at odds with Communist Party policy. Official
CP policy supported U.S., British, and Soviet government positions that the war
effort took precedence over decolonization. Indeed, the desperation of the
antifascist struggle led the Communist Party to retreat from an anti-imperialist
position during the war, going so far as to argue that imperialism was a
temporarily progressive force.14 But the anticolonial CAA supported India’s
refusal to support the British war effort without the guarantee of immediate
independence. The CAA and its allies, for example, organized a 1942 rally
calling for independence for India. For Robeson and the CAA, as well as a host
 THE COLD WAR SEDUCTION OF HAROLD CRUSE • 179

of African American journalists and activists, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism,

and antifascism were inseparable.15
The formation of the United Nations in 1945 provided an especially important
venue for anticolonial politics. With the imminent independence of India (1947)
and the promise of a number of new Asian and African states, the possibilities
for winning political and economic rights for black and colonized peoples
through international strategies looked far more promising than they would after
the onset of the Cold War. Through the United Nations and other international
forums, the possibility of redefining political sovereignty and human rights on an
international scale became a reality. And African American activists, from the
CAA to the NAACP, churches, fraternities, and nurses’ associations, saw these
forums as hopeful sites for their own struggles, bringing a profound vision of the
rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Hunton and the CAA worked in tandem
with the South African Passive Resistance Campaign and the African National
Congress, and with the interim government of India at the 1946 and 1947
meetings of the United Nations, to challenge the attempts of the South African
government to annex southwest Africa (Namibia) and to protest discrimination
against Indians within South Africa. Significantly, these projects were opposed
by both the United States and the Soviet Union; both nations feared international
interference and thus supported national sovereignty.16
How is it that this rich anticolonial and nation-building politics remained
beyond the purview of Cruse’s nationalism? In Cruse’s dichotomy,
integrationism versus nationalism, African American anticolonialism was
whitewashed as liberal/leftist integrationist politics because its advocates argued
that anticolonial struggles were inextricably bound to the fight against Jim
Crowism. For Cruse then, this damned them on two counts: the “integrationist”
goal of dismantling Jim Crowism and their putative associations with the
communist Left. Following this logic alone, it is predictable that these coalitions
wouldn’t survive Cruse’s version of history. Yet since Cruse came of political age
in the same era, his development of a schema that made those politics invisible
remains a puzzlement.
The fate of Robeson’s anticolonialism provides a clue. With the onset of the
Cold War, characterized by the consolidation of U.S. global dominance at
the moment of the rise of new Asian and African nations, the broad anticolonial
alliances of World War II disintegrated. With the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and
the acceleration of political repression, many African American liberals retreated
from criticism of U.S. foreign policy, fundamentally altering the terms of
anticolonialism and effectively severing the black American struggle for civil
rights from the issues of anticolonialism and racism abroad. For many liberals,
criticism of American foreign policy gave way to an acceptance of America’s
claim to be the legitimate leader of the free world. In response to Cold War
anticommunism, African American liberals began to argue that discrimination at
home must be remedied because it undermined the legitimate position of the
United States as the leader of the free world. From this position also evolved a
180 • PENNY M.VON ESCHEN

parallel anticommunist anticolonialism.17 The silences imposed during the Cold

War on American global relations involved not only the eclipse of historical
analysis but a redefinition of race and racism from something understood as
rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism to something seen as a
psychological problem and an aberration in American life; and from something
understood internationally to a “domestic” problem.18 Here, ironically, Cruse
bears an unmistakable resemblance to the liberals. Both are silent on the
ascendancy of American empire; and both take refuge in a form of American
exceptionalism.
In fairness to Cruse, unlike the liberals, his distorting indictment of the politics
of the 1940s and ’50s might be viewed in part as a product of a despair born of
twenty years of U.S. dominance. Robeson and anticolonial activists in the CAA
had believed that new African and Asian states would help black Americans in
their own struggles against Jim Crowism. But after two decades that had been
profoundly disruptive of African and Asian nation-building projects, evidenced
in the U.S. CIA-sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and
the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, earlier solidarities crumbled under
the weight of political exigencies and neocolonial political economies prevailed
over genuine independence. In the United States, the post-World War II
resegregation of housing and jobs exacerbated structural inequalities and barriers
to black advancement, contributing to the inadequacy of the hard-won Civil Rights
and Voting Rights Acts. Indeed, the power of The Crisis lay in its confrontation
with these failures.
But herein lies the Cold War seduction of Harold Cruse. The plight of many
African Americans was hardly unconnected to the global context of American
politics and expanding U.S. empire had deep ramifications for domestic politics.
If in the immediate postwar period the U.S. role in the international economy
brought unprecedented prosperity to many, the militarization of the U.S.
economy that fueled U.S. invasions and financing of wars in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America skewed investment toward high-tech “national security” needs
and away from not only the social services of the New Deal and Great Society
programs, but also away from basic industry and infrastructure. And in a cruel
irony, as the inequitable social relations of empire came back home,
these processes eventually eroded the industrial and public sectors where black
American workers had made significant gains. As Paul Robeson and his allies in
the CAA, and later activists from Julian Mayfield to Martin Luther King Jr. knew,
inequality at home could not be resolved merely through a more savvy war of
position in interethnic-group politics.19 Genuine democracy depended, in part, on
a confrontation with empire. Robeson and his allies were uncompromising in
their insistence on making explicit and visible the lineaments of wealth and
power that have shaped the modern world. Cruse, on the other hand, took the
Cold War path of concentrating on racism at home while maintaining a silence
on the United States abroad. Cruse adopted the very assumptions of liberal
hegemony that undergirded the deteriorating conditions of urban black
 THE COLD WAR SEDUCTION OF HAROLD CRUSE • 181

Americans and the economic devastation against which he fought, and which
indeed he was prescient in grasping. Evidently at home with empire, Cruse
blamed the messenger—in this case Robeson, along with later internationalists.
Were there alternatives during that very repressive era to accepting the terms
of the Cold War, or to the despair engendered by an acceptance of those terms?
The historian Thomas Borstelmann has aptly observed that for most of the
peoples of Africa and Asia, “the Cold War and the supposed dangers of
communism were merely distractions from the historic opportunity provided by
World War II for ending the European colonialism that had long dominated the
lives of most of the world’s people.”20 As the administration of Harry S Truman
chose to interpret international, national, and even local politics in terms of a
fundamental struggle with the Soviet Union, Robeson, along with other
anticolonial activists, tried to shift the terms of the debate to colonial people’s
and working people’s control of their labor, their land, and their resources.
Following the fragmentation of anticolonial alliances and the split of the
Council on African Affairs in 1948, remaining CAA leaders such as Hunton,
Robeson, and DuBois continued their work on Africa. The organization
increasingly focused on direct support of African liberation movements as well
as on monitoring American corporate initiatives in Africa. The CAA’s African Aid
Committee, chaired by DuBois, raised money in 1950 to support striking coal
miners at Enugu, Nigeria, and the Nigerian National Federation of Labor.
Hunton followed the activities of Edward R.Stettinius Jr., the former secretary of
state who, Hunton argued, controlled virtually the entire economy of Liberia
through his Liberia Company. Alarmed by these efforts, colonial powers sought
to undermine the CAA’s visibility in Africa. By 1950, the CAA’s New Africa was
banned from the mails of the Union of South Africa, Kenya, and the Belgian
Congo.21
As the historian Sterling Stuckey has argued, Robeson’s efforts on behalf of
the liberation of African and Asian peoples intensified in the period after 1949.22
The Marshall Plan and new American corporate involvement in Africa and Latin
America deepened Robeson’s critique of the relationship between imperialism
and Jim Crowism and his sense of connection with black peoples in
the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. For Robeson, “The Marshall Plan
means enslavement of our people all over the earth, including here in the United
States on the cotton and sugar plantations and in the mines of the North and
South.” Moreover, again linking the violence of imperialism with the violence in
the U.S. South, Robeson argued that the new U.S. foreign policy was—and could
only be—backed by militarism. The Atlantic Pact gave “legal sanction for
sending guns and troops to the colonies to insure the enslavement and
terrorization of our people. They will shoot our people down in Africa just as
they lynch us in Mississippi.”23
Despite Robeson’s unequivocal grounding in projects of black liberation,
Cruse, seduced by bipolarism, lamented in a parochial American definition of
“nationalism” that Robeson and his allies “never, but never, had a single
182 • PENNY M.VON ESCHEN

nationalistic sentiment in their naive revolutionary souls.”24 Interestingly, Cruse

also claimed that Robeson “never engaged in direct action,” and asserted that
“Robeson also blasted the NAACP” as evidence of Robeson’s disloyalty to black
Americans.25 Here Cruse ignored not only Robeson’s activism, but a highly
publicized 1946 dispute between Robeson and Walter White of the NAACP
during Robeson’s antilynching crusade and the separate NAACP initiative that
led in part to the formation of Truman’s President’s Committee on Civil Rights.
Robeson was outraged over Truman’s claim that it was not expedient for the
federal government to take action on lynching and further enraged that White
accepted not action, but a committee that put antilynching measures “in
committee while Negroes are still being lynched.”26 Most fundamentally, in
simplifying Robeson’s critique of the NAACP, Cruse is also oblivious to the
critical role of the NAACP in crafting new strategies and arguments for civil
rights that rested on anticommunism and a fundamental embrace of the
legitimacy of America’s position as the leader of the “free world.”27
Furthermore, mired in a bipolar vision of the world, Cruse, who at times is
quite cognizant of the political repression of the Cold War, completely
overlooked the repression of black anticolonial politics.28 In fact, black activists
were tremendously beleaguered in this era of the consolidation of U.S.
hegemony. The work of the CAA was increasingly encumbered by government
prosecution of the organization and its leadership. As Duberman has argued,
while Robeson was misquoted by the Associated Press (AP) from the Paris Peace
Conference in 1949 as saying that “it is unthinkable that American Negroes
would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations
against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people
to the full dignity of mankind,” following the dispatch Robeson faced fierce
denunciations from the white press as well as black leadership, and the full wrath
of agencies of the U.S. government. As Duberman explained, Robeson had been
for many the showcase black American, proof that a “deserving” black person
could make it in America and, even better, someone who talked with patriotism
and optimism about the country’s democratic promise. But the AP account from
Paris, following four years of increasingly disenchanted public pronouncements,
suggested he had turned out to be an unsuitable representative. For the political
establishment, it became imperative to isolate and discredit him.29
While Robeson believed that the Soviet Union offered hope for colonized
peoples, he critiqued the U.S. role in fostering the Cold War because of what he
believed would be devastating consequences for anticolonial and democratic
projects, not because he supported the Soviet Union.30 For the rest of his life
Robeson would struggle for the visibility of oppression of black peoples against
a bipolar reading of global politics that rendered the oppression of Africans and
peoples of African descent a secondary issue. For Robeson, the paramount issues
were protection of free speech and civil liberties, the right to speak his mind as
an American citizen, and the integrity and independence of black politics. Indeed,
Robeson saw his silencing by the U.S. government as an “un-American”
 THE COLD WAR SEDUCTION OF HAROLD CRUSE • 183

violation of civil liberties, the government’s inability to accept the independence

of anticolonial struggles, and its persistence of viewing antiracist projects in terms
of the Cold War as expressions of U.S. racism, not as roadblocks to Soviet
expansion in the United States. Responding to attacks after the Paris Peace
Conference, Robeson declared, “They can’t imagine that our people, The Negro
people, forty million in the Caribbean and Latin America, one hundred and fifty
million in Africa, and fourteen million here, today up and down this America of
ours, are also determined to stop being industrial and agricultural serfs.”31
Unable to silence him through fear and intimidation, in 1950 the federal
government revoked Paul Robeson’s passport. In rejecting Robeson’s appeal, the
U.S. State Department plainly revealed that the government regarded
anticolonialism and civil rights activism within the United States as interlocking
issues that threatened U.S. security. The State Department contended that even if
the passport had been canceled “solely because of the appellant’s recognized
status as spokesman for large sections of Negro Americans, we submit that this
would not amount to an abuse of discretion in view of the appellant’s frank
admission that he has been for years extremely active in behalf of the
independence for the colonial peoples of Africa.” The government’s brief in the
U.S. Court of Appeals justifying the revocation of Robeson’s passport stated that
while working for the liberation of African peoples “may be a highly laudable
aim, the diplomatic embarrassment that could arise from the presence abroad of
such a political meddler, traveling under the protection of an American passport,
is easily imaginable. After all, “the President is the sole organ of the federal
government in the field of international relations.’” Here the government made it
clear that the U.S. government would not tolerate criticism of its foreign policy
by civil rights leaders.32
Thus, the reasons for the severity of the repression of Robeson lay in the
relationship between the foreign and domestic policies of the United
States, not in purported communist ties. Between 1945 and 1960, as the United
States emerged as the dominant global power, forty countries with a total of
eight hundred million people—more than a quarter of the world’s
population— revolted against colonialism and won their independence. The
projects of anticolonial activists such as Robeson, as well as those of indigenous
African independence movements, clashed with the explicit aims of the
American government to foster pro-western independence movements in Africa
and Asia. As a 1951 State Department directive put it, “Africa provides a sizable
proportion of the critical commodities now required by the Free World” and it is
imperative to “insure that Africa will remain firmly fixed in the political orbit of
the Free World.”33 Courting the loyalty of mineral-rich Africa, State Department
officials in West Africa were deeply concerned about the impact of prominent
anticolonial activists such as Robeson and DuBois—as revealed in the deliberate
attempt to discredit Paul Robeson. The revocation of Robeson’s passport by the
American government had drawn widespread criticism throughout Asia and
Africa. State Department personnel in West Africa were particularly alarmed
184 • PENNY M.VON ESCHEN

about the ramifications of the passport case, and were also dismayed by the
repercussions of Robeson’s criticism of American intervention in Korea.
In 1951, Roger P.Ross, a U.S. official in Accra, Ghana, wrote to the State
Department soliciting a disparaging letter about Robeson that could be
distributed in Africa. His request led to the publication of an article of this
precise description in the November 1951 Crisis, the official NAACP organ—
and the distribution of this article in West Africa. The article, “Paul Robeson—
The Lost Shepherd,” was written by Robert Alan, identified only as “the pen-
name of a well known journalist.” Ross had insisted that in order to be effective,
the story of Robeson must be presented as “a tragedy,” paying homage to his
talents as an artists and then treat his political views as “spiritual alienation from
his country and the bulk of his people.”34 Whatever the authorship of the article,
by publishing the piece in The Crisis, the NAACP participated in this
discrediting of Robeson (something else Cruse ignored when he charged that
“Robeson also blasted the NAACP”). Moreover, that Cruse himself chooses to
call Robeson’s story a “tragedy” speaks to the hegemony of a liberal rejection of
politics in a form of “the end of ideology” (and perhaps as well to the
embarrassingly predictable lack of originality generated by Cruse’s oedipal
fixation.)35
Ironically, if Cruse was convinced that Robeson and his allies followed a
communist line, U.S. officials knew much more was at stake. In addition to
attempts to discredit Robeson in Ghana, after the revocation of Robeson’s
passport, the Council on African Affairs faced two different sets of charges by
the U.S. attorney general. In 1952, the attorney general’s Subversive Activities
Control Board charged the CAA with communist domination and with failing “to
register with the Attorney General as provided in Sec. 7(b) of the Internal
Security Act of 1950.”36 However, evidence for the case rested not on CAA
support of the Communist Party, but on its work on Africa and on its opposition
to American intervention in Korea. Asserting the integrity and independence of
anticolonial politics, the CAA’s chief line of defense was to demonstrate the
breadth of work in support of African liberation movements.37 Not only was
it precisely this work on Africa that the government interpreted as communist
inspired, but indeed, the next year the CAA was charged directly for its support
of African groups. In a 1953 memo to J.Edgar Hoover, assistant attorney general
Warren Olney III implied that the attempts to link the CAA to the Communist Party
had been “a mere fishing expedition” and outlined a new case against the
council. Evidence that “the subject is acting as ‘a publicity agent’ for a foreign
principal” and “soliciting funds for a foreign principal” rested on the CAA’s
support of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, the Nigerian
mine workers, and the Kenya Africa Union. Olney subpoenaed CAA
correspondence with the ANC and South African Indian Congress, hoping that
“an examination of the subject’s books, records and correspondence will reveal
the necessary evidence to establish an agent relationship.”38 The FBI further
stepped up its surveillance.39 The case against the CAA never reached closure
 THE COLD WAR SEDUCTION OF HAROLD CRUSE • 185

because in 1955, financially crippled by the defense of the organization and

weakened by the restrictions placed on its leaders such as Robeson, DuBois, and
Hunton, the CAA disbanded. The CAA devoted much of its last months to
supporting the 1955 conference of nonaligned nations in Bandung, Indonesia,
and embraced the position of nonalignment. Although the government had
successfully contained the CAA and its leaders, Bandung vindicated their support
of the struggles of colonized peoples over bipolar Cold War politics.
Cruse’s text points ultimately to its author’s crisis of historical imagination. In
overlooking the new forms of American political, economic and military
dominance, including U.S. responses to African nation-building projects and the
political repression of African American activists for a host of domestic and
international challenges, Cruse mislocated the causes and the character of the
weakness of the black Left in this period. And in the end, Cruse’s American
exceptionalism, part and parcel of the Cold War hegemony that labeled any
internationalism or opposition to U.S. objectives as communist or the
inappropriate imposition of foreign ideologies, severely truncated the history of
black nationalism.
The October 1957 issue of Ebony carried a profile with Paul Robeson by Carl
T.Rowan. Noting that the name of one of “the most fabulous characters of our
time” has become anathema, Rowan asked, “Why? What caused this almost
unbelievable turnabout that sent an international hero plunging into seven years
of obscurity?” And “why was the State Department out to get him?” “‘Nobody will
ever convince me that the foreign and domestic policies of this country do not
come straight from the South,’ explains Robeson. ‘This country is run by Jim
Eastland and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Russell and that crowd.’ And
Robeson figures that these men feared him, that they saw in him a symbol around
which the Negro masses might rally to join hands with ‘the black power that is
now flexing its muscles in Asia and Africa.’”40 Robeson, unlike Cruse, knew
that there could never be any purely American context for race relations. But
Robeson hardly overlooked the American context, arguing that the real reason he
was silenced was that he challenged both colonialism and racism in the U.S.
South, not for what he considered the false charges of being pro-Soviet.
Given that the contemporary resonance and appeal of The Crisis at its
publication in 1967 and in the years following was in no small part a product of
its passionate call for an independent politics, made all the more compelling by
the devastation of such a politics in the Cold War, Cruse’s mislocation of that
devastation is tragic. Not only did Cruse fail to indict the far more systemic
sources of disruption and repression against black activists, in discrediting
Robeson and an entire generation of left activists, his analysis contributed to a
profound historical amnesia and helped create a fissure between different
generations of black radicals. If Cold War memory loss and government
disruption of black politics wasn’t enough, there was Harold Cruse to assure
young radicals that due to the failing of their elders, they were starting from
scratch, with only his “first theoretical attempts” as a guide.
186 • PENNY M.VON ESCHEN

In 1956, a decade before Cruse authoritatively presumed to locate the origins

of black power in 1966, Robeson told Rowan for the Ebony interview, “I think a
good deal in terms of the power of black people in the world. If I could just get a
passport I’d just like to go to Ghana or Jamaica just to sit there for a few days
and observe this black power.”41 But when black power was articulated in the
1960s, Robeson’s enormous contributions to an internationalist black politics
were largely unappreciated. Following prolonged isolation, harassment, and
exclusion from work and travel, he suffered a series of emotional and physical
breakdowns. Before his death in 1976, he spent his last years broken and
virtually forgotten (not “in exile” as Cruse rashly asserts) a fate clearly not
helped by the extensive attacks on him in the highly influential Crisis.42

Notes

1. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the
Failure of Black Leadership (1967; reprint New York: Quill, 1984), 227.
2. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Martin Bauml Duberman,
Paul Robeson (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1988); Penny M.Von Eschen, Race
against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1997); Brenda Gayle Plummer, A Rising Wind: Black
Americans and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996.)
3. This point has been further developed in Von Eschen, Race against Empire. See
especially chapter 7, “Remapping Africa, Rewriting Race,” and chapter 8, “No
Exit: From Bandung to Ghana.”
4. Significantly, Cruse attacked the anticapitalist versions of “the end of ideology,”
taking issue with Daniel Bell’s critique of “mass cultural democracy” where, by
ignoring what Cruse saw as intergroup cultural competition, black America was
invisible and “the black social movement is not even worth mentioning.” On the
terrain of American politics, Cruse was absolutely correct in his critique. But while
rejecting homogenizing assumptions of “end of ideology” theorists, Cruse fully
accepted their American exceptionalism. See Cruse, Crisis, 460–65.
5. Ibid., 289.
6. Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 13.
7. Cruse, Crisis, 236–37.
8. Robin D.G.Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black like Mao: Notes on Red China and
Black Revolution,” forthcoming, unpublished manuscript. On Cruse and Mayfield,
see Kevin Gaines, in this volume.
9. Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” in Black Fire: An
Anthology of Afro-American Writing, Ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (New York:
William Morrow, 1968), 63. Cruse’s disclaimer is less interesting for the
unelaborated claim that he no longer agrees with all of the articles’ conclusions
than for his curious assertion that it was “the first theoretical attempt to deal with
Afro-American nationalism after World War II.”
10. Kelley and Esch, “Black Like Mao.”
 THE COLD WAR SEDUCTION OF HAROLD CRUSE • 187

11. Cruse, Crisis, 354

12. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 257–58.
13. I have furthered explored these projects in Von Eschen, Race against Empire,
chapters 1, 2, and 3.
14. See Nelson Peery, Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary (New
York: New Press, 1994) for a fascinating discussion of the Communist Party and
Earl Browder’s temporary appeasement of U.S. imperialism and the U.S. Office of
War Information’s deliberate distribution of Earl Browder text in the Philippines
during World War II. See Von Eschen, Race against Empire, chapter 1, “The
Making of the Politics of the African Diaspora,” for a further discussion of the
independence of the CAA’s anticolonial politics from the Communist Party.
15. I have made this point in “Legacies of 1930s Race and Internationalism,”
Intellectual History Newsletter 19 (1997). See also Von Eschen, Race against
Empire, chapter 2, “Democracy or Empire?”
16. Von Eschen, Race against Empire, chapter 4, “The Diaspora Moment.” See also
Paul Gordon Lauren, The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987.)
17. Von Eschen, Race against Empire, chapter 5, “Domesticating Anticolonialism”
Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993.)
18. Von Eschen, Race against Empire, chapter 7, “Remapping Africa, Rewriting
Race.”
19. On Mayfield, see Kevin Gaines, in this volume.
20. Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle, 195.
21. Von Eschen, Race against Empire, chapter 6, “Hearts and Mines.” See also Hollis
Lynch, Black American Radicals and the Liberation of Africa: The Council on
African Affairs 1937–1955 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Africa Studies and
Research Center, Monograph Series no .5, 1978,47–48; Gerald Horne, Black and
Red: W.E.B.DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War 1944–1963
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 184.
22. Stuckey, Slave Culture, 356–58.
23. Philip Foner, Ed., Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918–
1974 (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1978), 207.
24. Cruse, Crisis, p.236.
25. Ibid., 236, 286.
26. Foner, ed., Paul Robeson Speaks, p.204.
27. Ibid.
28. Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? 8.
29. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 342–50.
30. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (1958; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 41–42.
31. Foner, Ed., Robeson Speaks, 203.
32. W.A.Hunton Papers, Box 1, Folder 19, Organizational, the Council on African
Affairs, 1945–55, MG 237 Schomburg Library, New York City; Duberman, Paul
Robeson, 388–90, 434. Many of the arguments in the following sections are further
developed in Von Eschen, Race against Empire, chapter 6, “Hearts and Mines.”
33. E.H.Bourgerie, Director, Office of African Affairs to A.W.Childs, Esq., American
Consul General, Lagos, Nigeria, April 23,1951: RG 745H.00/4–2351.
188 • PENNY M.VON ESCHEN

34. Roger P.Ross, Public Affairs Officer, American Consul, Accra to Department of
State, Subject: USIE, Request for a Special Story on Paul Robeson: Jan. 9, 1951;
Department of State, RG 59: 511.45K21/1–951; National Archives; Robert
Alan,“Paul Robeson—The Lost Shepherd,” Crisis, November 1951, On the
Crisis’s publication of this article and other attacks on Robeson including Walter
White’s “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson,” published in Ebony, see Duberman,
Paul Robeson, 395. See also “Paul Robeson: Right or Wrong: Right: says W.E.B.Du
Bois: Wrong: says Walter White,” Negro Digest, March 1950, 8–18.
35. Cruse, Crisis, 286.
36. Herbert Brownell Jr., Attorney General of the United States, Petitioner; Council on
African Affairs, Inc., Respondent: On petition for an order requiring the Council on
African Affairs, Inc. to register with the Attorney General as required by Section 7
(b), (c) and (d) of the Internal Security Act of 1950. Papers of W.E.B.Du Bois,
microfilm, Reel 69, Frames 692 and 693. FBI report NY 100–19377, June 3, 1952:
Papers of W.E.B.Du Bois, U. of Amherst, Box 377, Folder 136. On the charges see
also Horne, Black & Red pp.187–188 and Lynch, Black Americans Radicals, p.50.
37. Outline of proposed testimony, W.A.Hunton, October 23,1953, Hunton papers,
Box 1, Folder 19.
38. Warren Olney III, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division to the Director of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, File 146–28–376, 1953. The Papers of
W.E.B.DuBois, Special Collections, W.E.B.DuBois Library, University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. Group 2/3, Section 23, Box 379, Folder 60, 1–3.
39. On survellience of CAA support for the Kenya African Union and Jomo Kenyatta
see, To: SAC NY 100–19377 from Director, FBI, 100–69266, July 19,1954.
W.E.B.Du Bois Papers, Amherst, Group 2/3, Series 23, Box 376, Folder 31.
40. Carl T.Rowan, “Has Paul Robeson Betrayed the Negro?” Ebony, 12, no. 12
(1957): 33.
41. Cruse, Crisis, 545. Rowan, “Has Paul Robeson Betrayed the Negro?” 41.
42. Cruse, Crisis, 301.
 10
The Crisis of Historical Memory
Harold Cruse, Julian Mayfield and African American
Expatriates in Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1957–1966

KEVIN GAINES

In 1968, Harold Cruse’s classic study The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
became an immediate best seller, capitalizing on the popular mood of militancy,
black power, and angry disenchantment with the gradualism and limitations of
the reforms achieved by the 1960s-era social contract between corporate
liberalism and the civil rights establishment.1 Cruse’s text presented itself as
bolder and more radical than other approaches to African American liberation
popular in black intellectual discourse of the day.
In retrospect, however, it would appear that the book’s reception actually
benefited at least as much from Cold War liberalism as it did from the popular
mood of militancy. Cruse singled out the previous generation of black leftist
intellectuals—Paul Robeson, W.E.B.DuBois, Richard Wright, Lorraine
Hansberry, and others to support his contention that black militants had hitherto
failed to make an independent social and historical analysis of African American
oppression within the United States. Cruse’s indictment of the black Left
remained strikingly silent about the negative impact of the Cold War and U.S.
racism on African American radicalism. Instead, his book is a sustained polemic
against many of the most prominent black leftist intellectuals of the postwar era,
whose international political outlook and support for national liberation struggles
abroad, Cruse felt, had led them into debilitating compromises with the white
left and failed integrationist politics.
But as Penny Von Eschen has argued, the disputed reputation of these
intellectuals, and the demise of the radical anticolonial politics they
espoused after World War II, were to a large degree the result of a campaign
against them led by the U.S. government and anticommunists.2 Julian Mayfield,
the Harlem-based novelist and actor, and one of the radical internationalist
intellectuals named in Cruse’s indictment, castigated Cruse for pursuing personal
vendettas through his “spiteful” assault on black leftist intellectuals. Mayfield’s
review of Cruse’s book for Negro Digest elicited an acrimonious response from
Cruse, unenlightening on political and ideological questions and saturated with
innuendo regarding Mayfield’s activities while in exile in Ghana as an adviser to
its head of state, Kwame Nkrumah.3
This heated exchange between Mayfield and Cruse has long been
overshadowed by the influence Cruse’s text has exerted on generations of black
190 • KEVIN GAINES

scholars and activists. Mayfield, who was teaching at Cornell University at the
time, saw himself engaged with Cruse’s text in a contest over the minds of black
students. Mayfield reminded his audience that DuBois, marginalized by Cruse
for having embraced both exile and communism, had been a stalwart
indispensable champion of black liberation. And Mayfield proudly defended his
participation in left-wing causes and campaigns during the late 1940s and ’50s.
But Cruse prevailed with ease over Mayfield’s invocation of historical memory.
For many black activists who had experienced white paternalism, Cruse’s jibe of
integrationism contained more than a kernel of truth. His text also caught the
cresting tide of black-power ideology, one tendency of which privileged
separatism and local control of black communities over cosmopolitanism and
coalition building. The tension between insular and expansive notions of black
identity persists, and to a great extent we see narrow exclusionary expressions of
“authentic” blackness prefigured in Cruse’s unrestrained prejudice against Afro-
Caribbeans and Jews.4 However valid Cruse’s critique of the paternalism of the
white-dominated Left, his conflation of the black left internationalism of
DuBois, Robeson, and others with the suspect category of integrationism
effectively consigned much of the independent black radical activist tradition to
the dustbin of history, at least on American campuses. By rearticulating the Cold
War’s marginalization of the black Left in the minds of many of his readers,
Cruse might well be understood as an unwitting soldier in the Cold War. Cruse’s
avowed commitment to historical analysis fell victim to his seductive assertion
of a more authentically grounded—and thus, all the more misleading—black
nationalist intellectual praxis.
Cruse’s magnum opus maligned many of those artists, activists, and
intellectuals whose political commitments thorughout the Cold War era
contributed to their ambiguous legacies: Wright, Robeson, Hansberry, James
Baldwin, Mayfield, and others. (Mayfield wondered why Cruse devoted
considerably more space to his attack on Hansberry than to any discussion of
DuBois.) These radical intellectuals and their internationalist solidarity with
emergent African nations, articulated in such journals as Freedomways and the
Liberator, were, by Cruse’s reckoning, out of touch with the needs of
black communities in Harlem and the United States. According to Cruse, this
generation of intellectuals was “deeply impressed by the emergence of the
African states, the Cuban revolution, Malcolm X, and Robert Williams himself.
They were witnessing a revolutionary age of the liberation of oppressed peoples.
Thus they were led to connect their American situation with those foreign
revolutionary situations. They did not know, of course, that to attempt to apply
foreign ideologies to the United States was more easily imagined than
accomplished.”5
For Cruse, then, the exile from the United States taken after World War II by
Wright, Baldwin, Chester Himes, and other black writers seeking an intellectual
and personal freedom unavailable under Jim Crow conditions had been a failure.
Mayfield’s own flight into exile to Ghana, to escape arrest for his involvement
 THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL MEMORY • 191

with Robert Williams’s armed self-defense movement, was attacked by Cruse as

proof of the critical cul-de-sac of the internationalism of both these black
radicals and of their purported disagreement with the struggles of African
Americans for economic self-sufficiency and control of their communities.6
For better or worse, Cruse’s book marked a turning point in black politics.
With the War on Poverty then perishing in the flames of the Watts Riot and the
Vietnam War, the assassination of Malcolm X, the implosion of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee after the defeat of its challenge to the
Democratic Party’s pact with Mississippi segregationists, and the overthrow of
Kwame Nkrumah in February of 1966, Cruse’s text signaled a decisive shift
away from the internationalism that had shaped the sensibilities of many black
intellectuals of the 1940s and ’50s, and had once culminated in widespread
support for the expatriates’ vision of a liberated Ghana.7 Ironically, given the
popularity of Cruse’s call for an independent black intellectual project (and his
scathing critique of white leftist paternalism), Cruse’s assertion of the radicalism
of black nationalism, with its scorn for “foreign” ideologies, was at the time
widely hailed by white liberals and leftists, a reading emblematic of the
American exceptionalism fashionable among liberal critics of New Left
internationalism. Indeed, Cruse—distortions and all—continues to be invoked by
liberals to authenticate their own dismissals of black left internationalism.8
Cruse’s disparagement of internationalism as irresponsible integrationism
echoed the constraints and outright dismissals imposed by the Cold War on black
radical thought and politics. However valid his advocacy of black community
control of economic and cultural institutions, Cruse’s nationalism precludes
serious consideration of the relationship between the local and the global within
independent black freedom struggles. What was the impact of Nkrumah’s Pan-
Africanism on black diaspora consciousness? How might the outrage among
African American militants at the United Nations over the assassination of
Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the independent Congo, be implicated in
local and national politics?9 True, Mayfield’s personal stake in rebutting Cruse,
through the review and in subsequent writings, was animated in part by his direct
involvement in Nkrumah’s Ghana from 1961 to 1965. But much more was at
stake in Ghana’s first republic or failure than the success or failure of a handful of
radical African American intellectuals, as Cruse and Mayfield would have it.
Ghana poses historical questions about the legacy of independent black social
movements and political projects, the relationship between their local, national
and global dimensions, and the complex role of these movements in shaping
black subjectivities that are unaddressed by Cruse and are still, with few
exceptions, largely unexplored.10
Though largely forgotten today, Ghana and its Pan-African politics were by no
means peripheral to the concerns and interests of black Americans and Afro-
Caribbeans throughout the 1950s and early ’60s. Indeed, Ghana embodied for
many the very independent black Left political ideals and objectives sought by
Cruse himself. It would be a fallacy to brand the internationalism represented by
192 • KEVIN GAINES

black Americans’ interest and involvement in Ghana as an integrationist retreat

from black interests and communities, as Cruse did. Instead, it is crucial to
recognize the centrality of race to the Cold War itself in order to appreciate the
singular challenge Mayfield and the Ghana expatriates faced in defining black
opposition to American racism. Mayfield and African American radicals in
Ghana and in the United States contended with the U.S. government’s Cold War
ideology, its subordination of black struggles to East-West conflicts, and its
frequently successful attempts to impose the ideological limits of Cold War
liberalism on the political discourse and tactics of many black activists and
movements.11
On a symbolic level, at least, Nkrumah’s proudly independent course for
Ghana against the tide of Cold War geopolitics briefly made this small country
seem to be an immediate threat to U.S. domestic and foreign policy as nuclear-
armed superpower rivals. The radical promise of Ghana’s first republic, and its
potential influence on the nature of black opposition in the United States itself,
led to concerted diplomatic, economic and political U.S. government strategies
for “containment” of Ghana’s influence in world affairs. In addition, fears of an
economically independent Africa prompted the United States to attempt to
prevent Nkrumah’s Pan-African socialist politics from gaining adherents across
the continent and spurred an intense propaganda campaign by U.S. embassies
throughout Africa to counter the adverse worldwide coverage of racial
oppression in the United States.
The first sub-Saharan African nation to gain its independence from colonial
rule, Ghana during the 1950s and early ’60s was a magnet for radical African
Americans supporting Nkrumah’s politics of nonalignment, socialism, African
continental unity, and revolutionary transformation. Their enthusiasm for
Ghana’s progress was reinforced by their frustration at the racial inequities,
unredressed bloodshed, and Cold War constraints of U.S. society. Mayfield
joined hundreds of African Americans, including many key intellectuals,
technicians, teachers, artists, and trade unionists who left the United States
for Ghana. To name only one example, Malcolm X’s 1964 visit among the
black expatriates in Ghana and his meeting with Nkrumah and other
African leaders and diplomats—all described at length in his posthumous
autobiography—appear to have been far more germane for refining his analysis
of the plight of black peoples in the Western world than his much-celebrated
renunciation of racism as a result of his pilgrimage to Mecca.
Nkrumah’s overthrow in a military coup in 1966 marked not only the demise
of Ghana’s leadership of struggles for economic and political independence for
African peoples, it also occasioned the dispersal of many of the American
expatriates, who close political ties to Nkrumah made them suspect in the eyes of
the new military regime.
Mayfield, and the African American expatriates in Ghana, are critical for an
assessment of the impact of the racial politics of the Cold War on black politics
and social movements. Indeed, the relative obscurity of Mayfield and the Ghana
 THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL MEMORY • 193

expatriates is a consequence of the enduring legacy of the Cold War’s constraints

on black thought and politics, a legacy dismissed by academic and popular
declarations that some domestic repression was regrettable, but ultimately
justified by the American victory in the Cold War.12 From U.S. government
controls on the freedom and mobility of African American intellectuals and
journalists of the postwar period, the most notable examples including DuBois,
Wright, and Robeson, to the state-sanctioned repression against the Black
Panthers, to the amnesia with regard to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.’s
denunciations of the Vietnam War and U.S. counterinsurgency policies, those
antidemocratic legacies of the Cold War and their consequences both here and
abroad belie declarations of victory.13 Mayfield and the Ghana expatriates are
instructive precisely because they defied pressure from Cold War liberals to
confine their vision of black politics within the domestic realm of civil rights.
Justifiably, they were insulted by Cold War liberals’ demand that
anticommunism take precedence over their commitment to African American
and African freedom. They refused to engage in Cold War rituals of
disassociation and denial, and vehemently objected to anticommunist
propaganda that portrayed domestic struggles against segregation, and African
nation-building projects as spearheaded by Soviet “outside agitators.”
In the late 1950s and into the next decade, Mayfield’s support for Ghana
joined efforts by African American intellectuals, at home and abroad, to forge an
independent black radical politics. Not only did these intellectuals oppose the
extremist anticommunist “states’ rights” rhetoric employed by segregationists to
discredit the cause of civil rights; they also insisted on the inherent value of
struggles for racial and social justice, against liberals’ tendency to subordinate
the domestic issue of civil rights to Cold War foreign policy imperatives.14
As an actor, novelist, and activist intellectual, Mayfield had been at the center
of Harlem cultural life throughout the 1950s. He had held a major role in the
Broadway production of Lost in the Stars, adapted from Alan Paton’s Cry the
Beloved Country. As chairman of the Committee on Negro Art, Mayfield was an
associate of such Harlem-based actors and intellectuals as Ossie Davis, Ruby
Dee, Sidney Poitier, James Baldwin, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, Lorraine
Hansberry, and John Henrik Clarke. Almost all were associated with Paul
Robeson’s Freedom newspaper, and later, with the journal Freedomways
(another target of Cruse’s), which consistently stressed the close relationship
between right-wing anticommunism and massive white southern resistance to
desegregation and vehemently challenged Cold War liberals’ assumptions that
black spokespersons were not entitled to criticize—let alone address—U.S.
foreign policy issues.
In Ghana, Mayfield defined black American identities within a continuum
linking U.S. and international politics. Mayfield’s journalistic writings from
Ghana were prolific and widely circulated throughout Anglophone West Africa
and the United States. Mayfield’s writings for Ghanaian and African audiences
contained exposés of past and present instances of antiblack violence in the
194 • KEVIN GAINES

South, intended to counter official Myrdalian rhetoric that the United States was
well on its way to resolving its racial “dilemma.” For American audiences,
Mayfield gave Nkrumah’s anti-imperialism and his radical vision of development
the fair hearing that they seldom received in the Western press. After Nkrumah’s
ouster, Mayfield found himself without a political platform for his activist
journalism. With the escalating demands for Black studies programs and
curricula on college campuses, Mayfield was exiled to the classroom. Upon his
return to the United States, Mayfield was unsuccessful in his attempts to publish
three separate manuscripts of his analysis of Ghana under Nkrumah.15 It is telling
that his only published account of Ghana in those years is a work of
autobiographical short fiction, “Black on Black: A Love Story,” in which events
in the fictional African nation “Songhai” were largely based on his experiences
in Ghana. The story concerns the relationship between a Ghanaian politician and
an African American woman that is undermined by popular suspicion of the
African American community as a threat to the nation’s stability in the wake of
assassination attempts on the head of state. Although Mayfield’s legacy was
certainly not helped by his untimely death in 1984 in Washington D.C., the
obstacles he faced in his repeated attempts to publish suggests the persistence of
Cold War limitations on black oppositional thought and politics and the culture
industry’s commodification of African American intellectual dissent, a process
that shaped the distribution and reception of Cruse’s best-selling text.16
Mayfield’s accounts of his work in Ghana, read against his surviving
correspondence from that period with other expatriates and colleagues back in
the States, attest to the complexity of the expatriate experience. For those who
voluntarily moved to Ghana, as opposed to those who were political exiles, the
enabling condition of exile enjoyed by most of Ghana’s expatriates brought forth
a critical and largely overlooked perspective on the origins and legacy of black
popular movements of the 1950s and ’60s. The ambiguities of their location in
Ghana—being of African descent, yet socially and culturally foreign; remote
from the racial controversies of the U.S. scene, yet situated at the center of
international anticolonial projects; being sympathetic to the politics of African
liberation, yet marginal, as junior partners of Pan-Africanism, so to speak,
within Nkrumah’s Ghana—all provided expatriate intellectuals a unique critical
perspective from which to reflect on events both near and distant.
Still responding, more or less, to Cruse’s polemic, Mayfield’s retrospective
account of “our crowd” in Ghana, while suffused with a blend of nostalgia and
disillusionment, nonetheless sketched a genealogy of the formation of his cohort
of black intellectuals. For Mayfield, the crisis of the Negro intellectual was
defined by the pressures of U.S. racism, segregation, and Cold War hysteria. “As
Afro-Americans [in Ghana] we were testing the parameters of the Western world,”
he noted. “Our heroes, inevitably, were…Paul Robeson, the still incredible Jack
Johnson, Malcolm X, and most of all, W.E.B.DuBois, who was still alive, and
who lived just around the corner…. All of these men had been international in
their thinking. They had recognized long ago something that we had to work out
 THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL MEMORY • 195

for ourselves in Ghana: That being a member of a persecuted minority in a racist

nation like the United States almost automatically stunted one’s psychological
and intellectual growth. Minority thinking limited your vision and scaled down
the demands you made on yourself, and on the nation. You asked for one school
instead of the whole school system, for a town instead of a country….”17
Mayfield praised Robeson and DuBois, who had been victims of Cold war
hysteria for their internationalism—specifically their advocacy of African
anticolonial struggles.18 For Mayfield, their radical legacy resisted the political
and ideological constraints imposed on black intellectuals within the U.S.
context. Ghana, to Mayfield, heralded a revitalized global black consciousness
purged of the compromises imposed by the repressive racial politics of the
United States, rising from the ashes of political persecution and historical erasure.
Nkrumah’s project of African liberation offered lessons of struggle to the plight
of African Americans in the United States. It was important to the black
Americans in Ghana that Nkrumah, in tandem with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s
Egypt, was the center of African affairs, with the first major conferences of
African states being held in Accra and Cairo. And, as Mayfield recalled, freedom
fighters from the non-independent territories of the continent came to Ghana for
guns, money, and training.
The expatriates’ experiences went to the heart of the deeply politicized matter
of black identity in these years. The Ghana expatriates and their allies back in the
United States had a considerable stake in the U.S. debate around the question of
the extent to which African Americans identified with Africa.19 While this was
an old debate, it took new forms in the Cold War context of the 1950s. Following
the blacklisting of Robeson, DuBois, and others, explicit claims by civil right
organizations and leaders of solidarity with anticolonial struggles on the African
continent were virtually taboo, perceived as explicit criticisms of the U.S.
government. As some commentators maintained that black Americans were
completely alienated from their ancestral origins, and others argued that they
were as susceptible as many whites to exoticized Western conceptions of a
primitive Africa, Ghana expatriates and their domestic allies strongly challenged
the widely publicized view that insisted that African Americans
remained unwilling to acquaint themselves with the affairs and struggles of
African peoples.20
For the expatriates, “home” was where they identified the vanguard of black
struggle, and during the early 1960s, as King’s nonviolent direct action
campaigns met white resistance, this was increasingly understood as Ghana.
Relatively unencumbered there by the repressive Cold War climate that branded
antiracist dissent “un-American,” and scorned attempted linkages of domestic
and international struggles for democracy, the expatriates reveled in the
expanded horizons of black statehood in Ghana, and for black identity as well.
Some expatriates found there a psychic refuge that made a return to the
debilitating forces of U.S. racism for a time unthinkable. The advent of a new era
of black power elicited a range of responses among the expatriates, from
196 • KEVIN GAINES

romantic longings to pragmatic assessments of the obstacles, both internal and

external, to nation building in Ghana, and by extension, to the African revolution.21
Ghana’s potential impact on black American identities, and by extension,
domestic politics, made it equally important for the U.S. government to contain,
or redefine, its significance. Upon returning from Ghana and five other African
countries, vice president Richard Nixon reported to President D.Eisenhower that
Africa was the new site of conflict “between the forces of freedom and
international communism.”22 The Eisenhower administration’s presence at
Ghana’s independence festivities was to some degree a concession to anger in
the black press at the administration’s inaction against a spate of racist bombings
throughout the American South, while the Soviet invasion of Hungary remained
a matter of intense concern. Black American opposition seized on the evident
double standard in U.S. policy, effectively making Ghana an unpredictable
phenomenon for a government seeking to minimize its symbolic potential as a
catalyst for change.
Following the 1954 Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education,
the Eisenhower administration’s policy of appeasement of the forces of massive
resistance to desegregation led to well-publicized and embarrassing encounters
of diplomats from the new African states with Jim Crowism. Such incidents
threatened to undermine U.S. attempts to direct emergent African and Asian
states and their development policies, to say nothing of the objective of
managing domestic racial unrest. When the press disclosed that Ghana’s minister
of finance, Komla Gbedemah, accompanied by his assistant, the African
American pacifist Bill Sutherland, were insulted and refused breakfast at a Howard
Johnson’s restaurant in Dover, Delaware, Eisenhower had “a first-class
international incident” on its hands, as E.Frederic Morrow, the lone black man on
the White House staff, characterized the event. Morrow’s diary of his tenure as
presidential aide during this crisis-ridden period records his frustration: “On top
of the Little Rock situation, this is the kind of thing that makes our country look
bad abroad and gives the world the idea that we are first-class hypocrites when we
prate about our wonderful democracy.”23 Morrow’s discomfiture, sparked by the
recent Little Rock school desegregation standoff between Arkansas governor
Orval Faubus and Eisenhower, was eased somewhat by Eisenhower’s invitation
of Gbedemah and Sutherland to the White House for breakfast. The inadequacy
of the Eisenhower administration’s largely symbolic attempts at reconciliation
was abundantly clear as segregationist mobs, clashes between advocates of
“states’ rights” and federal authority, continued mistreatment of African
diplomats, and murderous violence would plague the later Kennedy years
as well.
If the sight of African diplomats elicited racist responses from benighted
whites, Ghana’s image of independent black statehood and Nkrumah’s
nonaligned foreign policy at the height of the Cold War was inspiring to many
other Americans. Ghana’s early alliance with Israel evoked in many African and
Jewish Americans a shared aspiration for an ancestral homeland. Some blacks
 THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL MEMORY • 197

lauded Ghana as a refutation of popular myths of Africa as the “dark continent.”

For many African Americans, Ghana and the prospect of new African states gave
the lie to segregationist assertions that peoples of African descent had no history.
Indeed, Ghana was widely seen as a catalyst for Southern black college students
to make history themselves through the sit-in movement, energizing civil rights
struggles in the United States. Upon observing activists at Florida A & M
University in 1960, James Baldwin explained that the students were born as
Africa was breaking free of European colonialism: “I remember…the invasion of
Ethiopia and Haile Selassie’s vain appeal to the League of Nations, but they
remember the Bandung conference and the establishment of the Republic of
Ghana.”24
Like Mayfield, many of the Ghana expatriates had activist backgrounds in
civil rights and democratic struggles. Sutherland was imprisoned for refusing to
serve in World War II and campaigned against segregation in the Armed Forces
with A.Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin in the late 1940s. Disenchanted with
racism in the United States, Sutherland reached Ghana in 1953 and married the
Ghanaian writer Efua Sutherland. Although only a few, such as W.E.B. and
Shirley Graham DuBois and Dr. Robert Lee, originally from Charleston, South
Carolina, went so far as to renounce their U.S. citizenship, generally, the
expatriates’ embrace of Ghana was reinforced by their abhorrence of American
racism.25
The expatriates shared Nkrumah’s Pan-African conviction that domestic
struggles for black freedom were inseparable from African liberation
movements.26 This was not understood as an inevitable racial destiny but as a
position requiring constant practical application and public discussion. For
example, in 1963 the expatriates staged a demonstration at the U.S. embassy in
Accra in conjunction with the March on Washington for Civil Rights, enacting
their view of solidarity among the struggles of black Americans and African
peoples. The Ghana expatriates picketed the U.S. Embassy in Accra, carrying
placards condemning Kennedy’s interventions in Cuba and Vietnam, the
administration’s appeasement of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and
its foot-dragging on civil rights. Such forceful criticism of the administration of
John F.Kennedy was carefully censored from the officially managed March on
Washington. The expatriates’ parallel demonstration in Ghana, arguably the
most radical of several international demonstrations in sympathy with the March
on Washington, accordingly attracted far more U.S. government scrutiny than
the others (including those held in Paris, Oslo, Munich, and Tel Aviv). This was
evident in the detailed U.S. State Department memorandum describing the
protest, which included the expatriates’ original petition to President Kennedy.
Even before this, however, through their links with activists in the United States
they brought their vision of Ghana and internationalism to discussions of black
American politics and society.27
Tales of the Lido, Mayfield’s final, unpublished, account of the period, situates
the Ghana expatriates within a radical tradition that challenged not only Cold
198 • KEVIN GAINES

War anticommunism but also the Cold War ideology underlying the civil rights
establishment as early as the 1950s. In doing so, Mayfield’s analysis complicates
narratives that locate the emergence of militancy, indeed, of “black power,” later
in the 1960s with the emergence of Malcolm X, black nationalism, and the
antiwar movement. Mayfield described his position in the 1950s as one of active
dissent from King’s status as the preeminent civil rights leader, and the evolving
movement’s tactical emphasis on nonviolence. With black people and organizers
in the rural southern towns terrorized by segregationists, Mayfield pointed out
that nonviolence held a limited appeal for many in that region.
As Mayfield recalled their arrival in Ghana, “Most of us were leaving
something unpleasant behind.” Surely this understatement referred to the
indignities of U.S. racism. For Mayfield it also alluded to the circumstances of
his exile. Mayfield had gotten involved with the armed self-defense movement
led by Robert Williams, an NAACP leader in Monroe, North Carolina. In
Commentary Mayfield argued the case of Williams—who, though dismissed
from the organization, posed to Mayfield a stark challenge to middle-class black
leaders incapable of responding effectively to the boycotts, sit-ins, and other
forms of black mass protest from below. Before being suspended from the
association by leadership fearful that he was a liability, Williams had rescued the
local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) that had been decimated by white intimidation after the Brown v.
Board of Education decision. He organized a black paramilitary force to thwart
resurgent Ku Klux Klan attempts to harass black professionals suspected of
supporting the NAACP. Mayfield applauded Williams’s efforts to turn the Cold
War (and the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights) to his
advantage, putting pressure on the federal government by subjecting antiblack
violence to world exposure. Holding black working-class insurgency as the
unknown variable in civil rights struggles, and emboldened by the recent
revolution in Cuba, Mayfield argued that the legalistic and passive resistance
strategies of the black leadership class failed to address their needs. Mass-based
leaders such as Williams, “who have concluded that the only way to win a
revolution is to be a revolutionary,” would then rise to the fore.28
Pressured by the FBI to provide information about Williams, Mayfield left the
country, reaching Ghana in 1961. He reflected on his close call with U.S.
authorities in a letter to John Henrik Clarke, suggesting the persistence of the
Cold War culture of betrayal and ostracism, putting friendships and loyalties to
the ultimate test: “People who thought I was on my way to jail…are feeling their
way back. They dropped me cold in September. Well, brother, once burned is
enough for me.” Mayfield’s initial response to Ghana was complicated. Mayfield
declared himself no longer able to live in the United States, and held mobility (for
those fortunate enough to have it) necessary for his development as an
intellectual. He enclosed photographs of the Ghanian “outdooring” of his
newborn son, Emiliano Kwesi. Born in Greer, South Carolina and raised in
Washington D.C., Mayfield conveyed the turbulent emotions sparked by leaving
 THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL MEMORY • 199

the poisonous Cold War atmosphere of racism and distrust, and exchanging the
status of a member of a persecuted minority for solidarity with Ghana’s black
majority society.29
In Ghana, Mayfield served as a speechwriter and journalist for Nkrumah. He
maintained later that his was a limited influence on the Ghanian president.
Expatriates gathered frequently at the home of Mayfield and his wife, Ana Livia
Cordero, a physician from Puerto Rico who ran a public clinic for women in
Accra.30 Through a conversation with Ghanian journalists, Mayfield
inadvertantly sparked a corruption scandal, replete with screaming newspaper
headlines. He had mentioned a report in a Nigerian paper that the wife of Krobo
Edusei, a prominent Convention People’s Party official, had purchased a gold-
plated bed in London for three thousand pounds.
Mayfield’s activities paralleled the deterioration of relations between Ghana
and the United States as Nkrumah, along with other radical new states such as
Guinea, under Sekou Touré, pursued a policy of nonalignment. By seeking trade-
and-aid agreements with Soviet bloc countries, in effect playing the Cold War
antagonists against each other, Nkrumah seemed to confirm the worst fears of
anticommunists. As Basil Davidson has written, “that sort of non-alignment has
become an everyday affair: when Nkrumah embarked upon it, [westerners] saw
it as a hostile challenge or a dastardly betrayal.”31 For Nkrumah’s information
bureau, Mayfield edited a volume on nuclear disarmament, The World without the
Bomb, culled from presentations at a conference held in Accra.32 Mayfield also
worked as West African correspondent for Middle East News, a press agency
with bureaus in New York, Cairo, London, and throughout Europe, and as a
frequent contributor to the Accra Evening News. His articles also discussed
Nkrumah’s program of African unity and nonalignment across the continent.33
Ghana’s strategic importance for the U.S. is further glimpsed in the vigilant
concern among the expatriates—found in Mayfield’s correspondence and
writings—with identifying African Americans deemed unfriendly to the cause of
independent Ghana. This too was an abiding legacy of the Cold War, during
which government informants were paid to provide names of real or imagined
subversives to the authorities. Among the more immediate causes for Mayfield’s
and the expatriates’ suspicion was the crisis in the former Belgian Congo,
sparked by the secession of the resource-rich Katanga province, and the
assassination of the independent Congo’s prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. The
overthrow of Lumumba sparked outrage among African American intellectuals,
including James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. In response to the defining
moment of Lumumba’s death, black radicals articulated an independent position,
critical of innuendoes by Adlai Stevenson and numerous press observers that
dissent was instigated by communists. The West’s vilification of Lumumba,
unapologetically slandered in a British newsreel as a “red agitator” killed, to be
sure, “at the hands of the Congolese” imparted to his death the sense that a
lynching had taken place.34 In a New York Times essay, Baldwin warned whites
that they were dangerously mistaken in perceiving black Americans’
200 • KEVIN GAINES

demonstration at the United Nations (whose peacekeeping mission in the Congo

was widely believed to be implicated in Lumumba’s removal) as communist
inspired. Indeed, this claim of communist influence was to Baldwin deeply
insulting in its suggestion that blacks would otherwise be docile in the face of
dreadful conditions, north and south. In a defense of Baldwin against escalating
vituperation by black American militants for whom Baldwin’s mainstream
success and his candid writing about homosexuality all but proved his suspect
racial credentials, Mayfield reminded the critics that Baldwin, like Hansberry,
had taken the unpopular stand in aligning themselves with the demonstrators.35
The expatriates, along with Baldwin and Hansberry, symbolized a broader
tendency among black Americans to view the political status and identity of
African Americans through African liberation struggles. Correspondence shows
that Mayfield and his cohorts called themselves “Afros,” tellingly omitting their
American identity, but often with an ironic awareness that blackness in itself was
no guarantee of loyalty to Ghana and Nkrumah.36
Despite—perhaps because of—Ghana’s post-Bandung challenge of
nonalignment, the nation remained beset by Cold War pressures, internally and
externally. This state of affairs certainly shaped Mayfield’s highly specific notion
of the Uncle Tom as the African American enemy of the African revolution. As
editor in chief of the African Review, a magazine published from Nkrumah’s
ministry of information in his executive offices in Flagstaff House, Mayfield
found himself by 1964 floundering in the turbulent politics surrounding
Nkrumah. Domestic opposition from conservatives and intellectuals primarily
from the cocoa-producing Ashanti region had long been strident, and had elicited
such controversial policies as Nkrumah’s Preventive Detention Act (1958).
Such internal tensions were reinforced by the external pressure of Cold War
constraints on Ghana and black power. Ghanaian opposition leaders were keen to
exploit anticommunist hysteria at nonalignment, and colluded with U.S.
government opponents of Nkrumah’s regime. From exile, Dr. Kofi Busia
testified before Congress in 1962 that Ghana was the springboard for communist
subversion on the African continent and thus ineligible for further financial aid.
Opposition spokesmen such as Busia were effective in characterizing Nkrumah’s
support for nationalist parties still struggling against colonial rule as communist-
inspired.37
The February 1966 coup found Mayfield, like Nkrumah, away from Ghana.
Nkrumah learned of the coup in China, en route to North Vietnam on an ill-fated
peace mission. Mayfield was on the island of Ibiza, staying in a government-
owned villa; he remained there writing his first unpublished manuscript on
Nkrumah, Ghana, and the coup. Almost a year after the coup, Mayfield had
concluded that while Nkrumah’s flaws certainly contributed to his undoing, the
determination of Africa’s enemies—as he put it—to prevent African unity was
decisive. For Mayfield, the Ghana coup, along with the deaths of Malcolm X,
Lumumba, and others affirmed that “this power struggle is a murderous game….
The enemy plays for keeps.” Although an authoritative case has been made for
 THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL MEMORY • 201

the flawed policies of Ghana’s first republic, disclosures since the coup have
confirmed Mayfield’s suspicion of U.S. attempts to destabilize Ghana.38
Although widely understood at the time as an advancement in the struggle,
declarations of black power in the United States ultimately reflected the
fragmentation of African American politics. Before this fragmentation, the latter
careers of King and especially Malcolm X had been transformed in the
internationalist image epitomized by Ghana. They had attempted to broaden the
civil rights agenda, linking antiracism to struggles for economic democracy.
They had argued that inequality at home was inseparable from the escalation of
the war in Vietnam. Black power rhetoric notwithstanding, the deaths of these
martyred leaders virtually enforced civil rights as the normative black political
discourse.
From the mid-1960s onward, radical black politics were effectively
neutralized by a combination of state repression and increasingly unaccountable,
undisciplined leadership that abandoned the movement’s strategies of mass
mobilization.39 What remained was in large part a highly rhetorical popular
conception of black power, or the new black aesthetic. This new articulation of
black power was depoliticized, anti-intellectual, and ineffectual, despite its
inflated revolutionary pretensions.40 Although from exile Nkrumah managed to
publish several perceptive critiques of neocolonialism in Africa, black-power
rhetoric in the U.S. tended toward the sort of bourgeois nationalism that Frantz
Fanon had identified as the Achilles heel of independent African states.41
Undeniably, black solidarities were fragmented from above. In 1957, Vice
President Nixon had framed African independence movements within Cold War
geopolitics. A decade later, President Nixon demonstrated anew the U.S.
political establishment’s vested interest in imposing its own vision of freedom on
black Americans. For Nixon, Black power was best expressed through promoting
small business enterprises in inner cities.42
Cruse’s slighting of Mayfield and the internationalist black Left cannot be
wholly explained by personal animosities. The failure of the civil rights and
African liberation movements to deliver on their revolutionary promise and
potential suggests another explanation for the influence of Cruse’s text. Cruse
tapped into the widespread discontent borne of unfulfilled demands for social
transformation. Moreover, Cruse echoed E.Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie,
influential in its own right for its portrayal of a self-absorbed and politically
quiescent elite lulled by its own platitudes of racial uplift. Whereas Frazier’s
critique, its excesses aside, heralded an insurgent critique of liberalism (his
concern, after all, was linking the disengagement of the black bourgeoisie to
Cold War pressures), Cruse’s narrative reinforced dominant narratives of Cold
War anticommunism. This perception of Cruse’s text, while exposed by
Mayfield and others, was obscured by its cathartic display of racialism. In this
manner Cruse capitalized on the parvenu status of a generation of emerging
middleclass students, activists, and intellectuals. By projecting these anxieties
onto something called the “integrationist black left,” the scapegoat for the failure
202 • KEVIN GAINES

of black social movements, Cruse offered readers an irresistible remedy for their
own class anxieties. Cruse’s argument also benefited from the vogue of
revolutionary rhetoric and an altogether misplaced faith among student radicals
and activists in grand social theory. All one needed, it was routinely asserted,
was the correct ideology. These circumstances and assumptions placed Mayfield,
himself associated with Nkrumah’s “failure,” at a disadvantage in countering
Cruse’s influence.
Cruse reaped the benefits of the destruction and failures of postwar black
radicalism. To be sure, black expatriates in Ghana, and Nkrumah himself,
underestimated the myriad obstacles to the realization of a Pan-African
revolutionary vision. Mayfield’s retrospective accounts strongly suggest that the
role and influence of African American expatriates within independent Ghana
was severely restricted by the complex political realities established by Nkrumah’s
policies. Inhibited in thought as well as action by their marginality, the Ghana
expatriates were vulnerable to charges of naïveté in failing to perceive the
manifold contradictions of “African socialism” as practiced by Nkrumah.43
It can also be said, however, that the largely ad-hominem style of Cruse’s
writing and his self-serving penchant for toppling straw men precluded any
serious reflection on Ghana and the independent black left activism that had
flourished there. The emergence and downfall of Nkrumah and Ghana cannot be
explained by Cruse’s thesis of the black Left’s subservience to the Communist
Party. Expatriate sympathizers of Nkrumah and other writers remain convinced
that his military overthrow was not a purely internal matter, but was in fact
orchestrated in large by Western powers, including the United States.44
Whatever one’s analysis of the Pan-Africanism represented by Mayfield and the
African American expatriates in Ghana, it appears Cruse’s influence often has
been the opposite of what he claims to have intended in penning The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual. By falsely conflating internationalism with the suspect
category of integration, the work’s legacy for future generations has been one of
discontinuity and confusion rather than that of advancing his avowed project of
critical inquiry into the history of independent black politics.
Long after Nkrumah’s fall, the appearance of Cruse’s obfuscatory text and
Mayfield’s passing, Ghana still retains its significance, even as its former
prominence in the African diaspora’s political imagination is largely forgotten.
Recently, the nation has been advertised as an economic success story, the
showcase for the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs—
despite its declining exports and the erosion of real incomes and living standards
for most Ghanaians.45 But in the late 1950s Ghana and all it stood for potentially
debunked for African Americans the racial myths—both imposed and
internalized—that trapped them in what Mayfield called “minority thinking”;
myths that prevented them from defining and pursuing an independent vision of
human freedom. Ghana’s avowedly socialist project offered African American
expatriates, however briefly, a radical vision that countered the perennial problem
of the relationship of African Americans to the white-dominated Left. With the
 THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL MEMORY • 203

destruction of Nkrumah’s vision of an independent, unified African continent,

Ghana has come to symbolize continuing struggles and forgotten ideals that are
the legacy of the Cold War and the neocolonial condition.

Notes

1. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Quill, 1984).
2. Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,
1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
3. Julian Mayfield, “A Challenge to a Bestseller: Crisis or Crusade?” Negro Digest,
June 1968, 10–24. Amid his defense against Mayfield’s charges that personal
animosity informed Cruse’s assessments of Paul Robeson and Lorraine Hansberry,
Cruse calls for Mayfield to be more forthcoming about his own romantic pursuits in
Harlem, Cuba, and Ghana: “But, damn, Mayfield, here you are sittin’ on all that
fantastical experience about black writers in love (and also exile) with your poor
readers thirsting for knowledge, literary exaltation, and a bit of honest, healthy
titillation…. Give us the livin’ lowdown on what went down in Ghana.” For Cruse,
exile was reduced to sexual adventurism. This particular response to Mayfield
seems more revealing about Cruse’s personal preoccupations than anything else.
See Harold Cruse, “Replay on a Black Crisis: Harold Cruse Looks Back on Black
Art and Politics in Harlem,” Negro Digest, November 1968, 25.
4. So eager were Cold War liberal critics to endorse Cruse’s dismissals of the black
Left that they forgave Cruse for his numerous and egregious expressions of bigotry
toward West Indians and Jews. For criticism of Cruse that breaks the silence on this
matter, see Alan Wald, “Narrating Nationalisms: Black Marxism and Jewish
Communists through the Eyes of Harold Cruse,” in this volume: and Winston James,
Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia (London: Verso, 1998, 262–91. James has
provided one of the most extensive and detailed rebuttals to Cruse’s attacks on
West Indian radicals.
5. Cruse, Crisis, 354.
6. See Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France,
1840–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Michel Fabre, The
Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York: William Morrow, 1973); Ernest
Dunbar, The Black Expatriates (New York: E.P.Dutton, 1968); the fictional
treatment by John A.Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am (New York: Signet,
1968); Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1996), and Gerald Horne, Race Woman (New York: New York
University Press, 1998) are among the growing list of works that address the black
expatriate experience after World War II in either Europe or new African states
such as Ghana.
7. Cruse’s attack on black leftist internationalism is at its most meanspirited in his
discussion of the late Lorraine Hansberry. Taking his cues from the anti-
integrationist movement, Cruse dismisses her play Raisin in the Sun as an exercise
in bourgeois integrationism, and denounces its author as not only cliquish and
middle-class in her interpersonal relations, but also as the owner of slum property.
See Cruse, Crisis, 267–84. In an analysis of the assassination of Hansberry’s
204 • KEVIN GAINES

reputation by both white liberals and black nationalists, Hansberry’s widower and
literary executor calls Cruse’s accusation that she owned slum property “an
outright lie.” See Robert Nemiroff to Julian Mayfield, August 24, 1979, in the
folder “Correspondence re: Lorraine Hansberry,” Julian Mayfield Collection,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
8. Cruse was favorably reviewed by Christopher Lasch on this basis; the review is
reprinted in Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Vintage, 1970). On
the belief that the New Left was compromised by foreign ideologies, see John P.
Diggins, The American Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1973). Sadly, Cruse remains the only introduction for many readers to
Robeson, Hansberry, and other African American radical intellectuals.
9. See, for example, the virtually forgotten essay by James Baldwin, “A Negro Assays
the Negro Mood,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 12, 1961, 25, 103–4,
penned in the aftermath of the protest by Afirican American activists at the United
Nations after Lumumba’s death.
10. Notable exceptions to this silence include Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism
(London: Zed, 1983); Manning Marable, From Kwame Nkrumah to Maurice
Bishop (London: Verso, 1987); Jan Carew, Ghosts in Our Blood. Malcolm X in
England, Africa and the Caribbean (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1994); and Von
Eschen, Race against Empire.
11. Although it generally does not address the experiences of African American
expatriates, much of the literature on the civil rights movement addresses the
conflict between black activism and Cold War perceptions and policy. See
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Taylor Branch, Parting the
Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1988); Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction
in Black America, 1945–1982 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988); and
Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time From World War II to Nixon (New York:
Vintage, 1976). On federal surveillance of black intellectuals and activists, see
Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters. The FBI’s Secret File on Black America (New
York: Free Press, 1989).
12. Cedric J.Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(London: Zed press, 1983); Penny M.Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black
Americans and Anticolonial Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
13. Kenneth O’Reilly, with David Gallen, Eds. Black Americans: The FBI Files (New
York: Carroll and Graf, 1994); Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File (New
York: Carroll and Graf, 1991); O’Reilley, Racial Matters.
14. Lorraine Hansberry, “A Challenge to Artists” Freedomways, 3, no. 1 (winter
1963): 31–35.
15. Mayfield’s unpublished manuscripts are preserved in Box 14, Ghana Manuscripts,
in the Julian Mayfield Collection, Schomburg Center. The first, “The Lonely
Warrior,” written immediately after the coup, is divided between a political
biography of Nkrumah, and an analysis of the coup. Journalistic and anecdotal, it
presents a balanced assessment of Nkrumah’s flaws and failed policies within a
critique of the continued dominance of foreign economic interests in
postindependence Ghana. The second, “When Ghana Was Ghana,” is a revised
version of the first manuscript, maintaining the validity of Nkrumah’s project of
 THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL MEMORY • 205

African unity while seeking to strengthen this analysis with more documentation
and research. The final manuscript, “Tales of the Lido,” was evidently written
between the late 1970s and Mayfield’s death in 1984. In its surviving fragments,
this memoir of Mayfield and the Ghana expatriates abandons the scholarly tone of
the previous works, interspersing historical and political analysis with a more
informal, gossipy, and sexualized remembrance of Ghana.
16. Julian Mayfield, “Black on Black: A Political Love Story,” in Ten Times Black,
Julian Mayfield (Toronto: Pathfinder, 1972, 125–49; “Julian Mayfield, Novelist
and Actor, Dies at 56,” Washington Post, October 23, 1984, B-6.
17. Julian Mayfield, “Tales of the Lido,” unpublished manuscript, Box 14, Julian
Mayfield Collection, Schomburg Center.
18. Von Eschen, Race against Empire; W.E.B.DuBois, The Autobiography of
W.E.B.DuBois (New York: International, 1968).
19. Harold Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (New York: Viking, 1963).
20. On the Cold War repression of black American anticolonial politics, see Von
Eschen, Race against Empire; On official claims that African Americans took no
interest in new African and Asian states, see Paul Robeson, Here I Stand, (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971), 86–88; On the various degrees of African American
identification with Ghana and African affairs, see Marguerite Cartwright, “African
Odyssey: Ghana,” Negro History Bulletin 20, no. 8 (1957): 175–78; Phaon
Goldman, “The Significance of African Freedom for the Negro American,” Negro
History Bulletin 24, no. 1 (1960): 2, 6; Shirley Graham DuBois, “The African
Personality,” Political Affairs 39 (1960): 13–19; and Horace Mann Bond, “Howe
and Isaacs in the Bush: The Ram in the Thicket,” Negro History Bulletin 25, no. 3
(1961): 66–70.
21. For black expatriates’ memoirs, see Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need
Traveling Shoes (New York: Vintage, 1984); Leslie Alexander Lacy, The Rise and
Fall of a Proper Negro (New York: Macmillan, 1970); and Mayfield, “Tales of the
Lido.”
22. Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press),
34–35.
23. E.Frederic Morrow, Black Man in the White House (New York: McFadden, 1963),
126–27.
24. James Baldwin, “They Can’t Turn Back,” reprinted in The Price of the Ticket:
Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 228.
25. Ernest Dunbar, The Black Expatriates: A Study of American Negroes in Exile (New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 69–109.
26. Kwame Nkrumah,/Speak of Freedom (New York: Praeger, 1961).
27. An account of the demonstration is given in Ronald Walters, Pan-Africanism and
the African Diaspora (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 119–20.
28. Julian Mayfield, “Challenge to Negro Leadership: The Case of Robert Williams,”
Commentary, April 1961, 297–305. The photocopy in the Mayfield papers at the
Schomburg Center carries a 1971 note with instructions to have sixty copies of the
piece made for Mayfield’s students, indicating Mayfield’s commitment to
acquainting younger generations with prior, forgotten, struggles.
29. Julian Mayfield to John Henrik Clarke [1962], Julian Mayfield folder, John Henrik
Clarke Papers, Schomburg Center.
30. Angelou, All God’s Children.
206 • KEVIN GAINES

31. Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah
(London: Allen Lane, 1973), 172.
32. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, 180.
33. Julian Mayfield, “What Nkrumah Means by a United Africa,” Egyptian Gazette,
July 22,1964; Julian Mayfield, “Ghanaian Sketches,” in Young Americans Abroad
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 176–204; Mayfield, “Congo is a Lesson for
the Apologists,” Muhammed Speaks, March 19,1965), 11; Mayfield, “Malcolm X:
A Tragic Loss,” Ghanaian Times, February 24, 1965, 6.
34. Riot at U.N., 1961 newsreel produced by British Pathé Film Company, in author’s
possession. I am indebted to Ron Gregg for making this film available to me.
35. James Baldwin, “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood,” 103–4; Julian Mayfield, “And
Then Came Baldwin,” Freedomways, Spring 1963,143–55.
36. Mayfield, “Uncle Tom Abroad,” Negro Digest, June 1963, 37–39.
37. On Busia’s testimony, see Davidson, Black Star, 174
38. For a detailed analysis of the political and economic strategies that contributed to
Nkrumah’s downfall, see Bob Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer, Ghana: End of an
Illusion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968). Mayfield to John Henrik
Clarke, February 1, 1967, in Julian Mayfield folder, John Henrik Clarke Papers,
Schomburg center. On the role of the CIA station in Accra in the coup, see John
Stockton, In Search of Enemies (New York: W.W.Norton, 1978); for a general
discussion of CIA interventions in Africa, see Ellen Ray, editor Dirty Work 2: The
CIA in Africa (Seacaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1980).
39. Clayborne Carson, “African American Leadership and Mass Mobilization,” Black
Scholar 24, no. 4 (1994): 2–7.
40. Jennifer Jordan, “Cultural Nationalism in the 1960s: Politics and Poetry,” in Race,
Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, Ed. Adolph
Reed (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 29–60.
41. Kwane Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa (New York: International Publishers,
1970); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
42. On Nixon’s co-opting of black power, see Daniel Schechter, Michael Ansara, and
David Kolodney, “The CIA as an Equal Opportunity Employer,” in Ray, et al.,
Eds., Dirty Work 2, 50–69.
43. These contradictions are detailed in Fitch and Oppenheimer, Ghana: End of an
Illusion.
44. On the role of the CIA station in Accra during the coup, see Stockton, In Search of
Enemies; for a general discussion of CIA interventions in Africa, see Ray et al.,
Eds., Dirty Work 2.
45. Lareef Zubair, “Ghana I.M.F.Program Drains the Country,” letter, New York
Times, November 2, 1994, A22.
 Part 5

The Problematic Status of Female

Intellectuals
208
 11
Religious Intellectuals, Social Change, and
Women’s Bodies
TRACI C.WEST

Christian religious life continues to reflect an essential part of the social and
political dynamics of most African American communities. Therefore, Christian
intellectuals bear significant responsibility for constructively influencing this
communal religious life, and their leadership represents a crucial element for
cultivating progressive social change. In particular, the contributions of black
Christian intellectuals are essential for creating a climate that respects the dignity
and human rights of women within black communities. In this essay I focus upon
the role of black Christian ministers as “practitioner intellectuals” and of selected
black religious writers as “academic intellectuals,” and explore the ways they
help to nurture and/or transform Christian traditions that reinforce the sexist
treatment of women. As I pursue this inquiry, it is my presupposition that the
disavowal and relinquishment of Christian church traditions that foster women’s
subordination are crucial for the safety and well-being of black women.
To function as a Christian intellectual uniquely entails a commitment to
thoughtful discernment about matters of faith in God; promotion of the
wholeness, dignity, and worth of persons in a manner that emulates the Christian
Gospel; trying to positively influence church life (the primary base for practicing
and sustaining Christian traditions). These commitments contain powerful
ingredients for shaping ideas about black women within local community
subcultures. They especially impact individuals directly involved with black
churches1 but can also affect the conditions in black women’s daily lives
regardless of their religious participation.

Practitioner Intellectuals and Gender Issues

Ideally, black ministers could play a dynamic role within black communities as
transformative intellectuals. Organically linked to the communities they serve,
their primary task is to create ways to provide Christian nurture for every aspect
of human personhood, including the life of the mind. A consistent aspect of their
vocation as Christian leaders involves reading and thinking about texts contained
in the Bible in order to help people interpret its relevance for them as individuals
and members of communities. Performing this function requires ministers to
210 • TRACI C.WEST

study ancient texts but also to define social realities that confront the people they
serve. Ministers thus occupy a vital position in the community because they are
continually called upon to respond to the combined mental, spiritual, and
emotional needs of those searching for religious guidance in order to make good
judgments. In helping people to develop and utilize their own mental and
spiritual resources for identifying meaning and purpose in life, ministers are not
just engaged in intellectual work but in an inherently political task as well.
Through their preaching, teaching, and counseling roles, ministers have the
opportunity to engender thinking and action that is both critical and oppositional
toward the broader culture.
With regard to women in particular, the unfortunate reality is that black
ministers (who historically have overwhelmingly been male) too often function
as purveyors of repression. Using the institutional power of the church, these
leaders have typically engendered both repressive beliefs about women and
discriminatory treatment of them. These subjugating ideas and actions include:
church traditions that legitimate or promote women’s subordination and
obedience to men as a Christian value; condemnatory theological language and
teachings that associate female anatomy and sexuality with shamefulness; and
practices that deny women full access to positions of church leadership and
authority. Yet in most black churches, sexist practices are hardly even
acknowledged as problematic. The resulting injustices that black women
encounter, while varying in degree and form, are rampant across denominational
lines, congregational settings, and regions of the country.
Focusing our attention on these gender issues makes the search for
transformative intellectual practitioners among black clergy somewhat bleak.
Reflection by most black ministers on religious texts and social mores related to
women has meant reinforcing a host of discriminatory practices toward them. In
too many black churches, when these practices occur, they include explicit
policies, as well as accepted patterns of insensitive or prejudicial treatment that
may not be based on formal church rules.2 For some, black women’s church
experiences of mistreatment based on their gender may appear difficult to
identify. The fact that black women overwhelmingly comprise the majority of
most local congregations may blur recognition of the gender issues women
encounter. Their sexist experiences are not uniform in nature and often consist of
“casual” individual incidents with circumstances that appear to be unique to that
one church context. Stories of insensitive and discriminatory behavior toward
women tend to be part of well-known, communal lore, yet remain poorly
documented in scholarly literature.
Sexist incidents are also often dismissed by the members of black Christian
communities (including women) as simply routine behavior or as trivial
concerns. Additionally, the offensive behavior may remain uncontested because
it is thought to be based upon Christian traditions interpreted by leaders as
immutable or attributed to idiosyncrasies that male pastors are seen as having the
right and authority to express. In black churches, autocratic behavior can be viewed
 RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND WOMEN’S BODIES • 211

as an entitlement of male clergy and dissent against it, a heretical denial of the
obligatory veneration due him from the laity. Black churches can also inculcate a
staunch deference to a kind of officious formality that commends the
appropriateness of patriarchal attitudes toward women. To reinforce respect for
men’s authority over women may be seen as supporting their “proper treatment
of the ladies.” Nonetheless, rampant discriminatory church practices against
women cause emotional and spiritual damage to individual women and have a
cumulative subjugating impact.
We must remember that practice and theory are joined together in the
intellectual work of ministers as they continually reflect on religious ideas and
implement concrete practices which manifest those ideas. Based on this
awareness, we could compose a formidable list of the guises in which unjust
church practices based upon reactionary ideas about women present themselves.
In black churches there can be various restrictions on women’s leadership
authority as preachers, pastors, ordained clergy, bishops, and in other official
positions (outside of the area of educational ministries). Women’s freedom of
movement within the worship space of the church and their choice of apparel,
especially for church worship services, may also be limited on the basis of
gender. Though they usually serve as the principal fundraisers, women are
frequently denied membership and/or leadership roles in the decision-making
bodies of the church that manage the money and property. The structure of male
deacons as administrators and female deaconesses as direct service providers
that exists in several Baptist churches formalizes this kind of division of power.
Women church members and women assistant ministers may also be subjected to
sexual harassment by male clergy. Further, women parishioners are too
frequently counseled by clergy to remain with battering spouses and to “forgive
and forget” incidents of sexual abuse by male relatives.3
However, such a catalog of offensive practices not only insufficiently yields a
depth of insight about the nature and consequences of these actions but also
contributes to an inadequate understanding of the reflection-practice intellectual
work of ministers. Instead, we will pay particular attention to church practices
that sanction the circumscribing of women’s bodies. This emphasis allows for a
more intricate yield of analysis on the reflection-practice work of ministers in
several ways. It challenges the traditional Western notion that intellectual work
constitutes an engagement of ideas in some distinct way that is quite
separate from physical matters related to the body. Attention to some of the
“body experiences” of women in the church assists us in recognizing how
strongly the body, mind, and spirit are linked together in the intellectual work of
ministers. Moreover, starting from these body experiences garners a deeper
comprehension of precisely how certain practices are oppressive. It also helps to
reveal some of the necessary tasks and possibilities for transformative
intellectual work by clergy.
212 • TRACI C.WEST

Bodies Matter
The politically repressive direction of the reflection-practice intellectual work by
some black male ministers is especially highlighted in the ways women’s bodies
are treated as objects to be controlled. This problem is often exhibited in the
struggle over women’s rights to assume preaching and/or pastoral leadership in
churches. Women seeking leadership roles confront many deeply held sexist
communal traditions. For example, the preaching/pastoral role is often viewed as
a province of social authority and status to which black males are solely entitled
because of white racism. Even contemporary scholars C.Eric Lincoln and
Lawrence Mamiya seem to legitimate this view in their landmark study of the
black church. They explain: “Hence, the roadblocks to preaching for black
women were further compounded by the complex problem of black male identity
in a racist society. If the ministry was the only route to even a shadow of
masculinity, the inclusion of women seemed very much like a gratuitous defeat
for everybody.”4 Here they acknowledge the historic, sexist exclusion of women
from taking on the authority and position of “the preacher” in black churches.
Yet in this formulation the authors fail to challenge the prevailing assumption
that the fulfillment of black masculinity, and the inclusion of females in church
leadership, must be viewed as competing agendas. Nevertheless, this description
by Lincoln and Mamiya does expose the crucial moral content of intellectual
work by black church leaders on issues of gender. Through symbolic language
and specific practices, preachers and pastors help blacks sort through and
embrace American cultural ideology about such notions as masculinity and
femininity. Utilizing avenues of authority established by the church, they teach
the community important ideas about black women’s status and role, and attach
sacred meaning to those lessons.
In some churches, the weight and shape of a woman’s body may be raised as
an issue that relates to her ability to become an ordained minister. The shape,
size, and mere femaleness of black women’s bodies have sometimes been
publicly derided and defined as a liability for those hoping to take on pastoral
authority. For example, a black female Methodist candidate for ordination
described a conversation with her pastor where he spoke discouragingly to her
about her chances for ordination.5 He let her know that she could not succeed in
her attempt to be ordained unless she earned his approval and support. He then
informed her that her “large and loud presence” would be a problem. She
found it humiliating to be told that the fact that she was a “large” woman would
impede her ability to be ordained.
Similarly, the issue of accepting women as preachers can be used as an
opportunity to make women’s bodies the focal point for exercising male power
over women. Cornel West cites the black Christian tradition of preaching as one
of the two organic intellectual traditions of African American life.6 As he
describes, it is an intellectual tradition that is “oral, improvisational and
 RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND WOMEN’S BODIES • 213

histrionic.” But it should be noted that in its content the improvisations and
histrionics by black preachers can sometimes be ignorant and debasing of others.
Nancy (not her real name), a Baptist woman candidate for ordination
recounted to me how the pastor who introduced her to the congregation as she
was about to give her trial sermon did so with a “joke” about her size.7 The
“joke” was about his trip to buy a clerical robe as a gift for Nancy. The pastor
told the congregation that he had described Nancy to the store salesperson by
exclaiming: “I need the biggest size you got!” The salesperson had then informed
him that the last “lady minister” like that “we couldn’t get through the door.”
The punchline of this “joke” that the minister related to the congregation was
that he was happy to report that they were able to get Nancy through the door. As
she retold this experience to me, Nancy proudly described the anger on her
behalf by her family members and friends who were in attendance at the event.
But she did not articulate her own anger.
This pastor also included in the introduction of Nancy a statement about why
she was preaching at the podium rather than from the pulpit. The podium had
been moved directly in front of the pews in the midst of the service. He
vehemently pointed out that Nancy was not permitted to preach in the pulpit that
night or on any other occasion “until I license her, until I decide if I want her or
not.” In Nancy’s case as well as that of the candidate for ordination cited above,
each woman experienced in a single encounter: a tacit threat from a male
authority about how her chances for further official power in the church are
dependent upon her ability to please him; and being shamed about the weight and
size of her body.
It is not coincidental that each male preacher in these two examples asserted
his power and control over the woman’s access to power in the church at the same
time as degrading statements were made about the women’s bodies. The
humiliation of the women is a weapon of control. When women’s access to the
power and authority vested in ordination or licensing are at stake, the deprecation
of their bodies is useful for discrediting them.
In some instances, women laity may be subjected to explicit verbal
instructions about their apparel from the pulpit. They may be berated by their
male pastors about the impropriety of wearing dresses that are “too short” or
wearing pants to Sunday worship. In these admonitions, the male pastor assumes
the authority to review, discuss, contest, and limit the public presentation of
women’s bodies in the church.
In a striking example of this kind of control, I remember how a black male pastor
of a large independent black church in California once boasted to me about the
fact that he does not allow women to sit on the front row of “his” church. He said
that a line of men are designated to sit on the front pew, creating a visible barrier
between the pastor and the women. This pastor explained to me that he instituted
this policy because previously, women sitting in the front rows crossed their legs
in a sexually suggestive manner, attempting to distract him during the service.
Obviously, I was appalled by such a blatant policy of discrimination against the
214 • TRACI C.WEST

women. And I also had immediate doubts about his claim that it was the
women’s fault rather than his own, that he was distracted from his duties as
worship leader and preacher when women cross their legs within the range of his
eyesight.
Such restrictions on the display of women’s bodies in church settings not only
reinforces the stigmatizing of femaleness but represent a process of “knowledge
production” about the female body. They illustrate how a biblically informed
cultural stereotype of woman as sexual temptress may be taught and upheld by a
policy limiting her access to seating in the sanctuary. What we “know” about
women makes this kind of policy “necessary.” Note that such a policy applies to
pews in the church where women hold their membership—that is, where women,
usually in the majority, give their money, time, energy, and presence to sustain
the organization. Obviously, the worth of women’s bodies and their sexuality is
demeaned by such practices. Their spiritual capacities and needs are devalued as
the appropriateness of reducing women to sexualized objects that must be
controlled and restricted is taught.
Sometimes in black churches women are prohibited from entering the pulpit
area of the worship space. In a pioneering article, womanist theologian
Jacqueline Grant related her experience of being stopped at a session of a church
conference that she attended in a Chicago Baptist church. Grant explains that “as
I approached the pulpit to place my cassette tape-recorder near the speaker,
Walter Fauntroy, as several brothers had done, I was stopped by a man who
informed me that I could not enter the pulpit area. When I asked why not, he
directed me to the pastor who told me that women were not permitted in the pulpit
area, but that he would have a man place the recorder there for me.”8
In this instance, women’s femaleness is seen as desecrating the portion of the
worship space reserved for the male preacher. In a related fashion, women report
incidents like theologian and African Methodist Episcopal minister Annie Ruth
Powell mentioned in a presentation that she gave for female seminarians.9
Powell shared an experience that she had when attending a worship service with
a black male colleague. The two of them introduced themselves to the
congregation, announcing the fact that they were both clergy. Powell was then
conspicuously and publicly ignored by the black male pastor officiating at the
service. He responded to them by inviting Powell’s male colleague to come
forward to the pulpit since he was visiting clergy. The male friend declined the
invitation, in part as an act of solidarity with Powell. Thus, in some black
churches, either it is made clear that clergywomen’s bodies are unwelcome in
pulpit space or that all women’s bodies are mandatorily forbidden from entering
it. It seems that part of the sacredness of the pulpit is achieved by the mere
presence of male anatomy. Female anatomy is not merely deemed incapable of
assuming that sacred quality, but is seen as somehow desecrating the
pulpit space.
These examples of church regulation of women’s bodies offer evidence of a
distinctive pattern of social regulation. Yet they additionally indicate the type of
 RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND WOMEN’S BODIES • 215

critical thinking that is needed for clergy to function as transformative

intellectuals. They make it apparent that leaders must generate critical thinking to
challenge the notions of women’s inferiority that are embedded in the cultures of
black churches. These notions can be found both in the form of more insidious
behavior patterns as well as overt rules. Attention to such gender issues requires
that the regular task of reflecting upon scripture and reinforcing church traditions
that “embody” critical engagement. This “embodied” intellectual practice
demands the questioning of tradition and historical investigation to identify
cultural biases within it. Critical reflection on underlying layers of traditions is
indispensable for just church practices to result. This intellectual practice also
engages one in reflecting upon spiritual questions about how to decipher and
differentiate human will from that of the divine when appropriating church
traditions and customs.
Transformation can occur if, in addition to this reflective process, the minister
promotes the routinization of gender inclusive practices. This can aid in
contesting the ubiquitous but seemingly mundane nature of discriminatory
assumptions and policies concerning women’s bodies. A conscious, participatory
method is essential for such routinization to occur. In sum, an awareness of the
apparent inescapability of subjecting women’s bodies to an objectifying,
controlling, male-centered gaze in the church arena provides us with clarity
about the type of critical thinking as well as insurgent practice that has to be
implemented if that repression is to be countered. The trivialization of how
commonplace control over women’s bodies can be within the church arena
generates a similar political climate and practice in the broader community. That
this trivialization is reasonable and appropriate is established in Christian
religious culture by what we “know” about the destructive, polluting possibilities
issuing from women’s body-selves. Re-creations of the kind of humiliation of
and injustice toward women that occurs in churches may then be understood as a
stabilizing element for the black community, or somewhat more empathetically,
as minor personal costs black women have to bear. Political lessons inculcating
the acceptability of women’s subordination that emanates from the church are
filtered throughout the broader community.
Deliberately enacted, “everyday” church practices of inclusion can undermine
and perhaps even occasionally reverse the impact of these lessons. For ministers,
the task of taking steps toward cultural transformation necessarily involves
conscientious, interlocking, body-mind-spirit intellectual work. What analytical
tools and strategies are offered by religious academic intellectuals (working on
issues related to black churches and communities) that give guidance on how to
carry out this liberatory reflection practice? There certainly should be scholarly
resources available in this area. After all, we now not only mark over thirty years
of black liberation theology but also have access to the burgeoning intellectual
movement of womanist religious thought.
216 • TRACI C.WEST

Liberation Contributions of Academic Intellectuals

In their formal relationship to the church, Christian religious scholars are quite
different from practitioner intellectuals. The formal relationship between
Christian religious scholars and the church is quite diffused. This makes it
almost impossible to generalize about how academic intellectuals personally
engage in reflection practice. Their vocational commitments often straddle the
overlapping worlds of church, community, and academy. They maintain widely
varying relationships to local and national church settings. Some may appear in
these settings only as guest preachers or speakers. Others relate to predominantly
black churches as active lay members. Still others simultaneously teach in higher
education while serving as pastor in a local church.
Some black academic intellectuals in the field of religion are seminary
professors involved in training future clergy. But since there are so few black
seminaries (seven Association Theological Schools accredited black
seminaries),10 most black seminary professors teach in predominantly white
seminaries. There they teach a majority of whites, some students of color from
Asian, Latino, and Native American backgrounds, and international students.
But they usually encounter a minority of black seminarians who will definitely
serve in predominantly black churches. Furthermore, it is estimated that only
about 10 to 20 percent of all black clergy have even earned degrees at an
accredited divinity school or seminary.11 Based on these limitations, the direct
impact of academic intellectuals on the vast majority of black churches is
probably minor. Their indirect influence on black churches is extremely hard to
document and assess.12
As Christian religious scholarship attempts to interpret and reinterpret
Christian traditions perpetuated by church rituals and customs, it inherently
carries implications for the forms of reflection practice that occurs within
churches. Under consideration here is the content of writings on gender by
certain black Christian thinkers that have some potential for constructively
impacting the lives of women in black churches and communities. Instead of
trying to evaluate the degree and efficacy of their actual influence on black
churches, it is most useful to concentrate on the intellectual tools that they offer
and the potential for affecting change found in their intellectual stances.
Beginning in the late 1960s, a theological movement emerged that focused
especially upon the oppressive conditions of the poor. It proclaimed liberation
from such socially oppressive realities to be a primary mandate of the Christian
gospel. This theology insistently cast reflection upon justice-oriented communal
or societal practices as the most significant and authentic expression of
Christian religion. Within a very short period, this current of religious thought
included spokespersons from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, each with varying
indigenous formulations of liberation theology geared to their own contexts.13
In the United States, several black theologians who were inspired by the civil
rights and black power movements began defining the socially liberative
 RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND WOMEN’S BODIES • 217

qualities of Christianity for the conditions confronting African Americans. The

work by these black liberation scholars has encompassed a wide range of
theological ideas and topics such as theodicy, suffering, Christology, slave
religion, eschatology, and biblical hermeneutics. Because of its liberatory
notions about Christianity, I will examine this particular religious intellectual
movement. I selectively focus on ideas generated during the latter part of the
twentieth century that may help to transform the kind of racial/gendered
exploitation that is particularly illumined by black women’s discriminatory
“body experiences” in the black church arena.
During the 1960s civil rights protests, photographs of black female and male
bodies being beaten by police and assaulted by firehoses and vicious dogs were
repeatedly displayed in the media. These internationally circulated pictures
captured the empathy or at least dismay of much of the northern white liberal
public. The media attention became a major tool for galvanizing support and
momentum for pressuring politicians to pass civil rights legislation. Yet for some
northern blacks, like those who were attracted to the teachings of Malcolm X and
the Nation of Islam, these images invoked anger and a particular discomfort with,
if not angst against Christian teachings that called blacks to endure such
suffering at the hands of whites. To a large extent, initiators of black liberation
theology wrestled with how to create a black Christian theology that adequately
responded to the rage toward white racism surfacing in many blacks.14
In this struggle to produce relevant Christian theology, black theology may
have too closely mirrored black political radicals by uncritically adopting their
patently sexist social vision. James H. Cone, the leading voice and systematician
of black theology, echoed the strident rhetoric of the time when he wrote, “[S]
peaking for the black community, black theology says with Eldridge Cleaver, ‘We
shall have our manhood. We shall have it, or the earth will be leveled by our
attempts to gain it.’”15 With differences in emphasis, several early spokespersons
of this religious intellectual movement asserted the primacy of the racially
oppressive conditions facing “the black man” and urged black churches to be
appropriately responsive. Now it should be remembered that this was considered
a very radical theological movement and was either opposed or given little
attention by the formal structures of major black church denominations.16
There were contrasting views among black theologians about how to assess
the degree to which the practices of black churches helped to challenge the
specific societal problems facing black people. Cone’s version of black liberation
theology included a forceful critique of black churches. He exclaimed that “while
possessing the greatest potentiality for Black Revolution, the black churches
satisfy themselves with white solutions to earthly injustice” and this is why
the black church is so often scorned as “only a second-rate oppressor” by those
authentically concerned with justice.17 In a similar vein, the work of black
liberation theologian J.Deotis Roberts pressed black churches to be more active
in responding to social injustices and begin to “minister to the whole man.”18
However, Roberts countered Cone’s inflammatory black-power language, calling
218 • TRACI C.WEST

upon the black church to lead the society in racial reconciliation and sincere
engagement of interracial fellowship and cooperation.
Some black liberation theologians such as Major Jones denied the legitimacy
of offering any critique of the church’s liberatory role in black communities.
Jones took Cone to task for his critiques of the church and asserted that the black
preacher and the black church have an endemic and longstanding historical
tradition of playing a key role in the liberation struggles of black people.19
Religion historian Joseph R.Washington combined an appreciation for the
historic mission and message of freedom offered by the black church with
pointed criticism of the contemporary black church. Washington believed that
ministers and “churchmen” needed to be awakened to the fact that they must play
a greater role in supporting social action to bring about the freedom of black
people.20 Were these authors concerned with the freedom and liberation of
women within black churches and communities? Not really. When the lens of
women’s “everyday” church experiences of being humiliated, controlled, and
restricted on the basis of their female anatomy is used to examine this rhetoric
about the church as an agent of liberation, the gaping inadequacy of black
theology’s ecclesial vision becomes quite apparent.
Among these black religious scholars, Cone is the most candid and self-
conscious about the development of his thought on the topic of sexism as a
social problem. In more recent writings, he admits to a failure within his early
expositions of black theology to examine issues of sexism in the black
community.21 Cone specifically describes his uncertainty about what to say
about “the limitation of the Black Church in dealing with the oppression of the
Black Woman.”22 He writes, “When I first recognized the limitation of the Black
Church and Black Theology in this area, I did not know what to say about it.”23
This ended in 1976 when he was asked to address sexism as a theological issue
at a black women’s conference that students at Garrett Evangelical Seminary
held on “New Roles in Ministry: A Theological Appraisal.” Again, it seems to be
the embodied presence of women actively demanding to be included in the
ecclesial vision of religious thinkers that stimulates change in the production of
scholarly knowledge about the church.
Yet the intent of liberation theology extends beyond the ordinary production
of ecclesial theology. It endorses the cultivation of “public religious
intellectuals.” Its goal is to produce scholarship that not only critically evaluates
oppressive social conditions and institutional realities of the church but also
offers a vision for progressive, Gospel-mandated social change. Cone
concertedly incorporates the issue of sexism within his embrace of this public
intellectual role for black theologians. Perhaps his most self-revealing and
adamant statement incorporating antisexist work as a task of black liberation
theology is found in his autobiographical work, My Soul Looks Back.24 He
admits that originally he viewed the struggle against sexism to be “a joke or as an
intrusion upon the legitimate struggle of black people.”25 He also owns up to his
complicity in the silence of black theologians on the issue of the oppression of
 RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND WOMEN’S BODIES • 219

women. Cone points out the significant error that liberation theologians have
made in their avoidance of this subject, asserting, “I do not see how we can keep
our credibility as ‘liberation’ theologians and remain so unliberated in our
dealing with sexism.”26 He also challenges church practitioners, contending that
the arguments by black male ministers that are used to justify the subordination
of women are comparable to those of white racists to justify their privileged
position.27 The quality of Cone’s public confessions about his sexism are
laudable and unique among black male liberation theologians guilty of the same
omissions (or, for that matter, among white male theologians too!). He boldly
acknowledges that “unfortunately the Black church is one of the most sexist
institutions in the black community.”28
However, at the end of the twentieth century, for many black theologians
(even Cone) the issue of sexism remains at the periphery of black liberation
theology projects. Integration of gender concerns into the central paradigms of
black theology remains inchoate. There are nonetheless, a variety of burgeoning
approaches. For instance, in his Martin and Malcolm and America, Cone does
offer a section that pointedly critiques the sexism of each leader.29 But if that
analysis was blended into the body of his material on Martin Luther King Jr. and
Malcolm X, it would significantly affect the overall interpretation of these
leaders. If each figure’s personal relationships to women and treatment of the
women involved in the movements in which each participated were more
thoroughly interrogated throughout this text the breadth of insight about sexism
and about the leadership of these men would be fundamentally deepened.
From the vantage point of another discipline, Cain Hope Felder, a black
liberationist biblical scholar, criticizes black church traditions that deny women’s
right to leadership roles. For instance, in Felder’s Troubling Biblical Waters, his
section on “Family” offers alternative approaches to “simplistic” “literalistic,” or
“prooftexting” interpretations of scripture that deny black women leadership
authority in the church. He explains how the Bible “shows a remarkable,
progressive spirit in improving the social position of women and securing them
greater recognition, expanded leadership roles, and more human rights. Perhaps
today we are only catching up with the first-century attitudes of Jesus and the
earliest Christians in accepting the unique leadership that Black women ministers
can exert in God’s family, the Church.”30 This challenge to the scriptural basis
for excluding women is sorely needed in black churches. Felder urges an
appreciation for the unique contributions that black women ministers can and do
make to the black church so that it may authentically constitute “God’s Family.”
Yet even this adamant disavowal of biblically based sexism seems to miss a
crucial point. He appears to underestimate the degree to which revoking black
patriarchal male leadership would require a broad restructuring of the black
church.
Dwight Hopkins, one of the second generation of black liberation theologians,
initiates another method in the corrective task of making black theology
inclusive of women. He emphasizes the value of poor black women’s spirituality
220 • TRACI C.WEST

as a significant constructive source for a black theology of liberation. For

Hopkins, fictional depictions of black women by novelist Toni Morrison
exemplify valuable contributions to the sources of black liberation theology.31
Similarly, James Evans makes use of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Zora
Neale Hurston’s The Sanctified Church in his description of unique aspects of
black spirituality and the black church that ground African American systematic
theology.32 And though Robert Michael Franklin writes about formative,
liberating visions of social justice for the black church and community based on
the sexist formula of “four highly visible influential male leaders,” he knows
enough to assert the need for “a corresponding study of black female leaders” in
the introduction of this study.33
Though these authors decry the sexist exclusion of black women from church
leadership roles and call for or utilize black female sources, their core
assumptions about the plight of the black community remain largely unaffected.
It is as if, in the view of some black theologians, we need to solve this nagging
problem of sexism and then get on with the task of black liberation as a united
community. This approach still treats sexism as a side issue. Though these black
liberation sources offer some starting points for the strategic change that is
required, there is still an insufficient realization about how fundamentally a
church built upon sexist practices will be shaken at its core if that undergirding is
truly uprooted.
How can what we know about women’s “mundane” body experiences in the
church be fully incorporated into the production of religious knowledge focusing
on black liberation? This challenge for black liberationist religious intellectuals
remains largely unanswered. This adjustment would require that we figure out
how to thoroughly inculcate experience within knowledge constructions. It
would mean making what we know about the discrimination against—and
humiliation of—women within churches part of the core knowledge that informs
us about what needs to be transformed about church symbols, practices, and
hermeneutics as well as its political witness. Additionally, this process of
creating liberatory knowledge by incorporating black women’s lives surfaces
certain tensions in liberatory intellectual work. It exposes the challenge of fully
including within a formulation of Christian liberation ideas, a constituent group’s
experiences of marginalization within a group that is already advancing its own
group victim-status claims.

Bodies That Think: Womanist Constructive Approaches

Experience and knowledge came together in a somewhat dramatic fashion in the
examples cited earlier where womanist scholars Jacqueline Grant and Annie
Ruth Powell were excluded from the pulpit area. In those confrontations,
there was something simultaneously deeply personal and definitively public
about how knowledge about women, and knowledge that women possess, was
asserted. These women’s formally earned credentials are contested when
 RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND WOMEN’S BODIES • 221

restrictions from publicly viewed, sacred worship spaces are placed upon them
(in the form of sexist, personal slights). In other words, by vocation these women
may have been practitioner or academic intellectuals with formal credentials
verifying their knowledge and abilities, but at the moment when restricted, they
are understood merely as intrusive female bodies. Their encounters may seem to
some like individualistic, even ordinary incidents that are peripheral to the
primary role of the religious intellectual seeking to “liberate” the black
community. Yet as I have argued, these kinds of incidents so clearly reveal the
need to specifically locate reflection practice understandings of religion that form
the basis of communal knowledge, indeed to do so even in relation to the body
experiences of women. It is precisely this “embodied” emphasis on interlocked
personal and communal justice concerns that womanist and black feminist
religious scholars contribute to the goals of politically transformative
intellectual work.
Just as the roots of black theology were influenced by the black power
movement and the simultaneously burgeoning “third world” liberation
theologies, womanist theology was initially cultivated by contemporary social
and theological trends. It was birthed by the advent of black theology and
feminist theology as well as the social movements with which each was
intertwined. The omissions and misrepresentations of black women in black and
feminist theologies spurred the creation and growth of womanist religious
studies. Of course not all of the emerging religious scholarship on black women
is subsumed under the label womanist.34 Also, there are a wide variety of womanist
authors in ethics, church history, theology, homiletics, and biblical studies.
Included below is a selective focus on the work of a few womanist intellectuals
during the late twentieth century, and only on the themes in their work that most
relevantly exemplify religious intellectual strategies for unseating sexist
practices in black churches.35
The term womanist has been adopted from its initial presentation by Alice
Walker in her collection of essays In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Walker
explains that, among other qualities, a womanist is a black woman who loves
music, dance, the Spirit, food and roundness, other women, struggle and
herself.36 Most womanist religious scholars stress that the term enables them to
do women-oriented work that is rooted in black history, religion, and culture.
While anchored in a primary affirmation of black womanhood, religious
womanists are insistent in their commitment to the survival and wholeness of
both men and women in African American communities.
Though many of the writings of Jacqueline Grant primarily focus on
developing womanist Christology, her formulation of black feminist theology
illustrates how religious intellectuals promoting transformative change need to
work in academic and practical arenas. Grant’s arguments about sexism in the
church embody some of the earliest womanist efforts to directly confront
black male liberation theologians and black church practitioners on their
exclusion and devaluation of women. Grant broke this ground in her 1979 article
222 • TRACI C.WEST

“Black Theology and the Black Woman,” in which she provides a basis for a
“revolutionary” black theology centered upon the forms of social oppression
experienced by black women.
In this early formulation of religious black feminism, Grant asserts that a
holistic black theology can only be developed by recognizing all of the ways
“that God is at work in the experience of the black woman.”37 She chides black
male theologians for excluding black women from their interpretation of a
liberating gospel. Indeed, she suggests that one might easily argue “that since
Black women are the poorest of the poor, the most oppressed of the oppressed,
their experience provides a most fruitful context for the doing of Black
Theology.”38 Essentially, Grant wages a struggle for visibility. In an
admonishing and insistent tone, she calls attention to the salience of sexism in
black churches and communities. Her approach appeals to the reader to
understand that though heretofore a neglected issue, the inclusion of women is
key to the success of black liberation.
Like others who espouse black theology, Grant contributes to creating a
tradition of the religious intellectual functioning as community prophet. In her
1991 epistle “What a Womanist Would Want to Say to the Black Church” Grant
focuses on the ordination of women.39 Again, ardently challenging the black
church’s sexist exclusion of women from the pulpit ministry, she airs the
specifics of women’s stories of being mistreated and exposes some of the
unscrupulous behavior by male clergy toward women seeking to be in the
ministry. She argues that ignoring and rejecting women’s leadership constitutes
defective church stewardship of human resources. Grant’s strategy is twofold:
she seeks to uncover the persistent forms of rejection that women face through
the telling of their stories (including her own); second, she explains how it is in
the best interests of the church for the furtherance of its own growth and the
effectiveness of its ministries to embrace the underused gifts of women’s
leadership.
Whether pitched to a more academically oriented theological community or to
church practitioners, Grant’s intellectual voice offers an insider’s vantage point.
Her arguments are made on behalf of improving “our community” and “our
churches” through recognizing and using women’s skills and knowledge. Thus,
to encourage black women’s leadership is to make use of presently underutilized
and thwarted strengths of the black community for its own sake. Stylistically, her
contribution distinctively stands within a protest tradition.
Offering a slightly different example and disciplinary perspective is womanist
sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, who upholds a more conventional
intellectual role as chronicler of overlooked community realities. Like Grant,
Gilkes highlights the ways that black women represent and enhance the existing
strengths of black communities and churches. However, Gilkes’s emphasis is
framed less by testimony about the sexist exclusion of women than by
appreciation for the degree of power and influence extant in women’s roles.
Where Grant sees women denied power and treated as if they are invisible,
 RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND WOMEN’S BODIES • 223

Gilkes sees women garnering and exercising substantial power in spite of the
ways they may be restricted by male ecclesial authority. Yet, both of them take
up the task of literally writing themselves and other black women who
participate in church life into the history of Christian theology and tradition.
Their embodiment as scholars literally shifts the space in that history to create an
understanding of black women’s bodies as inhabiting a mind-body-spirit nexus
that thinks.
Gilkes reshapes knowledge about women in black church life by identifying
independent, “powerful” leadership networks even within the sanctified
denomination of the Church of God in Christ (perhaps the staunchest of all the
black denominations in its opposition to women’s ordination).40 She points out
the longstanding traditions of women within these sanctified churches fulfilling
leadership roles as evangelists, revivalists, and church education leaders.
According to Gilkes, women have developed unique and autonomous styles of
leadership that have “been the most significant historical factor in the survival of
denominations within the Sanctified Church.”41
The veneration accorded to “church mothers” and the influence that they wield
within Baptist and Methodist traditions are also flagged by Gilkes.42 The
tradition of “Women’s Day” first presented by Nannie Helen Burroughs in 1906
at the National Baptist Convention continues across denominations today, in
many black congregations.43 Gilkes explains that “Women’s Day” was initiated
as a deliberate strategy to promote women’s leadership in a denomination that
denied women access to ordination. She maintains that even under restrictive
authority systems of male hierarchical power, the ways that women carve out their
own space, thrive, and influence the institutional church must be given more
credence in feminist assessments of women’s power in the church.
Gilkes’s method may be understood as contributing to the tradition of
intellectual participation in social change by offering a modified lens that the
community can use to better understand itself. Her work magnifies the centrality
of woman-centered culture in black churches and the imaginative ways male
domination has been circumvented. However, even when we recognize the
rejection of sexist constraints implicit in these black church women’s leadership
efforts, it should not be forgotten that simultaneously, blatant institutional
sanctions supporting the notion of women’s inferiority are tolerated. Also,
inherent in this approach is a deemphasis on the aspects of woman-centered
black church culture that are in need of feminist critique.
Womanist theologian Delores Williams stresses black women’s oppression as
well as their resourcefulness, but then urges her audience to enlist every
available avenue to reconstitute black church practices in a liberative mode. She
emphasizes the direct confrontation of sexism that will ignite a radical
transformation of church doctrines and practices. Williams calls for “a serious
women’s movement within denominational churches—a movement to free
women’s minds and lives of the androcentric indoctrination and the exploitative
emotional commitments that cause many women to be used as tools of their own
224 • TRACI C.WEST

oppression and that of other women.”44 She helps us to see that an awakening
must first take place among men and women, and then the resulting new
consciousness channeled into concerted, focused action.
Enacting the role of intellectual as community poet-prophet, Williams calls for
theological inventiveness. She suggests an overhauling of the doctrinal
affirmations of African American churches to reflect resistance instead of the
upholding of “inherited” Eurocentric forms of Christianity and “female-exclusive
doctrine formulated centuries ago by male potentates.”45 She recommends
regularly practiced resistance rituals to implant resistance doctrine within African
American faith communities. These resistance doctrines are to be comprised of
African cultural sources, biblical traditions, and of black people’s experiences. Yet
these sources must be “’decoded’ of all androcentric, gender, homophobic, class
and color bias” in order to be useful.46
As is suggested by Delores Williams, for the dismantling of the sexism in
black churches one must identify and transform the multiple ways that scripts of
domination saturate church doctrine and practices. Strategies for naming both the
existence of sexism and the valuable contributions by gifted women in black
churches proposed by male black liberation authors and womanists constitute
important tools. Obviously, without any acknowledgement of the rampant sexism
in the church that is found in biblical sources and rules about leadership, there
can be no progress toward change. Too many black congregations have yet to
take the elementary step of recognizing sexism as a serious problem. Without
question, the kind of vociferous dissent offered by some of these scholars is
necessary to shake congregations awake. Similarly, without concentrated
attention to the particularity of black women’s experiences, the important roles
of women (who comprise the majority of churches), and the specific work that
they do, we are doomed to reinforce the idea of women’s inferiority.
However, it is most crucial that religious intellectuals not be bound by
established structures and traditions when launching their critiques. Such a
limited approach would fail to also unmask the ways that the culture of the
church circumscribes women’s inferiority. The meaning of womanhood in the
church context needs to undergo decontamination. Within a contaminated system,
neither the shifting of power to women or the broadening of our understanding
of women’s power will provide more than, at best, a partial remedy.
It is a daunting task for both academic and practitioner intellectuals to help
others recognize discriminatory conditions that black women face in church life
as constituting a crisis; understand black women’s freedom as a primary
ingredient of black liberation; and create practices that concertedly unseat the
andro-centric norms and locus of power in the black church. This work will not
necessarily be the unifying process for black churches and communities that
some think necessary for black liberation to occur. But it will be a life-giving
process—fostering health in mind, spirit, and body—especially for black
women.
 RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND WOMEN’S BODIES • 225

Notes

1. By “black churches” I refer to local congregations that are predominantly black in

membership and leadership. These churches not only exist within predominantly
black denominations such as African Methodist Episcopal or the National Baptist
Convention, but also within predominantly white denominations such as (my own)
United Methodist or the Presbyterian Church of America.
2. The issues of discrimination described here are by no means limited to African
American churches. Some degree of sexism can be found among every racial/
ethnic grouping in every Christian faith community (yes, including white ones). I
have simply chosen to focus this essay on black liberation theologians and ethicists
and black church contexts. The problems that I raise here are comparable and at
points maybe even identical to conditions that women of other racial/ethnic
groups face.
3. I offer a more detailed discussion of sexist church practices and violence against
women in Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence and Resistance Ethics
(New York: New York University Press, 1999).
4. C.Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American
Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 278.
5. Anonymous interview with the author, December 1995.
6. Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 73.
7. Anonymous interview with the author, November 1995.
8. Jacqeline Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” in Black Theology: A
Documentary History, vol. 2, 1980–1992, Eds. James H.Cone and Gayraud
S.Wilmore (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993), 331.
9. Speech by Rev. Dr. Annie Ruth Powell at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey,
April 1996.
10. The Fact Book on Theological Education (Pittsburgh: Association of Theological
Schools, 1996). By “black seminary” I refer to seminaries that identify themselves
as having a predominantly black student population. The Association of
Theological Schools in the United States and Canada is recognized by the U.S.
Department of Education for the accreditation of graduate professional theological
schools. It includes over two hundred theological schools as accredited members.
11. Lincoln and Mamya, The Black Church, 129.
12. In addition, I do not assume that black Christian religious scholars should be
confined to exclusively communicating (in either a direct or indirect fashion) with a
church audience. This expectation is no more appropriate than assuming that the only
goal of a legal scholar ought to be influencing practicing attorneys.
13. For some of the earliest writings of this movement see Sergio Torres and Virginia
Fabella, Eds., The Emergent Gospel: Theology from the Underside of History
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978); Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1972); José Míguez Bonino, Doing Theology in a
Revolutionary Situation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975); Basil Moore, Ed., Black
Theology: The South African Voice (Atlanta: John Knox, 1973); Desmond Tutu,
226 • TRACI C.WEST

“Black Theology/African Theology” Black Theology: A Documentary History, vol

1,1966–1979, in Eds. Gayraud S.Wilmore and James H.Cone (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis, 1979); K.Appiah-Kubi and Sergio Torres, Eds., African Theology en Route
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979); Douglas J.Elwood, Ed., Asian Christian Theology:
Emerging Themes (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980); and Virginia Fabella, Asia’s
Struggle for Full Humanity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1980).
14. The effort to negotiate these dynamics was not made solely by academic
intellectuals. Kelly Brown Douglas describes how a group of black clergy calling
themselves the National Committee of Negro Churchmen issued a statement to the
New York Times on July 31,1966, endorsing black power from the point of view of
the Christian faith. See Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1994), 51–52.
15. James H.Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, twentieth anniversary ed.,
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 10.
16. See Peter Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1985), especially 119–27.
17. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 134.
18. J.Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology (Philadelphia:
Westminister Press, 1971), 74.
19. See Major Jones, Christian Ethics for Black Theology: The Politics of Liberation
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974).
20. See Joseph R.Washington, The Politics of God: The Future of Black Churches
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); and “How Black is Black Religion?” in Quest for A
Black Theology, Eds. James J. Gardiner and J.Deotis Roberts (Philadelphia: Pilgrim
Press, 1971).
21. Cone, preface to A Black Theology of Liberation, xv.
22. Cone, introduction to “Black Theology and Black Women,” part 5, in Black
Theology: A Documentary History 1966–1979, vol. 2, Eds. Gayraud S.Wilmore
and James H.Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), 366.
23. Ibid.
24. James H.Cone, My Soul Looks Back (Nashville: Abingdon, 1982).
25. Ibid., 115.
26. Ibid., 121.
27. Similarly, James H.Evans Jr. notes that there is an inherent contradiction found in
liberation theology that uses a liberated hermeneutic for interpreting biblical
passages about slavery while retaining a fundamentalist stance for biblical
references about women. See Evans, “Black Theology and Black Feminism,”
Journal of Religious Thought 38 (1981): 43–53.
28. Cone, introduction to Black Theology, 365.
29. James H.Cone, Martin and Malcom and America: A Dream or a Nightmare
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 272–80.
30. Cain Hope Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters: Race, Class and Family (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis, 1989).
31. Dwight N.Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black
Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993).
32. James H.Evans Jr. We Have Been Believers: An African American Systematic
Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).
 RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND WOMEN’S BODIES • 227

33. Robert Michael Franklin, Liberating Visions: Human Fulfillment and Social Justice
in African American Thought (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1990), 4.
34. For example, I do research on black women in the area of Christian social ethics.
Though I have been mentored in fundamental ways by womanist scholars and am
greatly dependent upon their work to inform mine, I prefer to identify myself
primarily as a black feminist. Thus my emphasis here on womanist scholarship is
not meant to negate or minimize the contributions of those who identify themselves
as black feminists white feminists or any scholars doing pioneering and
constructive work on black women in the field of religion who may not assume the
particular mantle of womanist or even of black feminist.
35. Examples of religious womanist scholarship on individuals are found in Katie
Cannon’s constructive work on womanist ethics in Katie’s Canon: Womanism and
the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Continuum, 1995); Karen Baker
Fletcher’s study of the intellectual, educator and social reformer Anna Julia
Cooper, A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper (New
York: Crossroad, 1994); Emilie Townes’s study of antilynching advocate and
journalist Ida B.Wells-Barnett in Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (Atlanta:
Scholar’s Press, 1993). Examples of thematic constructive theology and ethics
include Douglas, The Black Christ; Cheryl Sanders, Ed., Living at the Intersection:
Womanism and Afrocentrism in Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995); Joanne
Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998); and Emelie Townes, Ed., A Troubling in My Soul:
Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993):
109–29. A few of the earliest biblical approaches include Clarice Martin,
“Womanist Interpretations of the New Testament: The Quest for Holistic and
Inclusive Translation and Interpretation” Journal of Feminist of Feminist Studies in
Religion 6 (1990): 41–61; Renita Weems, “Reading Her Way through the Struggle:
African American Women and the Bible,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African
American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1991): 57–77.
36. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). For a range of womanist essays that discuss
Walker’s description and the definition of womanist Christian theology, see Cheryl
J.Sanders, ed., “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in
Womanist Perspective,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (1989): 83–112.
37. Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” 335.
38. Ibid., 332.
39. Jacqueline Grant, “What a Womanist Would Want to Say to the Black Church,”
AME Church Review 106, no. 342 (1991): 49–58.
40. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “Together and in Harness’: Women’s Traditions in the
Sanctified Church,” Signs 10, no. 4 (1985): 678–99.
41. Ibid., 695.
42. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The Roles of Church and Community Mothers:
Ambivalent American Sexism or Fragmented African Familyhood,” Journal of
Feminist Studies in Religion, 2, no. 1 (1986): 141–59.
43. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The Politics of ‘Silence’: Dual-Sex Political Systems
and Women’s Traditions of Conflict in African-American Religion” in African
228 • TRACI C.WEST

American Christianity, Ed. Paul E.Johnson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1994), 104–5.
44. Delores S.Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist
God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 215.
45. Ibid., 217.
46. Ibid.
 12
Where are the Black Female Intellectuals?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL

In their introduction to the 1984 edition of Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual, Bazel Allen and Ernest Wilson III place this pioneering text
within a grand tradition of landmarks in African American intellectual history—
W.E.B.DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Alain Locke’s The New Negro, Carter
G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro, and E.Franklin Frazier’s Black
Bourgeoisie. Included within this roll call are other distinguished black male
writers/thinkers—Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka,
and more recently William J.Wilson and Thomas Sowell. Conspicuously absent
in this litany of pioneering and provocative landmarks are any works by African
American women, an oversight that is inexcusable in 1984 given the emergence
in the 1970s of a Black feminist movement, one of whose major objectives has
been reconstructing a black female intellectual tradition too long obscured by all
the men being black and all the women being white.
After reading the 1984 introduction to The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in
preparation for these comments, I remembered my first response to reading
Cruse in the late 1960s while a student at Clark Atlanta University. It was simply
this—that there was a major oversight in an otherwise incisive analysis of the
failures in black leadership over the preceding three decades or so. Though the
women’s movement was in its embryonic stages and though Toni Cade’s
pioneering text The Black Woman was not to be published until three years later
(1970), I recall being disappointed at the invisibility of African American
women—except for Lorraine Hansberry, who is mostly vilified in
Cruse’s massive tome on black intellectuals. I was attempting to do a master’s
thesis on William Faulkner’s treatment of women in his major novels without the
benefit of feminist literary criticism, but I was beginning to understand how
important a gender analysis would be in fresh interpretations of the “masters.” I
wondered to myself why it would not also have occurred to Cruse that a
comprehensive discussion of black intellectuals should not have been an
exclusively male discourse. Eventually I finished the Cruse text and the thesis,
got a teaching job, and embarked upon (with a colleague) the arduous task of
making visible to my students at Spelman College the forgotten tradition of black
women writers, having discovered that my students’ knowledge of the black
literary tradition focused entirely on men. I thought about the Cruse text during
230 • BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL

those years Roseann Bell and I were working on Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of
Black Women in Literature, a corrective, we hoped, to the notion that only men
had written anything worth reading in our communities. Many years later I was
to be reminded by Alice Walker, who was a sophomore at Spelman when I was a
freshman, that she had not heard of Zora Neale Hurston until after college, a
situation that my colleague and I teaching freshman English at Spelman hoped
none of our students would replicate.
I thought deeply about the Cruse text again after the Women’s Research and
Resource Center was founded (1981) and I was planning a symposium on the
black female intellectual tradition. Two black women intellectuals who had
written pioneering texts were invited to speak—Paula Giddings, author of When
and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America,
and bell hooks, author of Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism; they
would join Gloria Wade-Gayles and myself, professors at Spelman, in a standing-
room-only crowd of students throughout the Atlanta University Center who were
eager, it seemed, to learn about a subject we suspected would be fairly new to
them. This was confirmed by what happened at the beginning of our
deliberations. Before she began her formal presentation, hooks asked the
students to name some black women intellectuals. To our astonishment, there was
absolute silence. I’ve repeated this question, on occasion, at the beginning of
talks I give throughout the country on Anna Julia Cooper, one of the most
important nineteenth-century black women intellectuals, and I continue to be
astonished when I sometimes get no response. This happened a few months ago
and I thought again about the Cruse text and the difficulty of conceptualizing
black women as intellectuals. We can think of black women as mothers, church
women, activists à la Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, teachers, even
writers—but almost never as intellectuals.
As I reread Cruse’s profoundly patriarchal text, I was reminded that while
there are insights that are relevant for an analysis of contemporary black leaders
(male), The Crisis is also in many ways outdated. The overarching paradigm that
posits two paths for black progress—integration and nationalism—is overly
simplistic at the beginning of this new century. The assumption that the black
community is an undifferentiated mass with respect to gender is also passé. We
must be as vigilant about understanding sexism and its impact on black women
and men and our communities as we are about understanding racism and
classism. In other words, we must struggle to eradicate the sexist oppression of
women as we continue to struggle to eradicate the twin evils of racism and
poverty. Gender must become as important as race as an analytic category in our
analyses of the work of black intellectuals, male and female. A gender analysis
of the work of Lorraine Hansberry by Cruse would have rendered her a more
exciting figure, particularly with respect to her use of feminist themes in A Raisin
in the Sun. We will continue to distort the intellectual history of African
Americans if we fail to include the work of the womenfolk who have
consistently provided some of the most passionate and insightful analyses of
 WHERE ARE THE BLACK FEMALE INTELLECTUALS? • 231

what it means to be black and female in this patriarchal, capitalist, racist culture.
Black feminist scholars are not the only ones who have written about the erasure
of the intellectual discourse of black women, however. Manning Marable’s How
Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America underscores the critical importance of
such a paradigm shift in the writing of African American intellectual history: As
Marable notes, “The sexist critical framework of American white history has
been accepted by Black male scholars; the reconstruction of our past, the
reclamation of our history from the ruins, has been an enterprise wherein women
have been too long segregated…. To understand the history of all blacks…
special emphasis is required in documenting the particular struggles, ideals and
attitudes of black women…black male liberationists must relearn their own
history, by grounding themselves in the wisdom of their sisters.1
Another paradigm shift we must make in subsequent analyses of black
intellectuals is moving away from the assumption that the experiences of black
men can represent the condition of black people in general. Black male
experience is the norm in Cruse, so that black men become the representative
intellects. This masculinist bias renders invisible a host of important intellectual
women—Jessie Faucet, Margaret Walker, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida Wells-
Burnett, to name a few. What is worse it perpetuates the erroneous belief that
important political ideas have sprung from the brains of men only.
Though contemporary black intellectuals face a host of challenges not
anticipated by Cruse—a devastating drug and violence culture within and without
our communities; the ascendancy and high visibility of black neoconservatives;
the impact of mass media, including rap music, on youth culture; a war between
the sexes; homophobia and silence about AIDS; and confusion about appropriate
strategies for empowerment in the post-Civil Rights era, it is important to
remember Cruse’s final warning: “Those who cannot remember the, past are
condemned to repeat it.” As we ponder the future for African Americans, we
need all our sages, male and female. We must not repeat the mistakes of
yesteryear by silencing or failing to listen to those who hold up half the sky. We
must remember Frances E.W.Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Wells-Burnett,
Amy Jacques Garvey, Eslanda Good Robeson, Sonia Sanchez, Angela Davis, as
well as Booker T.Washington, W.E.B.Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Marcus
Garvey, Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King Jr., Amiri Baraka, and Stokely
Carmichael. Crisis revisited would certainly be made stronger by such a crucial
paradigm shift.

Note

1. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South

End Press, 1983).
232
 Part 6

Cruse and Black Nationalism

234
 13
Harold Cruse and Afrocentric Theory
MOLEFI KETE ASANTE

Harold Cruse is arguably one of the sharpest critical thinkers of the twentieth
century. Among African American intellectuals he is almost in a class by
himself, centered in his own cultural history, steeped in the traditions of
activism, and committed to social, economic, and cultural justice. Frequently an
individual critical thinker may have cultural centeredness but no knowledge or
experience in the activist tradition. In the case of Cruse, he thought out of the
profound experiences of ordinary African people, and this gave him a position on
facts and phenomena that was unlike that of many other contemporary
intellectuals. His insights into the dilemmas of African Americans are so fluid as
to be one with the best interests of the African American community. Perhaps in
our history no social critic—and that is what he called himself—could ever be
more organic to the conditions of the people than Cruse.
I believe his contribution rests in numerous places and at several levels of
philosophical and cultural inquiry. Cruse is concerned with culture, politics,
education, and economics. These are the themes by which he measures the
success or failure of the African American intellectual. By virtue of his concern
with the African American community exercising its own volition in terms of
culture and economics, he is a cultural nationalist. The plea he made in Rebellion
or Revolution? for a radical cultural theory indicates that he was a forerunner of
the Afrocentric idea.1 It is this prophetic appeal that was taken up by a host of
Afrocentric thinkers after the publication of my volume Afrocentricity in 1980,
nearly eleven years after Cruse called for a radical theory. When one reads Cruse it
becomes clear that he saw the issues of culture and society from the standpoint
of African American history and he investigated the various dimensions of the
issues from the standpoint of political maturity and cultural consciousness. When
one reads his principal works The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and Rebellion
or Revolution?, Cruse’s concept of the crisis in the African American community
is clear. For Cruse the fundamental question facing the community is a cultural
one, not simply one of singing and dancing, but one concerned with the sum
total of our behaviors—artistic, social, and communal. Whose culture, he asks,
do we uphold, the African-American or the Anglo-American? (48). In posing
this question, the central cultural nationalist inquiry, Cruse established his place
236 • MOLEFI KETE ASANTE

alongside that of Martin Delany, Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey, and Carter
G.Woodson. To ask the question of whose culture do we uphold is to advance at
once to the very soul of the conflicted African intellectual. What Cruse suggested
in the inquiry was the fact that the African American did have a choice; he could
choose his own culture.
It is my belief that Afrocentrists have answered the question in the manner
Harold Cruse would have expected because the Afrocentrists, among
contemporary scholars, have isolated cultural dislocation as the principal
weakness among African American intellectuals. Indeed, this is a crisis that now
finds its tentacles deeply attached to the work of African intellectuals
everywhere, on the African continent and in its diaspora. I believe that the
cultural crisis is an avenue for weakness in the community. If we are able to
resolve the cultural question we will be able to confront all other issues such as
economic unity, political redemption, and social maturity. In this sense culture
becomes genetic to the intellectual and political achievements of people who
accept and give agency.
Afrocentricity is about African people being agents and actors.2 And in
Cruse’s construction of the problems of our community he saw that we had
either denied, lost, or given away our agency in order to become different from
who we are. Some did not support African American culture because in their
minds it was separatist; they wanted to demonstrate that they were Americans,
meaning that they supported Anglo American culture. This confusion Cruse
recognized before others and sought to explore ways to neutralize this
destructive attitude. With the deftness and directness that only Cruse seemed to
have among all the intellectuals of his generation he writes, “The American
Negro must stand up and fight his way out of the social trap in which Western
civilization has ensnared him” (104).
The message of Harold Cruse is especially important at this time because this
is preeminently the age of “no race” and “interrace” and “fluid cultures.” We are
profoundly affected by this postmodern appeal to forget culture. I am unaware
that this mode of thinking has captured the imaginations of any other group to
the extent that it has afflicted African American intellectuals. Perhaps no group
has been so willing to abandon its cultural identity and historical legacy as
eagerly as the intellectual class among African Americans. For example, I do not
know of this attitude among Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean
Americans, Anglo-Americans, Italian Americans, or French Americans. This
seems to be a peculiarly African American problem enhanced by the lack of a
strong sense of cultural identity promulgated by Africans who have lost their
sense of cultural ground.
I am convinced that the enslavement was more effective as a maker of slaves—
mental slaves—than we could imagine. As other cultures recognize the value of
their own and in some cases, like the French, continue to legislate ways to
preserve the culture, many African American intellectuals still suffer from
cultural dualism, a split personality, and lean toward the worship of an iconic
 HAROLD CRUSE AND AFROCENTRIC THEORY • 237

whiteness. I can think of no example of people of other cultures urging the

abandoning of their culture or refusing to practice their culture. This is obviously
a behavior of those who feel inferior or have been made to speak as if their
culture is inferior because of their own cultural condition. I can see that if the
beginning of African American history is slavery then it is difficult for many
intellectuals to accept this history and therefore they would rather seek to attach
themselves to the culture of others. Herein is a problem in Cruse’s construction of
the cultural options: whose culture do we uphold, the African American or the
Anglo-American? He did not have the options of either African or Native
American included in his list. Some African Americans would have opted to say
that they participated in the African culture and some would have chosen to say
Native American, as a way of bowing to the genetic interaction between Africans
and Indians in the American South.
Because Cruse is a strict African Americanist he does not view the
relationship of Africa or the Caribbean to the African American as important.
Therefore, the powerful cultural analysis of Cruse is outstanding in its reach but
it is incomplete. This is his biggest hurdle, and one that makes it impossible for him
to understand the response of the African American intellectuals of the 1950s
and 60s. Cruse had deliberately separated Africa from African Americans and in
so doing believed that he was following W.E.B. DuBois’s notion that the African
American was truly an American product.3 But DuBois was wrong and Cruse’s
support of him was to compound the problem of culture and further conceal the
source of the lack of cultural will. I regret that Cruse did not see this mistake
because in so many ways he is one of my heroes. Yet he thought that the ocean
was an insurmountable barrier between the African and African American. Since
we had been detribalized, he thought we could not search for Africa and indeed
he believed we would never find it because of the complications of the
Americanization of the Negro. But the “Negro” was to be a transitory person, an
artificial creation, an inauthentic African, one without groundedness and thus
only a passing phase in the evolution of cultural change. The cycle would be
completed only with the return to centeredness in our own cultural grounding,
which is not some esoteric back to Africanity idea, but the genuine operation of
our psychocultural center from our own reality, experience, and perspective. The
African American is not any less African than the Yoruban is. We do not give up
our continental historical heritage by virtue of being domiciled in the Americas. I
believe that this is an unfortunate misunderstanding in Cruse’s construction of
his cultural critique. In many ways his work, at this level presages the troubling
ideas of Paul Gilroy, who argues that the notion of a “black Atlantic” is different
from Africa. I cannot accept such an inauthentic structuring of the cultural
situation within the African world; the cultural crisis, which Cruse understands
better than Gilroy, is dangerous precisely because African Americans have
denied their African heritage. But because Cruse is unable to see this as a Pan-
Africanist would see it, he misses an important point.
238 • MOLEFI KETE ASANTE

But this is the crux of the cultural problem. We are African people and when
we landed in America we were Africans—that is, Mandinka, Ibo, Yoruba,
Asante, Fante, Ibibio, Congo, Angola, Wolof, Ijo, and so forth—not African
Americans. We were never made European, though some of us came fairly close
to that impossibility. We were Africans who retained much of Africa even
through the slavery institution and we also were deeply affected by Europe in
America, but we remained Africans. “Wood may remain in water for ten years
but it will never become a crocodile,” goes an old saying in Africa. In respect to
the cultural question, Cruse’s project would have been stronger had he seen that
the real issue was the lack of Afrocentricity in the African. Although we could
not escape our inherent Africanity in the way we talked, walked, danced, or
made music, we did not often consciously choose to be Afrocentric. In fact, what
Cruse really wanted, I believe, was for the African American to choose African
culture over alienation from African culture, to accept the fundamental
prerogatives of our history rather than to abandon them to the wind. The fact that
so many African American intellectuals were ready to capitulate to the
Eurocentric imposition on African culture was a dangerous sign. Therein is the
difficulty with our journey in this country.
Cruse’s lament is that we have not achieved what we should have achieved
culturally given what he sees as our genius in many areas of art. However, he
argues the necessity for a new type of culturalist with specific characteristics. I
have drawn from his analysis three traits that the culturalist should possess (1) a
commitment to cultural agency; (2) the lack of economic or moral fear; and (3)
the willingness to pursue the objective of freedom. What Cruse understood in
this regard was that only artists or just plain humans who were capable of
supporting these ideas could be depended upon for cultural liberation.
The African American community, male and female, continues to be
marginalized in the context of culture and economics. What is the role of the
artists in such a situation? It means that artists should not place their own
personal ambition in front of the masses of African American people. The debate
about individual freedom and community responsibility has often
deteriorated into a lament about the inability of our artists to understand that
culture is the centerpiece of communal rehabilitation. To indulge oneself in
noncommitted art is certainly within the freedom of the individual artist but it is
often socially nonredemptive.
What is significant to understand is that some people stand between Cruse’s
African and Anglo, not knowing who they are or wanting to be someone other
than who they are. A people cannot produce good or great art when they are
confused about identity because art emerges from the soul of the artistic creator.
The best creator is always the person who knows precisely who she is at the
moment of creation. This is self-conscious art, the highest form of creating the
new, and making the innovative. Enslaved Africans could produce the spirituals
because they recognized the existential reality of their situation. They were not
confused about their identity and knew precisely who they were and who the
 HAROLD CRUSE AND AFROCENTRIC THEORY • 239

whites were. In order to produce out of the myths and culture of the people, the
artistic creator had to overcome the barriers of anomie and alienation from self
and community.
In the past, racial integration was advanced as a philosophy of social relations
at the expense of cultural nationalism. But some scholars believe that at the
bottom of all issues was the question of culture that flows inexorably toward
human progress despite the waves of integration, economic progress, and social
panaceas introduced to make the “Negro” American. There could not be a
mistake between citizenship and cultural origin and identity. The African
American is an American by nationality and citizenship; this is passport identity.
The African American is also African by continental cultural identity and origin,
which means that he shares in the vast movement of history of the African
peoples. This means that the responses of the African to the last five hundred
years of European domination and white racial triumphalism have been based on
a general, universal, African understanding of what Europe has done to Africa. At
this level, the African in the United States is no different from the African in
Brazil, Jamaica, or Great Britain.
During the last few years and because of the depth and breadth of the
Afrocentric revolution African Americans have begun to reexamine the tenets of
an integration meant to make it possible for whites and blacks to sit next to each
other in schools and public places. Actually the cultural issue has been on the
minds of African American parents who have sent their children to historically
black colleges and universities in record numbers during the past two decades.
Many of these parents believed that racial integration had become an end in itself
and had robbed the African American community of economic, social, and
political power. When one does not appreciate one’s own culture or when one
prefers the culture of others to one’s own this is an attack on cultural
nationalism. Like all ideologies, cultural nationalism carries with it the seeds of
its own problems, but to advance integrationism as a more effective ideology is
to live with the danger of the destruction of one’s culture, particularly where
white culture is intent on creating a situation of dominance. This is the fallacy of
a particular cultural ideology, white racial dominance, parading as a universal
idea. When middle-class African Americans fled the inner cities for the suburbs
during the 1960s and ’70s they took with them various skills, talents, and
professions but most of all they took away from the inner city communities the
spirit of success, the role models, and the class integration of the African
American community. Devoid of these skills and the examples of success
brought by the middle class many of these communities lapsed into what Cornel
West calls nihilistic behaviors. They were, in fact, nihilistic camps, with hope
cast out and despair settled in.
The future of the heterogeneous United States is not one giant amalgamation of
cultures, but rather a multiplicity of cultures without hierarchy resting on certain
political and social pillars that support racial and cultural equality and respect.
This multiplicity of cultural centers revolving around respect and equality is the
240 • MOLEFI KETE ASANTE

future. But for this to work effectively it means that the African American
community must have a mature attitude toward culture. Harold Cruse’s concern
about this is my concern. He saw a state of cultural malaise where the popular
culture did not enrich the race and where artists had degenerated into peddlers of
the most vacuous nonsense to gain fame and money.
Of course, this is not a universal indictment of contemporary artists. In music
and dance there are many conscious artists creating moments of victory rather
than dwelling on pain and suffering. Kariamu Welsh, the Afrocentric
choreographer of Temple University, is a self-conscious creator of images and
movements that are organic to the African American community. The Welsh
Umfundalai technique, which is based on the authentic dance movements from a
dozen different African and African American communities, is a clear indication
of what is possible if an artist concentrates on using African agency for the
execution of a particular concept. Thus, dances such as Anthem, Herero Women,
Women Gathering, and Ibos’ Landing reflect the power of cultural substance
employed to enrich life’s experiences. No wonder audiences of Africans and
Europeans have been struck by the genuine creativity of the Umfundalai dances.
However, as Cruse understood, the danger is that fewer African American
intellectuals and artists are exhibiting a broad base appreciation of the cultural
traditions.
I believe that Cruse records long before the present Afrocentrists the
dislocation that occurred because of the forced migration of the African people.
The enslavement of African people created, among other things, a permanent
class of revolutionaries against the racist order. Cruse understands this, and while
he is more acutely impacted by the integrationists than he admits, he is still
profoundly convinced that the African American community needs a cultural
revolution. But he knows that the only way that such a radical change can occur
is with a new philosophy of culture. In many ways, this cultural philosophy,
which is so necessary for radical politics in a pluralistic American society, has
shown up in the powerful Afrocentric movement. Maulana Karenga, a cultural
philosopher in the Crusean vein, has stated that Kawaida, his philosophy of
culture, “is a cultural nationalist philosophy that argues that the key challenge in
Black people’s lives is the challenge of culture, and that what Africans must do
is to discover and bring forth the best of their culture, both ancient and current,
and use it as a foundation to bring into being models of human excellence and
possibilities to enrich and expand our lives.”4 In this regard, Karenga is in the
tradition of Cruse. He has positioned the emergence of Kwanzaa, an African
American holiday, as an icon of the cultural nationalist movement. Nearly all
cultural advances, whether conceptual or institutional, in the African American
community have been made by the cultural nationalists.
Thus, Cruse does not believe that the Marxists or today’s radical democrats
can bring about that type of cultural revolution. They are captured by the
ideology of failure and the inability to redefine the relationship of the African
American to the American society. Understanding the history of Marxism, Cruse
 HAROLD CRUSE AND AFROCENTRIC THEORY • 241

has examined it as inapplicable to the condition of African American culture.

Marx relied upon the basic principle of the law of unity and the conflict of
opposites to underscore his idea of the dialectical principle of theory and practice.
The idea is that capital production creates two classes, the capitalists and the
workers. Since the capitalists will try to increase their profit by exploiting labor,
labor will revolt with strikes, work stoppages, and other protests. When this occurs
in advanced capitalist societies it means that there will be revolution.
The problem is that there has never been a workers’ revolution in an advanced
capitalist society. All of the previous communist revolutions have been in less
advanced capitalist societies. Thus, Cruse understands something that the radical
democrats—Angela Davis, Manning Marable, and Cornel West—have yet to
understand and that is that white labor is procapital, anti-immigration, and anti-
African. Yet the Marxists and their political descendants believe in some radical
reconfiguring of the American political landscape where white and black labor will
unite against white capital. Cruse knew, as the Afrocentrists contend, that white
labor and white capital would unite if given the chance against black economic
interests.
It is my contention that the Marxists were in turmoil in this country long
before the writings of Cruse, although there are a lot of Marxists who would
accuse Cruse of “red baiting.” The international crisis of Marxism during the
past decade or so is just an indication that it could not have succeeded in the case
of African Americans. The de facto radical movement in the United States has
always been the African American movement for justice and equality. The
Marxists as communists never ascended to the level of posing a political threat to
the American government or the established order. They never succeeded in
overthrowing racism or segregation; it was the active, viable, vigorous, willful
action of the African American masses, of course with some allies, operating on
the basis of resistance to oppression that brought down the walls of segregation.
In fact, we have no history of a communist movement in the United States where
communists put their bodies and lives on the line as African Americans
did. What does this mean? Was class not a strong contradiction in the American
society, or was race the fundamental contradiction for which people were willing
to die to resolve? Were there no white workers willing to give up their lives for
the class issue?
It is clear to me as it was extraordinarily clear to Cruse that the Marxists have
tried to infiltrate the black movement wherever they could because they have no
political vanguard against capitalist exploitation. In order to maintain their own
revolutionary status and agenda the communists have often tried to insinuate
themselves into the African American movement. We saw similar inroads
happening in South Africa under the government of former president Nelson
Mandela, where communists from the former Soviet Union were used as
advisors to the South African government although there was no communist
government in Russia at the time.
242 • MOLEFI KETE ASANTE

In the United States race remains the one characteristic that has confounded
the Marxists. It is this situation that confounds the radical democrats today as
they scurry to find a place to be. Because the Marxists as communists or
Trotskyites were unable to lead any type of revolution they became “twin
branches on the withering tree of Marxism,” according to Cruse.
Cruse had a historical analysis of the failures of Marxism that included the
excesses of Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky had brutally suppressed the Kronstadt
sailors’ revolt in 1921 and was a predictor of Stalin’s later bureaucratic murders
and ultimately held the seeds of an implosive situation in communism. Given the
attempt on Stalin’s part to force obedience to a system that was to naturally
evolve out of the conflict of classes there could be no space for understanding the
dimension of race in a society like the United States where racial brutality had
occurred in the most provocative and powerful way. Neither class nor race could
be overcome without a new, more radical approach to culture.
The Afrocentrists are the legitimate children of Cruse’s appreciation of the
role of culture. We seek to assert his notion of a radical cultural theory in every
context of African life. But what is the principal element of this radical theory? It
is the fact of agency—that is, the activity of a subjectivity based on one’s
orientation to culture. What Cruse does not see, I believe, is that it is impossible
for this radical theory and practice to emerge from the conditions of mental slavery.
The slave must overcome this condition in order to advance to a higher degree of
cultural expression. Thus, Frantz Fanon of Martinique, a political psychologist
and a supporter of the Algerian Revolution, understood this more clearly than
any of the Négritude writers though ostensibly they were concerned with culture.
On two occasions, once in 1968 at the University of California-Los Angeles and
again in 1985 in Miami at the Négritude Conference organized by Carlos Moore,
I heard Léopold Sédar Senghor expound on culture and each time I felt that he
did not effectively address the question of cultural encapsulation, that is, the fact
that one could never rise above the condition of mental slavery just drylongso. It
was necessary for self conscious action if oppression and mental slavery were to
be overcome.
Harold Cruse does not even venture down this road but he raises the question
of a radical social and cultural theory. Aimé Césaire, Leon Damas, Alioune Diop,
and Senghor attempt to address it with Négritude, but this is ultimately an artistic
movement, perhaps, even only an artistic statement that we have a culture, that
our culture is rich, and that we declare our cultural maturity. As an assertion and
indeed a demonstration in the works of the poets and essayists this is a positive
advance but it could not deal with the confrontation of Cruse’s cultural malaise.
The theory that Cruse prophesied would have to have five aspects:
(1) psychological orientations; (2) emotional commitments; (3) political
implications; (4) collective textual revision; and (5) socioeconomic redefinitions.
Aiming to redefine the cultural landscape used by African Americans, the new
theory would be oriented toward African motifs, designs, concepts, languages,
and styles. In this psychological orientation it would take on dimensions of
 HAROLD CRUSE AND AFROCENTRIC THEORY • 243

personality and spirituality that would direct any thrust into personal or
collective transformation. As an emotional commitment it would mean that the
African American would be saturated in historical knowledge so as to understand
the nuances and intricacies of the culture and not merely participate without
some emotional attachment to the knowledge. Only with this kind of emotional
orientation could self-interested political actions be possible. Otherwise the
African American person could conceivably become anti-African American in
political situations. The collective textual revision that would take place in this
case would change the ethos and image of African Americans as beggars after
the culture of others and would promote and project us as agents, actors, and
artists in our own right who operate in keeping with our cultural and ethical
standards. Implications for socioeconomic achievement should be self-evident in
such case. Those who are transformed into agents would also seek to make
agents out of others through economic activity centered in the interest of
liberation. What Cruse calls into being is a radical theory, not merely an assertion
of culture, and in this instance those who have obliged him the most are the
Afrocentrists.
Such a radical theory heavily invested in the historical legacy of African
people would pose a threat to the keepers of the mental plantation and create the
conditions for a different people, a truly self-actualizing African in America. The
idea of the reconfiguring of a nation must begin with the myths of that nation.
And in the case of the cultural nationalist it is necessary to establish the nature of
the new myths in order that the old myths disappear. The Afrocentrists have gone
about this work in ways that Cruse would appreciate given what he has written
about the nature of culture. Tackling the fundamental root of racial ideology from
the standpoint of its mythical origins has allowed us to grapple with the essential
points of a Greco-Germanic idea promoted by the Aryanists of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Only by insisting that this mythology is invalid and
should not be imposed on the world as if it is universal do we unlock the gates to
freedom and liberation. People cannot be free if they are never given the
opportunity to glance at that possibility and the fact of the matter is that whenever
we have sought economic and political freedom without a historical window we
have never been ale to effectively secure it. The Afrocentrist accepts history as
the basis, not the end, for rational action in regard to liberation because we must
know what the steps have been that brought us to this place before we can
dismantle them.
The myth of white superiority permeates all American institutions and is at the
root of the problem of intercultural and interracial harmony in the American
society. According to Théophile Obenga, the dogma that reason originated with
the Greeks and that Europeans are responsible for rational thought undergirds the
myth of white supremacy and superiority.5 The myth is the problem but the
dogma itself is wrong because rational thought did not start with the Greeks in
either the form of mathematics, geometry, or philosophy.6 Nevertheless, the
dogma has not only affected Europeans but everyone else because of the wide
244 • MOLEFI KETE ASANTE

dissemination of that ideology. And Marxism could not deal with that ideology
because it concentrated solely on class and was blinded to the problem in the
world. The Cubans, for example, had the idea very early on in their articulation of
the communist philosophy that class was the central contradiction but as it turns
out, even in Cuba itself, race was much more difficult to resolve than class and
the class issue caused the government to miss the essential characteristic of the
American response to Cuba as a racial response rather than a political response.7
Furthermore the character of international Marxism with its European analogues
was set to establish itself, as it has tried in South Africa under Mandela, as a new
front for the promotion of the racial ideology of rational thought emanating from
Europe. Only those political thinkers who are historically aware and self-
conscious operators can ever break away from the clutches of Europe. This is
what Cruse complained about in Rebellion or Revolution? I believe it was what
he was writing about in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual as well. His project
was monumental and his name must be placed alongside the great social critics of
the twentieth century because in some respects he took the work of Carter
G.Woodson to a new level by posing a different order of question about culture
as practiced by the African American middle class. Appreciating the strong
analytical powers of Marxism did not blind him to its faults and its failures. Thus,
Harold Cruse makes the journey toward liberation easier for having reinvigorated
cultural nationalism after his Marxist adventure had led him to the cul-de-sac of
culture. We can now stand near him and look in the same direction with the
added instrument of a radical theory of African agency as expressed in
Afrocentricity.

Notes

1. Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? New York: William Morrow, 1969, 48–67;
hereafter page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text.
2. See Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Buffalo:
Amulefi, 1980); Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (Trenton, NJ: Africa World
Press, 1991); and The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1987).
3. See W.E.B.DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago:
A.C.McClurg, 1903).
4. Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community, and Culture
(Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1998), 3–4.
5. Théophile Obenga, A Lost Tradition: African Philosophy in World History
(Philadelphia: Source Editions, 1995), 1–25.
6. See Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization. Myth or Reality (New
York: Lawrence Hill, 1976); Yosef Ben-Jochannon, Black Man of the Nile
 HAROLD CRUSE AND AFROCENTRIC THEORY • 245

(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990); George G.M.James, Stolen Legacy (San
Francisco: Richardson Associates, 1990); and Molefi Kete Asante and Ama
Mazama, Eds., Egypt vs. Greece and the American Academy Carlos Moore, Cuba
(Los Angeles: UCLA Center for African American Studies, 1989). (Chicago:
African American Images, 2002).
246
 14
Rethinking the Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual
Harold Cruse, Black Nationalism and the Black
Power Movement

PENIEL E.JOSEPH

The decade of black power politics (1965–1976) can be usefully analyzed as the
public manifestation of dissident politics stifled by the Cold War. During these
years radical discourses were propelled into national and international politics.
From this perspective the black power movement’s critique of American
imperialism can be viewed as the extension of black anti-colonialism
circumscribed by geopolitical imperatives. Inspired by global events, black
Americans had comprised the vanguard of a radical anticolonial politics that
sought to challenge European dominance over “third world” majorities the world
over.1 Yet the political damage suffered by “her majesty’s other children” was
not the sole concern of black radicals.2 Black anticolonialism was situated, and
experienced its decline, within the context of America’s emerging dominance
over post-World War II Europe.3 Bound by the Cold War’s silencing of critics of
American foreign policy, African American anticolonialism survived, and at
times thrived, through the works and activities of late 1950s and early ’60s
radicals.4
During the black power era, African American activists such as Stokely
Carmichael, Angela Davis, and LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) represented the
new face of black international politics, while organizations such as the Black
Panthers reflected the popularization of previously underground discourses.5
Each, in different ways, argued that black America was part of a radical political
movement whose ultimate goal was global transformation. As the descriptive
metaphor for a series of complex political discourses related to
redefining national and international politics, “black power” compelled the
nation to seriously consider long-censored voices. Though perceived as a stark
break from the political status quo, in truth black power revealed the flowering
of black radical organizations and discourses that had existed alongside the civil
rights movement. Constructing an alternative vision of black protest through
political organizations, cultural groups, and revolutionary journals, the black
Left laid the groundwork for the growth and power of black power radicalism.
An examination of social critic Harold Cruse, arguably the most influential
cultural critic and essayist of the black power era, helps delineate the immediate
historical context for black power radicalism. Anticipating the black power
248 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

movement’s focus on black nationalism and the cultural politics of race, Cruse
provides a theoretical bridge to a diverse range of black power discourses.

From Black to Red and Back: Harold Cruse and the

Communist Party
Harold Cruse, one of the most widely read and controversial social critics of the
black power era, continues to profoundly influence the study of black
intellectuals, African American political thought, and the role of the black scholar.
Considered a hero and sage by young radicals during the black power era, Cruse
became one of the movement’s chief theoreticians during the 1960s and early
’70s. Published in 1967, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual became a best-seller
and the unofficial bible of black nationalists.6 Praised as much for its strident
critique of the white marxist left as it was for its repudiation of assorted black
leaders,7 the book revealed major schisms within the black intelligentsia. Yet to
read Cruse’s major work as simply an ideological attack on Marxism and black
intellectuals would be a mistake. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was the
culmination of Cruse’s long attempt to construct a philosophy of revolutionary
black nationalism that stood outside the parameters of conventional
interpretations of black radicalism. Moreover, Cruse analyzed the cultural
politics of race in American society and the role of black intellectuals in the
American cultural and political arena. In short, Cruse attempted to craft an
indigenous theory of black American resistance.8
Once published, Cruse’s bruising and polemical rhetorical style became the
talk of black and white leftist political circles. And with good reason: with the
exception of W.E.B.DuBois, whom Cruse held in high esteem, the book harshly
criticized virtually every high-profile black intellectual, writer, and activist of the
period. Despite his status as a black power-era public intellectual, Cruse remains
an enigma. His political biography reveals a complex and at times contradictory
portrait of a man who spent much of his life, paradoxically, as an iconoclast
relentlessly pursuing a political platform. Though belatedly achieving national
prominence at the age of fifty, Cruse had been immersed in radical politics for
over twenty years. While Cruse was a fixture within New York’s radical postwar
political circles, his most famous work is puzzling in many respects. A member
of the American Communist Party at least until the early 1950s, Cruse deletes
this important fact from his book. An editor, along with Lorraine Hansberry and
Julian Mayfield, of Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper during the early 1950s,
Cruse disparages Robeson and Hansberry with vicious invective. A vocal
supporter of Cuba who toured the island with a group of black activists and
cultural workers in 1960, Cruse displays an exasperating skepticism toward the
Cuban Revolution. A leading proponent of black internationalism during the
early 1960s, Cruse presents a decidedly narrow conceptualization of black
politics in his later work. Cruse was a founding member of the Freedom Now
Party, which proposed an independent black political party, yet The Crisis of the
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 249

Negro Intellectual argues that blacks must be incorporated into the cultural arena
of American society. A contributing writer to the radical journal Liberator during
the early 1960s, Cruse excoriates the publication in the pages of his book. A
tempestuous, strong-willed, bitter, and brilliant man, Cruse underwent a series of
political evolutions that reverberated throughout the black Left during the 1960s.
Criticized now and at the time of its publication as being personally motivated
and containing historical and conceptual inaccuracies,9 Cruse’s writings and
political activism remain crucial to charting the trajectory of African American
political thought during the black power era. The enduring strength of Cruse’s
work has less to do with its historical accuracy than the profound debates
generated by its analysis. Perhaps most significantly, for a generation of young
black radicals, Cruse’s work was their first introduction to the complex history
of black radicalism.
Born in Petersburg, Virginia in 1916, Cruse’s migrated with his family to New
York in 1934 and the young Cruse came of age amid the cultural and political
transformations that engulfed Harlem during the 1930s and ‘40s. Representing a
singular moment in American history when New York’s uptown area was a
cultural and political haven, the Harlem Renaissance was a training ground for
both New Negro literati and a cadre of influential black radicals.10 Inspired by
the Harlem Renaissance’s stress on the cultural aspects of racial politics, Cruse
would spend his political career trying to influence politics through culture.
Serving in the armed forces during World War II, Cruse traveled through North
Africa, Italy, and England. Upon returning to Harlem in 1945, Cruse spent the
next six years working a variety of jobs, including five years as a jack-of-all
trades for the Communist Party (CP) newspaper the Daily Worker.11 Like many
black cultural workers of the era, Cruse utilized the Communist Party as a
vehicle for political expression. Similar to his contemporaries, his experience
with the party would be a source of personal contention for many years.12 Part of
cultural groups such as the Harlem Writers Club (HWC), Committee for Negro
Arts (CNA), and the editorial staff of Freedom newspaper, Cruse’s associates
included Lorraine Hansberry and Julian Mayfield. Although a member of the CP-
backed CNA, he regarded the party as being run by whites who relegated black
members to subordinate positions.13 A self-trained intellectual, Cruse was a
voracious reader and prolific writer who published film and theatrical reviews
for the Daily Worker during his years with the party. Frustrated with the CP’s
stance on the “Negro question” and the CNA’s failure to produce a significant
number of black plays, he left the party in 1951.14 This was a tumultuous time
for Cruse, one that would have lasting effects on his future political activities. In
addition to leaving the CNA, he endured a bitter break from the group working
at Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper. The schism was especially difficult for
at least three reasons. First, it turned Cruse’s admiration for Robeson into
lifelong enmity. Second, it marked an end to the Harlem Writers Club’s political
experiment of merging black nationalism with a political worldliness unburdened
by the CP. Bitterly recalling the end of the HWC in 1951, he asserted that the
250 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

group had “initiated a trend that was not to bear fruit until more than a decade
later.”15 For Cruse, this trend was black nationalism linked to a cosmopolitan
intellectual outlook. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the feud with
Robeson’s Freedom cohorts prevented him from publishing. Jerry Gafio Watts
argues that historically black intellectuals have lacked the available infrastructure
to pursue their craft resulting in the utilization of “ethnic marginality facilitators”
such as the Communist Party that provide an outlet for creative expressions.16
From this perspective, Cruse’s break with the party further hindered his ability to
ply his trade. At a time when venues for publishing were extremely limited for
black radicals, periodicals such as Freedom were critical organs for the
dissemination of political ideas.17

The Lonely Struggle

Over the next decade Cruse would exert considerable amounts of energy working
a variety of jobs while attempting, unsuccessfully, to produce several plays, a
musical comedy, and publish a novel as well as political essays.18 Moving to
Greenwich Village during the early 1950s, he made a conscious break from his
old uptown comrades (many of whom he was no longer on speaking terms with),
and plunged himself into the theater scene. Taking up residence on Fourteenth
Street, he immersed himself in the history of downtown radicalism.19 Cruse’s
unpublished writings on early-twentieth-century American radicalism reflect a
sophisticated understanding of the history of white Marxists such as John Reed,
who had been deeply affected by the Bolshevik Revolution.20 These were bitter
years for Cruse, who worked a variety of odd jobs, including one as a film cutter.
Witnessing the rise of a number of prominent black artists such as writer
Lorraine Hansberry and actor Harry Belafonte was especially difficult for Cruse.
Unlike Hansberry who had come from a middle-class family from Chicago,
Cruse had continually struggled to make a living as a professional writer. Cruse
regarded Hansberry’s success as the consequences of a class position that he both
despised and could never achieve. Positioning Richard Wright as the last
working-class literary hero to come through the ranks of the black Left, Cruse
noted that “it is a disturbing fact that in the American radical movement a Negro
writer-intellectual who writes and washes dishes (as Orwell did when he was on
the bum in Paris) is declasse and thoroughly looked down by his craft
colleagues. This is but one indication of how far the American Communist Party
movement is removed from being proletarian. This leftwing accommodation to
middle-class ideology was reflected in the type of literary talents that rose to
prominence in the CNA-Freedom newspaper inner circle. These writers
definitely represented a middle-class literary and cultural ethos.”21 In this
passage Cruse is referring to the humiliation that he felt at having to hold an
assortment of odd jobs during and after his break with the Communist Party.
In addition to his own personal struggle for success and recognition, Cruse felt
that black cultural production lacked race consciousness. In its place had arrived
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 251

a slavish need to be integrated into American cultural institutions. The focus on

race-conscious cultural infrastructure and expressive vehicles, one that would
characterize the black arts movement of the 1960s, would remain a staple of
Cruse’s political activism. Both Cruse’s critique of liberal integrationism and his
focus on culture as a vehicle for racial uplift would be themes fully explored in The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In a letter written over a decade before its
publication, Cruse explored these issues, “We can talk about our rights in
culture, what we have in the way of Negro talent, and what we are allowed to
achieve, ‘solely because of race.’ But is it only because of race? I don’t believe
it! It is not ‘because of race,’ rather it is because of a lack of race, or to put it
another way, we do not strive for a racially conscious art. Today Negro artists are
too busy trying to represent everything in art but themselves and their own racial
background.”22 Like his personal and political life, Cruse’s words represented a
creative balancing act. Navigating a thin tightrope between hope and melancholy,
Cruse rejected both liberal integrationism and the Marxist tendency to utilize
black despair as a theoretical point of departure.
As a radical black excommunist attempting to publish during Cold War
anxiety, Cruse found the 1950s extremely difficult. The narrowing cultural and
political terrain precipitated by “black listing” and “red baiting” redoubled the
fringe status of black cultural workers.23 During this period Cruse started the
Afro-American Cultural Society and was associated with a variety of individuals
in search of vehicles for political expression.24 Although gaining a sense of
satisfaction from Nikita Krushchev’s revelations of the atrocities of Stalinism in
1956, Cruse continued to feel isolated within radical politics. Unable to publish,
he resorted to writing angry polemics that provide a context for his later work.
Writing to the New York Post, Cruse denounced singer and actor Belafonte for
criticizing African American entertainer Nat King Cole’s lack of political
consciousness, noting that Cole “didn’t come up through the left-wing
movement like you did where everybody got hepped up on ‘civil rights’ and then
proceeded to go out and mess up Negro politics.”25 Cruse’s bitterness regarding
his personal, professional, and political experiences are clearly revealed in these
writings. His increasing disaffection with his own personal and political plight
could, at times, verge on paranoia. Although aligned to radical political causes,
Cruse’s experiences in Harlem and Greenwich Village left him increasingly
embittered. With a broad range of political antagonists ranging from the
black radical literati of Harlem to white communists, Cruse occupied an
increasingly narrow political space in New York. His situation was further
exacerbated by the arrival of up-and-coming poets such as LeRoi Jones to New
York’s cultural scene. For Cruse, such new emigres were hopelessly unaware of
the history behind the crucible of black intellectual and cultural formation that
was reflected in the lives of postwar activists like himself. In many ways Cruse’s
tempestuous critiques amounted to subconscious acts of self-marginalization and
were born out of his frustration at failing to be taken seriously as an intellectual
and writer. As a member of the CP, Cruse experienced first hand the painful
252 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

hierarchies within radical politics. Thus, Cruse’s polemics in The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual and his scathing criticisms of Robeson and Hansberry were
fueled by both ideological and personal differences.26 Even after gaining
national prominence in the late 1960s, Cruse believed that figures such as
Robeson and Hansberry had received uncritical adulation from the Left. As the
1950s drew to a close, Cruse, despite scores of rejection letters from both
publishers and foundations, remained indefatigable and resumed the political
writing and organizing that he had abandoned to write plays.27 In this capacity
Cruse would have considerable success. Speaking to the American Society for
African Culture in 1959, Cruse forcefully argued that African Americans needed
to develop their own definitions of black culture, rather than continue to allow
the American mainstream to define blackness.28

A Cuban Excursion
If Harold Cruse failed as a novelist,29 as a political writer and critic he was a
stunning success. Cruse’s political life, like that of many members of New
York’s black intelligentsia during the early Cold War years, was transformed by
international developments. Specifically, the Cuban Revolution galvanized broad
sections of the international Left. Furthermore, various political developments
during the decade had placed a strobe light on international affairs, including the
liberation of the African Gold Coast, Robert F.Williams’s Monroe Movement,
and the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia. Although a vocal critic of white
influence within black politics, Cruse was by this time considered something of
an elder statesmen within black radical circles. Therefore, Cruse was a natural
addition to the 1960 delegation of mostly black writers and cultural critics who
visited the newly independent island. The participants in this trip included
writers John Henrik Clarke and Julian Mayfield, poet Sonia Sanchez, and militant
civil rights leader Williams.30 Key among his fellow-travelers on this historic trip
was LeRoi Jones.31 Cuba had an intoxicating effect on blacks touring the island.
Both Jones and Cruse, in various ways, viewed the revolution as significant to
black liberation struggles in America.32
In many ways the Cuban Revolution served as a literal and figurative example
of political freedom for black radicals. For many, the event precipitated an
emotional and at times reverential response.33 Well traveled politically
and imbued with a fair share of cynicism, Cruse was nonetheless profoundly
affected by his trip to Cuba. Traveling to the province of Oriente in the Sierra
Maestre mountains, Cruse personally witnessed the enthusiasm of the Cuban
people despite their harsh living conditions.34 As the first group of black
intellectuals to visit the island, Cruse and his associates were treated as foreign
dignitaries. The presence of these intellectuals was especially significant to the
Cuban government in the aftermath of their failed attempt to hire boxer Joe
Louis to promote black tourism in Cuba.
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 253

Perhaps the most significant occurrence of Cruse’s two weeks in Cuba was the
impact that it had on his politics. Well-versed in the history of American
Marxism, Cruse began to look toward the global horizon to analyze black
politics in America. Adopting an actively internationalist stance in the wake of
the Cuban Revolution and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Cruse actively
propagated a philosophy of black internationalism. On this score Cruse’s article
“A Negro Looks at Cuba,” published in Presence Africaine in 1961 clearly
demonstrates the impact that these events had on his thinking. Recalling being
awed by Cuba’s economic revitalization, Cruse mingled with Cuban workers to
assess the revolution’s progress.35 As Cruse would later detail, he regarded the
Cuban Revolution as transforming a younger generation of black intellectuals,
and was fascinated by the reaction of this group.36 Cruse’s experiences in Fidel
Castro’s Cuba had a profound impact on his political outlook in a number of
different ways. Describing the experience in the pages of the Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual, Cruse positioned himself as a supportive yet cautiously sober
observer of the celebrations taking place during the summer of 1960. Claiming
that he “notably held back all outward exuberance for the Cuban situation,”
Cruse contrasted his stark pragmatism with the revolutionary romanticism of
younger writers, specifically LeRoi Jones.37 However, in the immediate
aftermath of his Cuban trip, Cruse was an unabashed supporter of both the Cuban
Revolution and its potential implications for black liberation movements in
America. Writing about the celebration of Cuban independence at Sierra Maestre,
Cruse described Castro’s speech as “eloquent,” noting, “I do not think Fidel
Castro has many superiors today. He is able to prepare his listeners for the dramatic
persuasion of his main propositions by the skillful use of deductive ideas with
words understood by the peasants. And the peasantry, en masse, beat the air
above them with their wide straw hats and the mountains of Sierra echoed with
the clamor of wild acclaim.”38
Support for “third world” revolutionary movements would be a resounding
theme in Cruse’s work during the early 1960s. Unable to publish in the
mainstream press,39 Cruse contributed to key left publications of the era
including Studies on the Left, the New Leader, the Liberator, and Presence
Africaine. Presence Africaine was particularly influential among these journals.
Started by the group of black writers and cultural workers that included Richard
Wright, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire the journal provided
sophisticated cultural and political criticism regarding the global implications of
anticolonial struggles. In 1956 the group convened a national Negro Writers
Conference. Held at the Sorbonne in Paris, delegates to the conference included
novelist James Baldwin, theorist Frantz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, and George
Lamming.40 The proceedings of this conference were published as a special issue
of Presence Africaine that would be influential among black radicals
internationally.41 The journal’s advocacy of the role of culture in transforming
global society was a theme that would be central to black power politics. Cruse
was undoubtedly influenced by the ideas emanating from this group of activists
254 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

and intellectuals. Attempting to develop an alternative to Western Marxism that

drew on elements of black nationalism and anticolonialism, Cruse’s work would
play a pivotal role in shaping the political thought of a new generation of black
militants and radicals.42

Revolutionary Nationalism: The Political Writings of

Harold Cruse
Revolutionary nationalism sums up Cruse’s political philosophy during the early
1960s. Blending black nationalism with a unique perspective on the relationship
between African Americans and class struggle, Cruse looked to the international
horizon for a way forward at home. A political traveler among a diverse
constellation of radical groups and organizations during the immediate postwar
years, Cruse advanced a political philosophy that blended black nationalism with
an idiosyncratic view of class struggle, positing that “American Negro
nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance,
define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the
cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold
ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution
would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic
originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a
black aesthetic and artistic base.”43 Given his remark elsewhere that “The great
error of Marx, himself, was to underestimate the role nationalism was destined to
play in working-class ideology of all countries, the world over,” it is not difficult
to see why Cruse is still considered to be anti-Marxist.44 Yet, this
oversimplification of Cruse’s work dismisses the author’s political history as
well as the power and influence of his earlier works and political activities.
While it is true that Cruse had a highly tendentious relationship with the CP and
was very critical of orthodox Marxism, during the early 1960s Cruse supported
revolutionary socialist movements. In this spirit, Cruse went as far as calling the
Cuban Revolution an “un-Marxian revolution carried out by non-Marxists.”45
For Cruse, the idea that nationalist based anti-imperialist movements be
considered “Marxist” was a distortion attributable to white supremacy. For
Cruse, African independence efforts and the Cuban Revolution had exposed the
fallacies of Western Marxism. No doubt Cruse felt a personal stake in clearing
up such confusion considering his painful relationship with the CP.
Notwithstanding The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual’s lack of an international
political perspective,46 Cruse’s early work was notable for its focus on
“third world” liberation movements. His argument in The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual focused more on black patronage toward the white Left than on key
contradictions within Marxist political philosophy. For Cruse, black radicalism’s
obsession with white vehicles for political success militated against the wide
currents of black nationalism that existed in black communities. Bruised by his
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 255

experiences in party circles, Cruse viewed the party as a “retarding, divisive, and
destructive political force.”47
Cruse’s political profile grew steadily during the first half of the 1960s.
Although Cruse recalled feeling somewhat slighted by Jones during their trip to
Cuba in 1960,48 a younger generation of black student-activists would come to
regard Cruse as a major political figure.49 Indeed, Cruse was part of a group of
radical black “elders” whom younger activists sought out for aid and advice
during the early 1960s. Young activists associated with groups such as Uhuru,
the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and the Afro-American
Association sought out veterans of the movement including Robert F.Williams,
Detroit community activists James and Grace Lee Boggs, and Queen Mother
Audley Moore.50 Along with The Crusader, Muhammad Speaks, Freedomways,
and the Liberator, Cruse’s work was eagerly read by groups of young radicals
seeking political guidance. The students who were influenced by Cruse and other
black radicals during the early 1960s were in search of a radical alternative to
contemporary civil rights struggles.51 Many of these students were inspired by
the courage of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and
the speeches of Malcolm X. For these young people, the writings of Cruse,
Williams, and the Boggses served as crash courses in black nationalism, Marxist-
Leninism, and revolution. In 1962 Cruse published “Revolutionary Nationalism
and the Afro-American,” in Studies on the Left. This essay was widely circulated
among black student radicals, introducing the concept of “revolutionary
nationalism” to young militants. Examining the global dimensions of black
political radicalism, Cruse criticized conventional Marxism for its failure to
substantively deal with black nationalism, writing “From the underdevelopment
itself have come the indigenous schools of theory and practice for achieving
independence. The liberation of the colonies before the socialist revolution in the
west is not orthodox Marxism (although it might be called Maoism or
Castroism). As long as American Marxists cannot deal with the implications of
revolutionary nationalism both abroad and at home, they will continue to play
the role of revolutionaries by proxy.”52 Cruse stressed that, similar to “third
world” independence movements, black Americans would have to develop an
indigenous revolutionary praxis. By providing an intellectual basis for increasing
black political radicalism, this essay significantly impacted black students who
were searching for an alternative to mainstream civil rights strategies and
tactics.53 That same year Cruse authored “Negro Nationalism’s New Wave,”
which appeared in the pages of the New Leader. Discussing the “new wave” of
black nationalism that had been examined earlier by writers and activists John
Henrik Clarke and Julian Mayfield, Cruse asserted that young black militants
were focusing on global political events for a way forward at home, noting,
“Already they have a pantheon of modern heroes—Lumumba, Kwame
Nkrumah, Sekou Toure in Africa; Fidel Castro in Latin America; Malcolm X, the
Muslim leader, in New York; Robert Williams in the South; and Mao Tse-Tung
in China. These men seem heroic to the Afro-Americans not because of their
256 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

political philosophy, but because they were either former colonials who achieved
complete independence, or because like Malcolm X, they dared to look the white
community in the face and say: ‘We don’t think your civilization is worth the
effort of any black man to try to integrate into.’ This to many Afro-Americans is
an act of defiance that is truly revolutionary.”54 Cruse’s growing political influence
within black politics was underscored in the aftermath of the radical youth
conference held at Fisk University in 1964. Comprised of black students from
across the nation, participants utilized Cruse’s “Marxism and the Negro,”
published in the Liberator, to formulate their advocacy for revolutionary
nationalism.55 In an article written in the aftermath of the conference, radical
nationalist Don Freeman of RAM and Cleveland’s Afro-American Institute
stated that “the only revolutionary force in this society, the Afro-American
freedom struggle, must be led by black radicals, not opportunistic white
Marxists.”56 Like much of his work before The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
Cruse’s “Marxism and the Negro” was intensely debated among the black Left,
especially black student radicals. For young students wrestling with African
American history, studies related to class politics, and contemporary civil rights
struggles Cruse represented a breath of fresh air. Arguing that blacks needed a
liberation theory fashioned from their own unique history, while not being
dismissive of socialist-inspired revolutionary movements, Cruse satisfied those
inspired by increasing nationalism and its internationalist aspirations.

Cruse and the Freedom Now Party

Cruse’s increasingly strident criticism of Marxism placed him in direct conflict
with some leading black socialists and Marxists within New York’s black Left.
Uneasy with the presence of black socialists such as Clifton DeBerry and Paul
Boutelle in the Freedom Now Party (FNP), Cruse accused DeBerry and the
Socialist Worker Party (SWP) of trying to hijack radical elements of the black
liberation movement.57 Responding to Cruse’s allegations in a letter to the
Liberator, SWP presidential candidate and FNP supporter DeBerry argued that
he was in “favor of the formation and growth” of the FNP and found no
contradiction in the SWP’s support of independent vehicles for African
American politics.58 As the program committee chairman of the FNP, Cruse’s
stake in the debate between the FNP and the SWP was personal as well as
political. The origins of Cruse’s debate with the SWP stemmed from the fall
1963 issue of the SWP’s International Socialist Review, which outlined its
support for the newly formed FNP. Telling the editors of the review that the FNP
was unwilling to exist in a sycophantic relationship with the SWP, Cruse warned
that any attempt to drag the FNP into Marxist politics would be “fought with
every weapon at our disposal.”59
In some respects Cruse’s fears were exacerbated by the SWP’s vigorous
embrace of the FNP. For many in the SWP, including George Breitman, the FNP
was the black political vehicle that they had been waiting for.60 Experiencing
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 257

only limited success through support for black radicals such as Robert F.
Williams, the SWP devoted a significant portion of their 1964 convention to
outlining the FNP’s usefulness to a worldwide socialist revolution.61 Arguing that
the SWP “operated in an arena wider than the Negro struggle” the draft
convention resolution outlined plans for an alliance between black militants and
labor radicals that could be furthered through the FNP.62 Considering the SWP’s
preemptive embrace of the FNP, it is not surprising that Cruse so thoroughly
rejected political overtures of both black and white socialists.63 Cruse’s
experiences with the short-lived FNP left him bitter and dejected. Strong willed
and naturally combative, Cruse distrusted the influence of black socialists in the
party and was further angered when the group refused to adopt the draft
resolution that he had written.64 Detailing some of the events that precipitated the
organization’s decline a few years later, Cruse failed to reveal his own
association with the group. Furthermore, although describing the Liberator as an
“outstanding journalistic failure,” Cruse does not admit to being one of its
leading contributors during the early 1960s.65 Arguing that Liberator “failed”
because its editorial direction was interracial, Cruse once again deleted important
information from his political analysis. In short, even before the release of his
best-seller, Cruse had occupied a small but influential space within black leftist
political discourses and movements. A former Marxist who had traveled to Cuba
and supported Fidel Castro, Cruse attempted during the early 1960s to outline an
indigenous theory of black internationalism that was anticolonial but not white
controlled. Cruse’s political writings significantly influenced the development of
“international revolutionary black nationalists”66 such as RAM and assorted
black nationalist political and cultural organizations. Although criticizing African
Americans for failing to develop an infrastructure for a black intelligentsia capable
of leading the masses, Cruse himself contributed to the development of such an
infrastructure during the early 1960s. Often short-lived but always influential, the
organizations, study groups, conferences, and journals that focused on culture,
class and colonialism provided the organizational and theoretical foundations for
black power radicalism. Indeed, by 1965 Cruse would serve as an instructor in
LeRoi Jones’ short-lived Black Arts Repertory Theater/School (BARTS). Like
organizations such as the FNP and Uhuru, the BARTS experiment was short-
lived. However, its enduring significance had more to do with unveiling a set of
ideas and concepts that would serve as a framework for future black power
activism.

Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: Reactions and Responses

At the time of its publication, Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was both a
critical and commercial success. The book rescued the then fifty-year old Cruse
from relative obscurity, transforming him into an intellectual celebrity. Having
struggled for the better part of his career to find venues to publish, Cruse now
found outlets for previously published work.67 Similarly, after having been
258 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

excluded from the upper echelons of black literary circles, Cruse parlayed fame
into considerable success on the lecture circuit and a permanent faculty position
at the University of Michigan.68 Tracing the development of the black
intelligentsia from the Harlem Renaissance to black Marxists of the 1940s and
militant contemporaries, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual leveled a critique of
the black Left that was even harsher then its suggestive subtitle. Part
autobiography, part political analysis and wholly polemical, Cruse’s work
targeted white Marxists and black literary and political figures. Cruse forcefully
argued that black America suffered due to the absence of a cultural and
intellectual infrastructure. Finally, Cruse linked this lack of a genuine black
public sphere to the black Left’s overreliance on white-led radical
organizations.69
Arguing that a cultural reconceptualization of black identity was vital for the
development of black liberation in American society, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual focused on the role of black intellectuals in achieving this task. Black
intellectuals, who according to Cruse had the skills to accomplish this difficult
task, had abdicated their roles through a slavish adherence to racial assimilation.
Discussing a 1964 debate between black intellectuals and white liberals
sponsored by the Association of Artists for Freedom, Cruse argued that such
debates illustrated the theoretical ineffectualness and the political bankruptcy of
black intellectuals. He noted, “The Association of Artists for Freedom came into
existence in 1964 as a result of the Birmingham Church bombing and killing of
six children; but not through any prior intellectual comprehension that Negro
writers, artists, and creative individuals had a political role to fulfill in the Negro
movement, in any event. Now having assumed this rather belated militant
political stance, and attempting to palm it off as super-radicalism, these
intellectuals, straining at the leash, find themselves the tactical and programmatic
prisoners of their Northern roles. They are integrationists, active or implied, with
no tangibly visible worlds to conquer in the North, beyond furthering their own
individual careers as creative artists.”70 Cruse’s critique of the Artists for
Freedom represented an attack on black intellectuals for articulating a
disingenuous critique of American liberalism. While agreeing with criticisms
against white paternalism, Cruse argued that black intellectuals and white
liberals engaged in an unequal relationship that prevented the creation of a
critical discourse on black liberation that went beyond the narrow confines of
liberalism.71 Cruse’s indictment of black intellectuals reverberated throughout
African American politics. The book was eagerly received by a younger
generation of black activists angered by what they perceived as the
ineffectiveness of black leadership.
Moreover, the text’s harsh criticism of the Communist Party was embraced by
liberal critics eager to expose Old Left politics as a sham. Cruse’s complex and
at times contradictory historical and political analysis of race, class, and
culture mixed elements of historical materialism, black nationalism, and
liberalism. For Cruse, the literal crisis of black intellectuals presented a
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 259

conundrum precisely because of the lack of critical imagination on the part of

black intellectuals and the black middle class. “They call for Negro leadership
unfettered by white liberal control somewhat as the nationalists do, but are
careful to avoid nationalism or separatism,” he wrote. “They have taken on a
radical veneer without radical substance, yet have no comprehensive radical
philosophy to replace either the liberalism they denounce or the radicalism of the
past that bred them. They are representative of the Negro intellectual’s quandary
in America. And the social roots of their problem are directly traceable to their
class separation from the ethnic group consciousness level of Negro thought
(that resides mostly in the lower mass of disinherited Negroes, for whom the
American middle-class establishment offers no way out).”72
As characterized by Cruse, black intellectuals were in crisis due to their
adherence to liberal-integrationism, disconnection from the black lumpen
proletariat,73 and ignorance of the radical black nationalist legacy in America.
From this perspective, black intellectual ambivalence permeated the African
American public sphere irrespective of political and ideological divergences.
According to Cruse’s thesis, radical intellectual ambivalence in the face of black
misery was based on the black intelligentsia’s ties to liberal integrationism as a
means for black equality.74 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual argues that
cultural apparatuses in the form of mass media represented the most powerful
tool for black freedom. Asserting that “whoever controls the cultural apparatus”
would dominate society, Cruse defined the state’s cultural apparatus as
encompassing political, economic, and social institutions.75
In many ways Cruse’s criticisms echoed the work of sociologist E.Franklin
Frazier, whose Black Bourgeoisie had offered a similar indictment of the black
middle class as lacking an institutional base to be considered a legitimate
bourgeoisie.76 However, Cruse’s manifesto went beyond Frazier’s classic by
analyzing the role of black radicals. Cruse’s rhetorical venom against
contemporary radical political activists revealed the tendentious ideological
landscape of the black power era. Moreover, the author’s vitriolic attacks against
the CP coupled with his relative silence on revolutionary movements illustrated
transformations within Cruse’s political thought. By 1967 even while
acknowledging the enormous implications of the Cuban Revolution for anti-
imperialist politics, Cruse criticized black radicals for attempting to apply
international theories to black liberation struggles.77 Thus, Cruse’s black
political internationalism had been replaced by a more narrow view of the
applicable terrain of black political thought. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
ignores or glosses over organizations and periodicals (some of which Cruse
participated and published in) that comprised at least an embryonic infrastructure
for the cultural politics that Cruse advocated. Furthermore, despite his past
advocacy of revolutionary nationalism, Cruse now espoused plans for black
incorporation that were reformist rather than radical. However, despite Cruse’s
critique of Marxism and black radicals, his characterization of the black poor and
the ineffectualness of African American leadership was staunchly rooted in the
260 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

author’s critical view of capitalism. He noted, “As a prime victim of laissez-faire

capitalism and its social imperatives, the Negro intellectual is pro-capitalistic in
his every reflex. He does not see that the concepts of social equality for the entire
Negro group, and unqualified capitalism, are contradictory and incompatible.
The ideology of the Negro movement, in all its trends, protests against the ill-
effects of capitalist society but not against the society itself.”78 Cruse’s unique
analysis of American political economy displayed the eccentric personal and
political tendencies of Cruse the writer and political theorist. Perhaps the most
controversial aspect of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was Cruse’s
concluding chapter. Titled “Postscript on Black Power—The Dialogue between
Shadow and Substance,” this chapter attacked the conservative politics inscribed
within strains of black power discourse. Recognizing the conservative black
economic nationalism that undergirded aspects of black power rhetoric, Cruse
asserted that the “slogan actually represents a swing back to the conservative
nationalism that Malcolm X had just departed.”79
Cruse’s bruising polemics precipitated a groundswell of debate within the
black public sphere. Not surprisingly the most caustic observers included black
radicals and militants, many of whom had received the brunt of Cruse’s rhetorical
venom.80 For Robert Chrisman, Cruse’s opus represented a lost opportunity.
While acknowledging the book’s significance Chrisman argued that The Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual suffered from conceptual myopia.”81 In a review
published in the inaugural issue of the important journal Black Scholar,
Chrisman asserted that Cruse “evaded an analysis of American capitalism and
economic racism” while consistently scapegoating the black intelligentsia for
problems attributable to racial capitalism.82 A political contemporary of Cruse,
writer and activist Julian Mayfield criticized The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
as a blatant distortion of black history. In a Negro Digest review titled “Crisis or
Crusade,” Mayfield argued that Cruse purposely distorted the history of
Harlem’s black radical intelligentsia and the author’s once prominent position in
the Communist Party.83 Arguing that during the late 1940s Cruse was “an up-
and-coming Marxist theoretician” Mayfield, a former CP member himself, stated
that younger rank-and-file members actually looked up to Cruse.84 Moreover,
Mayfield traced Cruse’s distaste for Lorraine Hansberry and Harlem’s black Left
back to Cruse’s failure as a playwright.85 Mayfield had been part of the same
contingent of intellectuals that Cruse accompanied to Cuba in the immediate
aftermath of Cuban independence. This core group of New York black radicals,
once political allies, received the brunt of Cruse’s criticism. According to
Mayfield, the thrust of Cruse’s attack revealed the rhetorical assaults of a bitter
ex-Communist who “Almost alone of black intellectuals…has kept the flames of
black nationalism burning while the rest have been dancing the Boogaloo to alien
ideologies.”86 The derisive tone of Mayfield’s review reveals the political
implications of Cruse’s work. As a slightly younger contempora ry of
Cruse, Mayfield interpreted the excommunist’s full-scale attack on black radicals
as disingenuous.87
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 261

While Mayfield dismissed The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual as a personally

motivated attack on the black left by a disgruntled opportunist, radical political
theorist Robert L.Allen focused on the theoretical implications of Cruse’s
treatise. Published in 1969, Allen’s important book Black Awakening in
Capitalist America, while acknowledging the significance of Cruse’s work and
its impact on black nationalist thinking, found Cruse’s construction of cultural
hegemony within American political economy to be flawed. According to Allen,
one of the book’s central errors was its “failure to establish, by argument or
evidence, his central thesis concerning the salience of the cultural apparatus and
the projected cultural revolution.”88 Moreover, Allen argued that Cruse
overemphasized the power of black intellectuals. Therefore Cruse, while
ostensibly calling for a dynamic and creative black intellectual elite, failed to
critique the elitism that was intrinsic to his thesis. Finally, Allen asserted that
Cruse’s solution of black control of America’s cultural apparatus as being
piecemeal, rather than radical.89
Writer Ernest Kaiser accused Cruse of purposely distorting African American
history to justify his own intellectual ambitions. Reviewing The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual in the journal Freedomways, Kaiser provided a detailed
refutation of Cruse’s assertion that the black Left had failed to construct a viable
infrastructure for the African American community.90 Kaiser was particularly
disturbed by the uncritical praise given to the book by white writers such as
Christopher Lasch, who, lacking extensive knowledge of African American
history, viewed Cruse as the authority on “Negroes.”91 Early critical reviews of
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, written in the immediate aftermath of the book’s
publication, attempted to interrogate the implications of Cruse’s critique. Cruse’s
work resonated during the era at least partially as a result of his claim that black
militants and radicals failed to provide a theory of history and philosophical
program for the black power movement. This assertion, fused with the author’s
brash polemical prose style, made the book an immediate classic.
In retrospect despite sharp political and intellectual insights, the book suffers
from historical errors, ideological inconsistency, and theoretical short-
sightedness. Ironically, Cruse, an exmember of the CP, dismisses the complex
relationship between black radicals and white Marxists. Although consistently
and forcefully condemning black reformist political paradigms, Cruse distorts
African American radicalism’s connection to Marxism. Describing the
disjuncture between grassroots politics and the black bourgeoisie, Cruse indicted
both reformist and radical vehicles for racial uplift, noting, “For ghetto Negroes,
the liberal panaceas never have had any meaning, and they have been powerless
and inarticulate just as long as the NAACP-integrationist type of leadership has
been viable and official. Even the radicalism of the Communist Party never
struck deeply sympathetic chords in the consciousness of these forgotten
people.”92 Cruse’s bitter personal encounters with the CP during the 1940s
undoubtedly shaped his portrait of the relationship between black
intellectuals and the party. Unfortunately this personal relationship led Cruse into
262 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

an ahistorical analysis of the relationship between blacks and the CP. No doubt
written as both an ideological manifesto and to settle old political debts, the book
suffers from a skewed interpretation of black involvement in the American
Communist Party.
Historically, to be red and black has constituted an alternative to both
conservative and liberal shibboleths of self-help and equal opportunity. In the
political and historical context of the Great Depression, black radicals from
Harlem to Birmingham utilized the party as a vehicle for racial uplift.93 Cruse’s
one-sided analysis of black participation in the Communist Party evades the
complexity of the black radical tradition by casting black nationalism and
Marxism as being ideological poles apart. As historian Robin D.G.Kelley has
illustrated, African Americans turned a red ideology into black through a creative
blending of multiple political traditions. Black radicalism merged elements of
Western and African American radical traditions to construct a diasporic
imaginary that redefined conceptions of race and class in American society.
Thus, African Americans who joined the CP in the 1920s and 1930s were as
much the creation of American Communism as of indigenous black radical
traditions. Many were products of Garveyism and the emerging postwar black
left that had been influenced by the Bolshevik Revolution and worker uprisings
in American cities after World War I. While these events did not propel large
numbers of African American radicals into the American Communist Party, it
did reinforce their belief that socialist revolution was possible within the context
of “race politics.”94 Far from being a cadre of revolutionary followers, black
Marxists utilized the CP as a vehicle for political and ideological transformation.
Turning much of party ideology on its head, black radicals circumvented the
CP’s disallowance of nationalism to fashion race and class-conscious critiques of
white supremacy.95 In contrast to Cruse’s construction of a sycophantic black
intelligentsia slavishly attached to Marxist theory, excommunists such as Richard
Wright attempted to fuse class struggle and black nationalism into an ideology
for black liberation.96 As the heirs to the tradition of mass mobilization embodied
by Garveyism, the black Left was forged within the crucible of twentieth-century
crises that included a Great Depression domestically and the rise of fascism on
the international front. Cruse’s one-dimensional portrayal of the black Left
erased this complex history of African American radicalism.

Conclusion
Despite falling victim to rhetorical flourishes and historical inaccuracies,
Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual stands out as a major
analysis of black political and intellectual traditions during the twentieth century.
Furthermore, Cruse paved the way for serious scholarly inquiry into black social
and political thought of the black power era. Contributing to the growth of a
black intelli gentsia, even as he despaired over its development Cruse’s work
was vital to debates over black liberation during the civil rights-black power era.
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 263

His essays written during the early 1960s represent key texts that informed and
inspired a new generation of black activists. Promoting the idea of “revolutionary
nationalism” as central to black liberation struggles, Cruse’s writings informed
the political development of black nationalism that was explicitly displayed
during the black power movement. Cruse’s personal political activities during
this era provide a prism to view the development of post-war black radicalism. In
the aftermath of his association with the CP Cruse joined a variety of
organizations that focused on the intersection of race, culture, self-determination,
and world affairs. Cruse’s tendentious criticism of black leadership was both
compelling and confounding. At the time, Cruse’s sharp insights were blunted by
the ad hominem nature of his polemics and one-sided political analysis. Despite
these shortcomings, Cruse’s political writing encouraged black political activists
to create institutions and an infrastructure that were worthy of the grandeur of
African American history. Indeed, to Cruse’s great consternation both black and
white leaders had found the African American community to be unworthy of
such an arduous undertaking. However, Cruse overstated the extent to which
black radicals had abdicated their role in building creative cultural and political
vehicles for black liberation. Indeed, organizations that Cruse participated in,
such as the Freedom Now Party, were examples of radical attempts to create
lasting political structures. Similarly, the radical journals that provided Cruse the
bulk of his exposure before the publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
were part of a radical black public sphere that contributed to the development of
the black power movement.
Perhaps Cruse’s most important contribution was in providing theoretical
momentum for the new wave of black nationalism. Historian Komozi Woodard
has highlighted black nationalism’s impact during this period, noting “The
impact of the New Nationalism on Baraka and the younger writers and artists
was quite dramatic. By building a bridge between the old nationalism and the
new, Malcolm X helped lay the basis in political culture for a black united front
of various classes and social groups that would bond together in the Modern
Black Convention Movement. And under his sway the black urban poor were not
isolated; instead of middle-class reformers on a mission in the ghetto, the poor
would have allies in their struggle for justice and dignity.”97
If Malcolm X served as the political catalyst that allowed diverse groups to
rally around black nationalist discourses, Harold Cruse provided black
nationalism with key concepts and ideas that would be utilized during the black
power era. In short, Cruse’s penetrating writings on the importance of black
nationalism influenced a broad array of activists and cultural workers who would
play significant roles during the era. Reexamining the political and philosophical
journey that culminated in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual sheds new light
on the development and contestation surrounding postwar black political,
intellectual, and cultural radicalism.
264 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

Notes

1. See Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle
in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 155–56;
and Penny M.Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and
Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 32–37.
2. See Lewis R.Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a
Neocolonial Age (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).
3. See Nikhil Pal Singh, “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,”
American Historical Review 50, no. 3 (1998): 2–10; and Bush, We Are Not What We
Seem, 155–92.
4. See, for example, Peniel E.Joseph, “Black Liberation without Apology:
Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement,” Black Scholar 31, no. 3 (2001),
3–19.
5. See Charles Jones, “Reconsidering Panther History: The Untold Story,” in The
Black Panther Party Reconsidered, Ed. Charles Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic
Press, 1998), 1–16.
6. Mohammad Ahmed (Maxwell C.Stanford), interview with the author, December
18,1999.
7. New York Times, November 21,1967.
8. According to Cruse’s political and historical analysis, African Americans have
alternated between adhering to Western (white) ideology or foreign (Carribean)
black ideology, rather than constructing a political practice based on the unique
experiences of black Americans. See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 115–46.
9. For recent critiques, see, Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and the Art
of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 1–7; for a
detailed criticism of Cruse’s depiction of West Indian radicals see Winston James,
Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-
Century America (London: Verso, 1998), 262–91. For earlier critiques see, for
example, Julian Mayfield, “Crisis or Crusade: A Challenge to A Bestseller,” 5–6,
Julian Mayfield Papers (hereafter JMP), Box 21, Folder 9, Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
10. See Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1983).
11. Correspondence, Harold Cruse to unknown person, October 11,1955, Harold Cruse
Papers (hereafter HCP), Box 7, Tamiment Institute, New York University.
12. In tone and anger, aspects of Cruse’s argument were echoed in the writings of
George Padmore. See Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? (London:
Dobson, 1956).
13. Correspondence, Harold Cruse to unknown person, October 11, 1955, HCP,
Box 7.
14. Correspondence, Harold Cruse to unknown person, May 18, 1958, HCP, Box 7.
15. Cruse, Crisis, 228.
16. Watts, Amiri Baraka, 8–10.
17. Ibid., 225–32.
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 265

18. Cruse had difficulty publishing his polemical essays in leftist publications such as
American Socialist. Correspondence from Harry Braverman to Harold Cruse,
December 3,1956. HCP, Box 7.
19. Harold Cruse, “Bohemia Revisited,” unpublished manuscript, HCP, Box 7.
20. Ibid., 1–20.
21. Cruse, Crisis, 267.
22. Correspondence, Harold Cruse to the Amsterdam News, April 19, 1956, HCP,
Box 7.
23. Ben Keppel, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clarke, Lorraine
Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 188–90.
24. Correspondence, Harold Cruse to the New York Post, September 24, 1956, HCP,
Box 7.
25. Correspondence, Harold Cruse to the New York Post, November 11, 1956, HCP,
Box 7.
26. In his autobiography, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) recalls having first met Cruse in
the late 1950s. Baraka notes that Cruse “was always complaining about how
Broadway producers were turning down musicals he was writing.” See Amiri
Baraka, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1997), 243.
27. In the aftermath of the demise of the Harlem Writers Club in the early 1950s, Cruse
formed a series of short-lived cultural organizations such as the American Negro
Cultural Society. Correspondence, Harold Cruse to Mr. Forde, mid-1950s, HCP,
Box 7. Between 1951 and 1958 Cruse wrote four plays, one musical, an eight-
hundred-page novel, and various articles that remained unpublished. See Harold
Cruse papers May 18, 1958, HCP, Box 7.
28. New York Times, June 28, 1959.
29. Correspondence, Audrey Lyle to Harold Cruse, March 25, 1957, HCP, Box 7.
30. See Timothy B.Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F.Williams and The Roots of
Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 226–27.
31. See Watts, Amiri Baraka, 51–54.
32. For an analysis of the impact of this trip see Cynthia Young, “Havana up in Harlem:
LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse and the Making of a Cultural Revolution,” Science &
Society 65, no. 1 (2001): 12–38.
33. Baraka would later assert that during the trip “The dynamic of revolution had
touched me.” See Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 246.
34. Harold Cruse, “A Negro Looks at Cuba,” 2, HCP, Box 7.
35. Ibid., 7.
36. Cruse, Crisis, 356.
37. Ibid.
38. Cruse, “A Negro Looks at Cuba,” 15–16, HCP, Box 7.
39. Correspondence, Harry Braverman to Harold Cruse, December 3, 1956, HCP,
Box 7.
40. See Margaret Walker, Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (New York: Warner
Books, 1988), 274–85.
41. See Presence Africaine 8–10 (1956).
42. Ahmed interview.
43. Cruse, Crisis, 189.
266 • PENIEL E.JOSEPH

44. Winston James goes so far as to describe the book as fitting into the black
nationalist, rather than Marxist, tradition; see James, Holding Aloft the Banner of
Ethiopia, 263.
45. Cruse, “A Negro Looks at Cuba,” 18, HCP, Box 7.
46. See Eugene Genovese, “Black Nationalism and American Socialism: A Comment
on Harold W.Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” 10–11, unpublished paper
presented at the Socialist Scholars Conference, Rutgers University, September,
1968, HCP, Box 3.
47. Cruse, Crisis, 226–27.
48. Ibid., 356.
49. Ahmed interview; See also Robin D.G.Kelley and Betsey Esch, “Black like Mao:
Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1, no. 4 (1999): 12.
50. See Kelley and Esch, “Black like Mo,” 14–15.
51. See Bobby Seale, A Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale (New York:
Times Books, 1978), 128–30; Ernie Allen, interview, with the author, 4, Spingarn
Center, Howard University.
52. Harold Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” Studies On the
Left 2, no. 3 (1962): 12–13.
53. See Maxwell C.Stanford, “Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM): A Case Study
of an Urban Revolutionary Movement in Western Capitalist Society,” M.A. thesis,
Atlanta University, May 1986, 76.
54. Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 73.
55. Ahmed interview; see also Don Freeman, “Nationalist Student Conference,”
Liberator, July 1964, 18. Cruse’s essays from the Liberator, along with a reply
from Clifton DeBerry, were published as a pamphlet, Marxism and the Negro
Struggle, in 1964.
56. Freeman, “Conference,” 18.
57. Harold Cruse, “Marxism and the Negro,” Liberator, May 1964, 10.
58. Correspondence, Clifton DeBerry to Harold Cruse, May 1, 1964, HCP, Box 7.
59. Correspondence, Harold Cruse to the International Socialist Review, October 23,
1963. Breitman Paper Writing Series (hereafter BPWS), Box 6, Folder 7, Tamiment
Library, New York University.
60. Breitman’s political alliance with Malcolm X during the last year of his life was a
political feather in the party’s cap. The SWP’s organ the Militant reprinted many of
the nationalist leader’s speeches in the aftermath of his break from the Nation of
Islam. See George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Pathfinder,
1989), v–vi.
61. See “Freedom Now: The New Stage in the Struggle for Negro Emancipation and
the Tasks of the SWP,” Socialist Worker Party Papers (hereafter SWPP), Box 9,
Tamiment Library, New York University.
62. Ibid., 31.
63. See Cruse, Crisis, 416–19.
64. Paul Boutelle interview with the author, Spingarn Center, Howard University.
65. Cruse, Crisis, 404.
66. Max Stanford, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American Student,”
Liberator, January 1965, 15.
67. See Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?
68. New York Times, December 29, 1968.
 RETHINKING THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL • 267

69. See Cruse, Crisis, 137.

70. Ibid. 203.
71. Ibid. 200.
72. Ibid. 202.
73. Lumpen proletariat was a term adopted by the Black Panthers during the 1960s.
The Panthers, in contrast to conventional Marxism, equated the “lumpen” with the
black urban poor and argued that they could be transformed and organized. See
Chris Booker, “Lumpenization: A Critical Error in The Black Panther Party,” in
Jones, Ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, 337–62.
74. See Cruse, Crisis, 378–79.
75. Ibid., 474.
76. See E.Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Collier, 1962).
77. See Cruse, Crisis, 354.
78. Ibid., 367.
79. Ibid., 564.
80. Radical Tony Thomas argued that Cruse conflated Marxism with Stalinism,
overemphasized the importance of the black middle-class, and outlined social and
political alternatives that were both reformist and pro-capitalist. See Thomas, Ed.,
Black Liberation and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 157–76.
81. Robert Chrisman, “The Crisis of Harold Cruse,” Black Scholar 1, no. 1 (1969):
77–84.
82. Ibid., 81.
83. Mayfield, “Crisis or Crusade?” 5–6.
84. Ibid., 6.
85. Ibid., 22.
86. Ibid., 2.
87. Ibid., 9.
88. Robert L.Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (1969; reprint
Lawrenceville, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 177.
89. Ibid., 182.
90. Ernest Kaiser, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” Freedomways (1969): 24–41.
91. Ibid., 25. Kaiser was specifically referring to Lasch’s essay “The Trouble With
Black Power,” New York Review of Books, February 29,1968.
92. Cruse, Crisis, 202.
93. See Robin D.G.Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great
Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 92–116.
94. See Robin D.G.Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working
Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 105; and Naison, Communists in Harlem,
31–35.
95. See Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 112; and Race Rebels, 105.
96. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition (1983;
reprint Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 430–35.
97. Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and
Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 61.
268
 Part 7

Cruse as Political Thinker

270
 15
Home to Harlem
Black American Identity and Cruse’s Quest
for Community

FRED MONTAS

As a form of government, democracy exists only in imaginations and wishes for

a society that is no place. Democracy holds the promise of free and equal
citizenship with the opportunity for participating in the just distribution of
power. As a political orientation, however, democracy resists power and, unlike
democratic governance, power is everywhere. Indeed, power’s ruthless ubiquity
has banished democracy to utopia, only to appear in moments of resistance to it.
Still, over the last fifteen years, as more nations held open elections for the first
time, democracy was labeled the “unfinished project.” With its suggestion of a
completion date, this claim is wrong. Democracy, at most, inhabits our praxis as
an open-ended, “unfinishable” process of experience without resolution or stasis;
when it occurs, democracy is a momentary, incomplete realization of an ideal. A
fleeting experience and profound longing, democracy is a working toward, never
a destination. We may wish for a home in democracy, but we live with
democracy as with a dream.1
With power omnipresent, democracy is everywhere denied. This universal
refusal is especially evident in the United States, the worldwide arbiter of a new
world order whose claims to democracy, rooted in a popular myth of origin, have
transformed the ideal into a perverse ideology. Nevertheless, the experiences of
many social groups in America reveal the fallacy of any claim to democratic
nationhood for the United States. Revelations of truth behind this lie abound in
the historical and current situation of African Americans, for example. Enslaved,
disenfranchised, segregated, impoverished, and invalidated, the presence of
African Americans has helped, ironically and tragically, to mount and to polish
the veneer of a shimmering democratic culture. In the twentieth century, the
African American pursuit of democracy has taken many forms, some of which
were themselves anti- or ademocratic. Harold Cruse wrestles with many of these
efforts in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, which offers what Cruse believes
to be a program for black revolution based on principles of cultural democracy.
Cruse’s revolution would establish black control of black communities in a
United States where blacks direct their affairs in the way Cruse sees other—white
—ethnic groups do theirs. This kind of community control would resolve the
crisis of black intellectuals, their distance from the most urgent concerns of the
272 • FRED MONTAS

African American masses. While the term cultural democracy appears only
momentarily, it defines Cruse’s political agenda for reshaping black
communities.2 Cruse suggests a definition of cultural democracy when he writes,
“In such a [revolutionary] movement in America, whatever the organizational
formula, the basic ingredients must be a synthesis of politics, economics, and
culture, and from the Negro point of view it is the cultural side of the problem
that puts politics and economics into their proper focus within a movement”
(71). By democracy Cruse most likely means black people in a black community
must control their cultural, political, and economic resources. Cruse is much
more concerned with culture than democracy. As a result, his vision of cultural
democracy depends on two factors that undermine its democratic claims: a
nationalist conception of African American identity and a static idealization of
Harlem as the national locus of black American cultural democracy.3

Black Nationalism and African American Identity

We know our world through ourselves; our identities prepare us to meet the
world, both familiar and foreign, beyond our personal boundaries. With
nationalism, identities are frozen, ready-made, and immalleable. Refuge is sought
in the familiar in order to avoid the foreign, which is threatening. One need not
be nationalistic to have an identity that provides stability and helps one get
through the routines of daily life, with various aspects flaring up to defend one’s
sense of self or to pursue experiences that could gratify or validate it. But the self
cannot have an identity without an account of those around it, without a notion
of who might share its way of living and who might see the world in different
terms. Identity gives a person the ability to respond to the questions Who am I?
and Where do I belong? These are questions whose answers are easily taken for
granted.
Since the fifth century B.C.E., Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos has revealed the
“absolutely tragic” consequences of believing one could answer such open-ended
yet targeted questions with any certainty.4 Oedipus, his family, and Thebes suffer
terribly for not knowing who he is, for not knowing his position in the order of
their world. It is important to keep in mind that Oedipus’ family and the Thebans
believe they know him; Oedipus believes he took enough precautions to avoid
his fate, without realizing, to paraphrase the savvy words of Richmond
Lattimore, that he should have never killed anyone old enough to be his father or
married anyone old enough to be his mother.5 Sophocles reveals to us that a
person can hold neither his identity nor his membership in a community as a
fixed entity, beyond questioning, without changing his relationship to his world.
In questioning who we are, we engage the world and open ourselves to it. At the
point where we stop asking questions about ourselves, or believe we know the
answers to the questions we ask, we retreat from that which we do not know and,
in failing to question, we withdraw from the world. This is especially true in
diverse, fluid societies, where strangers encounter one another and questions
 HOME TO HARLEM • 273

such as Who am I? and Where do I belong? might be answered with certainty

only temporarily and in limited respects in order to place parameters on everyday
life. Whatever our answers, they do not provide permanent meaning to our lives
though we often use them in hopes of doing. As we ask questions that lead to more
questions we engage the world; if we hope to engage the world, we must
continually question ourselves in relation to it.
Oedipus raises questions only to seek definitive answers to them. Each
question he asks, in pursuit of discovering his origins or finding the source of the
plague, is a new riddle to display his problem-solving prowess. Such talent for
explication has limits; the knowledge gained from such ability secures neither a
place in nor an understanding of the world for each question is asked in
blindness. Although Oedipus cannot “see” the answers he needs, the answers are
found in one who cannot see, whom he refuses to acknowledge. With the
presence of the blind interpreter of oracles, Teiresias, Sophocles unsettles our
usual mechanisms for assessing ourselves. In thinking through perplexing yet
different questions such as “Who is the murderer of Laius?” and “Who is
Oedipus?” Sophocles informs us we must go beyond the visible, accessible
world to gain insight to these matters. Both of these questions are asked in
pursuit of a kind of identity. Even so, Sophocles does not provide a way to
address these questions so much as he exposes the distance between them. This
gap becomes the interrogative space available for negotiating these questions, a
space where identity becomes more than a question of biographical circumstance,
where identity’s place in the cosmos is revealed through the tragic fate of
Oedipus’s “crime of being.”6 When questions of identity are linked to historical
and existential interrogations, identity as biography loses its private groundings
and is placed in a context where the forces shaping it are beyond individual
mastery and social ordering. Thus identity acquires public dimensions and
consequences. In this light, Oedipus is not undone by his incestuous relationship
with his mother but by his sense of certainty about the world and his place in it
as a self-contained matter.
Black nationalism, then, has an oedipal complex. Cruse recognizes that
African Americans suffer for nothing more than their existence, for their
“thereness.” The cultural, economic, and political inadequacy of
black communities follows from the African American crime of being and, with
cultural democracy, Cruse aims to rehabilitate black communities from their
punishment for this crime. The key to this rehabilitation is protecting black
communities from the influence of white Americans, particularly through
measures that promote integration. Cultural democracy would allow black
communities to thrive by excluding non-black elected officials, bureaucrats, and
absentee property owners from leading roles in the community. Recognizing that
not all blacks are inclined toward such arrangements, Cruse writes,

Throughout my adult life, I have observed that the ideas of one particular
stratum of Negroes on such question as race, color, politics, economics,
274 • FRED MONTAS

art, Africa, minorities or interracial relations are pretty uniform. These

ideas are expressed in many different ways but, because, of the fact that the
American Negro exists under the dominating persuasion of the Great
American Ideal, the philosophy of these Negroes has not been allowed the
dignity of acceptance as an ethnic conception of reality. Nonetheless, this
stratum persists in its own inarticulate way as the residuum of what might
be called the Afro-American group consciousness in a society whose legal
Constitution recognizes the privileges and aspirations of the individual, but
whose political institutions recognize the reality of ethnic groups only
during election contests. (6)

This ethnic conception of reality and group consciousness provides the psychic
and social roots for cultural democracy. African Americans need a particular
orientation toward each other in order to work toward arranging institutions that
will benefit their communities. Despite Cruse’s qualification that these “ideas are
expressed in many different ways,” it is imperative for blacks to maintain a
“group consciousness.” A few pages later, Cruse continues, “As long as the
Negro’s cultural identity is in question, or open to self-doubts, then there can be
no positive identification with the real demands of his political and economic
existence” (12–13). With this claim, Cruse makes plain his coupling of black
self-recognition and the potential for successful change in the politics and
economics of black communities. “Positive identification” suggests that there is
a realm of experience, behavior, and outlook that define blackness and that triad
emboldens the identity to confront its material circumstances with a nationalist
praxis. In other words, for Cruse, “positive identification” is specific vis à vis
class and culture—it is not enough to be a black leading figure of an African
American community; hence Cruse’s disdain throughout Crisis for the black
middle class and others who he suspects could betray black interests to
encroaching whites.7 These ideas of an ethnic conception of reality, group
consciousness, and positive identification define Cruse’s nationalism and make it
incompatible with a democratic sensibility.
In its pursuit of certainty, nationalism seeks to obscure the limits of one’s
ability to know the world. It does so by requiring its supporters to
question everything but nationalism itself and providing answers for everything
else. With nationalism, the process of self-discovery and its complicated
negotiations with the world are negated by an ideology that would supply each
black person with a prefabricated self-definition. Thus, as nationalism aims to
stabilize and anchor self-understanding, it razes the interrogative terrain between
identity and existence, biography and possibility, facts and questions, that is
Sophocles’ legacy to us. From the nationalist’s perspective, black people need
not ask questions which lead to more questions about ourselves. Instead, we
must ask questions to build permanent boundaries around our sense of who we
are and where we belong.
 HOME TO HARLEM • 275

Cruse’s nationalism provides a ready-made identity that African Americans

can rely on. Everything black is laid out, waiting to be experienced in the
particular manner that will affirm one’s blackness. That is, a person believes he
is black in a particular way and nationalism provides the cultural materials and
institutional arrangements to affirm that sensibility and realize its vision. Cruse
implicitly offers a model of the black self; he is sensitive to the lack of a sense of
belonging among African Americans and seeks to provide a home for them in
communities directed by cultural democracy, where the nationalist—or truly
black—identity can flourish. Nationalism assumes that African Americans have
qualities that are inherently black and, consequently, it is very sensitive to ethnic
or racial betrayals when those qualities are not on display or readily apparent.
While it believes in a kind of inherent blackness, it does not strictly refuse the
idea, to borrow the words of Simone de Beauvoir, that “one is not born but rather
becomes” black. Those black Americans who are not yet nationalists must
rediscover their true selves and be reborn.
Becoming truly black is a process that regrounds individuals in originary
commitments. Along these lines, Cruse asserts that black intellectuals “should
tell black America how and why Negroes are trapped in this cultural degeneracy,
and how it has dehumanized their essential identity, squeezed the lifeblood of
their inherited cultural ingredients out of them, and relegated them to cultural
slums” (455). Moreover, intellectuals should not disagree with one another; their
main role appears to be one of reinforcing propaganda for one of the major
weaknesses of the intellectual cohort that included James Baldwin, Lorraine
Hansberry, Paule Marshall, and Le Roi Jones was that they were “not at all in
agreement on what general course the Negro should follow toward racial
equality” (10). In other words, the wrong sort of culture is harmful to the
individual and group identity of African Americans and the black intellectual can
and must provide the right identity. Defining that identity is crucial because
“without a cultural identity that adequately defines himself, the Negro cannot
even identify with the American nation as a whole. He is left in the limbo of
social marginality, alienated and directionless on the landscape of America, in a
variegated nation of whites who have not yet decided on their own identity. The
fact of the matter is that American whites, as a whole, are just as much in doubt
about their nationality, their cultural identity, as are Negroes. Thus the problem of
Negro cultural identity is an unsolved problem within the context of an American
nation that is still in process of formation” (13; Cruse’s emphasis).
This idea of a definable identity is essential for any effort to establish both
ethnic validation and solidarity. But the basis for solidarity (or “positive
identification”) among African Americans sought by nationalists only resides in
the bind that joins them in their potential for being treated poorly socially or
politically. Nationalism legitimates its claims for group mobility, consciousness,
and action on the everyday indignities and systemic racism suffered by individual
blacks but then requires them to adopt a belief in a primordial ethnic
276 • FRED MONTAS

cohesiveness to develop the “positive identification” necessary to redress their

oppression.
Cruse, then, values an identity that is attached to a place and provides a sense
of belonging, resources for action, and a bond with like-minded others.
Moreover, he is aware of the divergent, contradictory aspects of black identity.
Among African Americans, the cycle of conflict involving class, race, gender,
and sexual orientation is all too familiar and pernicious. Typically race wins, but
this competition sabotages the positive identification sought by Cruse and makes
black communities themselves alienating to many African Americans, despite
their ethnic group consciousness. Cruse’s nationalism seeks to resolve the
tensions between class and race while ignoring gender and sexuality For a people
under siege, nationalism gives them the materials to erect boundaries to protect or
to fortify their sense of self if they redefine themselves in nationalist terms. With
this new sense of self, they can validate and defend their very being without
having to question any aspect of it. Thus Cruse defeats the competition of
interests.
A sense of self-worth, and the self-definition that undergirds it, is, of course,
psychologically necessary for any social group that hopes to effect political
change. But Cruse’s nationalism treats that self-worth and self-definition as
incidental to the very purpose of seeking political and economic change, the
formation of a black cultural identity. It’s not just that economics, politics, and
culture go hand in hand. All political and economic development must reinforce
the nationalist cultural identity defined by black intellectuals. A community may
perceive its survival as imperiled when it is threatened and individuals may
retreat from public life altogether, viewing their own community with disdain
and the outside community as hostile. Black nationalism, however, has no room
for shame or the ambivalence that may follow from it. This rejection of shame
may be nationalism’s strongest attribute but cultural identity’s denial of
ambivalence is more problematic. Cultural identity casts the condition of African
Americans in stark, contrasting terms that assign them a definite place of their
choosing in the American social order.
Cruse believes that blacks have paid a high price for failing to develop their
cultural identity when they had a perfect opportunity to do so during the Harlem
Renaissance. As a result, an “identity vacuum” arose in the 1960s from the
efforts to integrate America (63). Integration, in Cruse’s view, is inimical to
black autonomy. Achieving integration would mean that blacks would
perpetually experience the types of practices that defined their second-class
citizenship in individual rather than group settings, thus undermining the
possibility for realizing their cultural group identity. Cruse fears that black
culture and institutions would wither since black communities would no longer
exist in an integrated United States.8 Many blacks, however, believed integration
would eradicate their second-class citizenship since they would have access to
the same public and private resources as whites. For Cruse, integration spells the
end of blackness; African Americans would assimilate white cultural mores
 HOME TO HARLEM • 277

while being denied acceptance as equal members of their new, integrated

neighborhoods. Cruse posits that integration forces one to “accept all the values
(positive or negative) of the dominant society into which one struggles to
integrate” (100). Cultural democracy could not be achieved with integration
because the latter requires blacks to “subordinate themselves to the very cultural
values of the white world that are used to negate, or deny, the Negro cultural
equality and to exploit his cultural ingredients and use them against him” (100).
Despite his aversion to integration, Cruse does not advocate separatism.
Instead, he criticizes separatism for being escapist and otherworldly, for
preventing blacks from carrying out their revolutionary potential (344, 452).
Especially noteworthy are his comments that “[t]he fallacies and weaknesses of
the integrationist programs can be exposed only to the degree that nationalists
initiate counter programs along political, economic, and cultural lines. But, at the
same time, this does not mean that separatism is the perfect antidote for
integrationism. An Afro-American Nationalist program that is politically,
economically, and culturally effective must be a dynamic program. It cannot be a
program that retreats from social realities of the white power structure under the
guise of separatist nationalistic moods” (439).9
Since Cruse does advocate autonomy for black communities, we must ask,
How can a community sustain its autonomy without being separatist? How is
autonomy different from separatism? Although Cruse does not clarify what he
means by separatism, he uses the term to describe the wish, among blacks, to
sever relations with whites, to live in the United States without having to
interact, on any level, with white people. Autonomy, on the other hand, accepts
that interaction among communities is not merely possible but politically
necessary so that blacks can become equal members of this nation’s polity.
“American group reality demands a struggle for democracy among ethnic groups,
rather than between races,” he writes Cruse (458). Nevertheless, the interaction
among these groups would be directed toward achieving and then preserving
their autonomous communities, so that once cultural democracy is realized, the
minimal exchanges that would occur would involve the representatives of these
communities. So, despite the distinction between separatism and nationalist
autonomy, the latter also encourages a withdrawal and retreat from American
public life.
Cruse’s “struggle for democracy” is merely the context for African-American
retreat because in such a struggle members of ethnic groups must define their
interests in a heterogeneous society via their cultural identity as members of
particular ethnic groups. Cultural identity, Cruse argues, is important both for
blacks among themselves and for their more effective political participation in a
United States whose political and social life is driven by ethnic group relations.
Even if this were an accurate depiction of American politics and society, Cruse’s
nationalist conception of identity makes it impossible to establish or participate
in democratic conditions because it presumes a kind of hermetic certainty about
the world. This identity narrows contributions to the (not too) democratic process
278 • FRED MONTAS

by making participation in it dependent on an identity that is not up for

questioning. Also, nationalist identity requires one to imagine a future that has
already been seen as a trompe l’oeil rather than pursue one with free and equal
partners. A democrat’s identity, on the other hand, is attached to an open future
that will be imagined, revised, and pursued, with other democrats. So, while
Cruse calls for democracy, his elitism and nationalism prevent him from
conceptualizing democracy in a way that takes seriously its most basic features—
popular participation and the tolerance of difference—as a permanent feature of,
rather than a prelude to withdrawal from, public life. In this way, Cruse’s
conception of nationalist identity is a logical descendant of Oedipus’s fixed idea
of the world.
Without a commitment to public life, Cruse’s notion of cultural democracy
appears bankrupt. It reveals how nationalism is antithetical to democracy both as
a type of political arrangement and a political orientation that constantly engages
the dilemma of being at home in the world.

Harlem as Ideal Community

To feel at home somewhere is to be at ease there, to have a sense of inclusion
and the opportunity to contribute to the affairs of that place. Lacking this sense
of belonging, a palpable uneasiness surrounds us as we struggle to make sense of
ourselves and those who share our communities. Indeed, in black communities
across the nation many African Americans are in a constant state of discontent,
which may manifest itself in moods ranging from docile anxiety to aggressive
restlessness. With this domestic unease, many hold an unarticulated yearning for
a home, either as a domicile which comforts, or a land that protects, the soul.
Even for those who do not have this yearning, Cruse’s cultural democracy strives
to give all black Americans a home in the United States, communities where they
know they belong, where they are understood, where their consciousness is one
with the world around them, and they are comfortable. According to Cruse, the
site with the greatest potential to satisfy this yearning, and the most important
site for cultural democracy’s realization, is Harlem. “Harlem, in this century,”
writes Cruse, “became the most strategically important community for black
Americans. Harlem is still the pivot of the black world’s quest for identity and
salvation. The way Harlem goes (or does not go) so goes all black
America” (12).
Almost twenty years earlier, Ralph Ellison offered a similar idea concerning
Harlem’s national significance: “Overcrowded and exploited politically and
economically, Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual
alienation in the land of his birth.”10 Ellison observed that this national alienation
imbued black Americans with a sense of dislocation that was particularly acute
in Harlem. He writes that this is a world in which “the major energy of the
imagination goes not into creating works of art, but to overcome the frustration
of social discrimination. Not quite citizens and yet Americans, full of the
 HOME TO HARLEM • 279

tensions of modern man but regarded as primitives, Negro Americans are in a

desperate search for an identity. Rejecting the second-class status assigned them,
they feel alienated and their whole lives become a search for the answers to the
questions: Who am I, What am I, Why am I, and Where? Significantly, in
Harlem, the reply to the greeting ‘How are you?’ is very often, ‘Oh, man, I’m
nowhere.’”11 Later in the essay, Ellison continues this line of thinking, writing,
“The phrase ‘I’m nowhere’ expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes
that they have no stable, recognized place in society. One’s identity drifts in a
capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are
questionable. One ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a
ghetto maze, a ‘displaced person’ of American democracy.”12
The idea of Harlem as nowhere reveals Harlemites’ inability to see Harlem as
it is; a visceral, vibrant urban culture full of possibilities becomes a vast, blank
expanse that offers nothing. Ellison senses the significance of the statement
“Man, I’m nowhere” but he does not draw out the questions masked by that
emphatic revelation of despair.13 Given this statement’s context (Harlem) and its
parameter (location), we must unpack the questions inspired by this
placelessness: What is this place where I am? Why is this place the way it is?
Did I have anything to do with it? What am I doing here? What are we doing
here? As banal as they appear, these questions are important because they precede
the political; without the contexts imposed by their responses, political
subjectivity, that is a subjectivity that exceeds the private dimensions of identity,
is not possible. In the struggle to make sense of these questions, those who can
articulate a response often receive no relief from their reflections. The answers
point in the direction of identifying a home but certainly no satisfactory home
has been constructed in response to the universal problem of homelessness in
modernity.
Yet, homelessness and placelessness do not describe the same set of
experiences. In some respects, the terms are synonymous: both signify the
absence of any particular resting point for an individual or a social group; both
suggest the lack of a point of origin or a location of return. But, homelessness is
more specific to a particular lack—that is, the absence of a site of recognition that
could be the basis of identity; it suggests that one could eventually find a home
somewhere; it speaks to a (hopefully) temporary condition, one that can be
resolved. Even in Friedrich Nietzsche’s remark that all philosophy is a wish to be
at home we see that the preoccupation of the homeless individual, group, or state
of mind is to find a place to stop, rest, gather, and claim as one’s own.
Homelessness is also gendered in its suggestion of ruptured domesticity. It
implies a breakdown in the split between the public and the private in which a
person is denied access to each as a haven from the other, but at the same time in
which the individual hopes to reestablish the attendant “graces” of domestic life.
Aristotle’s division of the public and private realms, the polis and the oikos,
respectively, has met some challenges in the last two hundred odd years but
largely remains with us through public policies and sociocultural practices which
280 • FRED MONTAS

hold that the separate existence of each realm reinforces their virtues. In the
homeless condition, one is consigned to being a wanderer who hopes to cease
wandering in order to lay a stake to something of one’s own and enjoy some sort
of existential certainty. If the homeless attempt to define themselves, it is in
terms of the home they seek.
The plight of the placeless is more severe. Not only is the placeless person
without a home, he also has no hope for one. It is a state of being entirely
unsettled, of being a purposeless wanderer. If we accept the idea that philosophy
negotiates the condition of homelessness, placelessness has no such existential
(or instrumental) guide marks. Whereas homelessness suggests the absence of
connections to other people through the domicile and, by extension, through
property and gendered connotations of “home,” placelessness does not recognize
such social ties or implications. The placeless may be understood as a group—
for example, African Americans, but as a placeless people, they do not approach
their condition as involving any kind of mutual recognition that could undo the
fact of their placelessness. The placeless person is radically isolated. The
philosopher’s ideas are of no use to him.
As it eludes comprehension, this boundless condition of displacement infuses
a deathly quality to the daily lives of many Harlemites. Without understanding
where they are, they exist in a state as enigmatic and unanswerable as death
itself. George Steiner helps us understand the inconclusive nature of interpreting
both phenomena, writing, “Only death is beyond discourse, and that, “strictly
non-speaking,” is its meaning so far as its meaning is accessible to us. It is only
in reference to death that the great ante-chamber of liturgical, theological,
metaphysical and poetic simile or metaphor—that of “return,” “resurrection,”
“salvation,” “last sleep”—leads nowhere (which does not signify that the journey
is vain).”14 Following Steiner’s lead, the metaphor provided by Ellison’s
Harlemites implies that when you are nowhere, you are dead. For our purposes,
Steiner’s argument suggests that the problem of placelessness and the politics of
African American displacement are beyond definition. That is, we may recognize
that we are nowhere, but the only thing comparable to it, in being similarly
nameless, is death. Placelessness is but one manifestation of the living state of
the African American proximity to death, a condition that emerged from their
fundamental exclusion, like no other social group, from the first guarantee of the
United States to its citizens, the right to life.15 Ellison’s Harlemites who said
“Man, I’m nowhere” might as well have uttered “Man, I’m dead.”
Cruse sought to overcome this African American sense of isolation and
death.16 But in The Crisis, as in most nationalist works, the condition of Harlem
as nowhere inspires a search for a home that is no place. That is, the instability
that accompanies dislocation leads to a desire for stability that, as a fixed utopian
idea, provides security and comfort but remains largely unavailable. There are
many varieties of utopian aspirations, some of which can provide wonderful
visions of openness and possibility, and others that function as lottery jackpot
fantasies, panacean reveries of fixed and happy outcomes that work against the
 HOME TO HARLEM • 281

realization of open-ended aspirations and instead close them off, in keeping with
the hermetic visions that inspired them. Cruse’s utopian vision belongs to the
latter category. It is one-dimensional and monochrome. Through his
hypostatization of community life, Cruse offers a Harlem that is true to the
etymological roots of utopia from the Greek combining forms eu-, u-, and
-topos, the good place that is no place.
Cruse describes Harlem in 1967 as “a social disaster area, a dehumanized desert
of mass society in black” (443). Nevertheless, Harlem is important to Cruse
because it is “the Negro’s strongest bastion in America from which to launch
whatever group effort he is able to mobilize for political power, economic
rehabilitation, and cultural reidentification” (12). Harlem is central to the
nationwide development of black communities because of the cultural issues that
arise there.17 According to Cruse, only in Harlem are these three factors so
readily available for their necessary confluence toward black community
development. Without a cultural perspective, black communities have endured
“disintegration” and “backwardness.” With white owners of theaters and clubs
dictating the availability and distribution of black culture in Harlem, that
community suffered a “cultural decline” following the Renaissance which was
“but a prolonged prelude to its ultimate degradation” (88).
So, how does Cruse propose to elevate Harlem? All of his recommendations
depend on the redistribution of its private property.” [The dominant Harlem
classes] wanted…to assume absolute control of Harlem affairs in economics,
politics, and culture, but they could not. The underlying reason was the very
question they dared not, and did not, openly debate—property relations in
Harlem between black and white,” he notes. More important, he adds, “was the
cultural alienation of [the Harlem bourgeoisie] from their Negro mass ideology.
It was this flaw that specifically weakened their struggle against white property
owners” (80). Property relations must be changed in accordance with a
particularly black, ethnic perspective in order for black communities to be
rehabilitated: “[Private property] must be challenged wherever it is found to be in
conflict with the democratic groups needs and aspirations of Negroes inside the
ghettoes. It comes down to the basic question of who owns the ghetto and profits
from it” (316). Toward this end, “A social movement of combined forces in
Harlem must press relentlessly for Harlem autonomy in politics, economics,
and culture. The first step towards economic autonomy must be in the nature of a
Harlem-wide boycott that will wrest ownership of all cultural institutions
(theaters, halls, club sites, and movie houses) out of the hands of private, outside
concerns, for the key idea is cultural institutions (theaters, halls, club sites, and
movie houses) owned and administered by the people of Harlem; they must
become nationalized, operated, and administered for the educational and cultural
benefit of the Harlem community, under the control of Harlem community-wide
citizens’ planning commissions” (86–87; Cruse’s emphasis).
Harlemites must control their neighborhood so that the resources that would
improve the daily lives of its residents would stay within it. Resting on a
282 • FRED MONTAS

foundation of ethnic group autonomy and consciousness, Harlemites would share

a belief system and work toward common goals. Keeping the community free of
outsiders would allow it to maintain its stability because community members
would not have to negotiate with diverse perspectives and conflicting agendas.
Redistributing private property, then, means shifting it from white hands to black
hands, which would only sharpen the class divisions in Harlem. In other words,
Cruse offers a crass ethnocentrism as Harlem’s saving idea.
As it was, Cruse does not find it problematic that most Harlemites had lived in
a world that housed antagonistic social groups that lacked a healthy respect for
each other. He writes,

A political or cultural line of approach that refused to recognize the

principles of ethnic group autonomy could never be expected to grasp
intellectually the essential nature, motivations, aspirations and necessities
of a community like Harlem. It could never bring itself to an open frontal
assault upon the economic entrenchments of the whites inside the ghettoes
who, by their privileged arrangements, were able to suck the community
dry of its hard-won income. Liberation for the people was always
someplace else far off—outside the community, in the class-
collaborationist dealings of the trade unions, in the mythical social region
of Jackie Robinson’s dreams where black and white, native and foreign-
born, Gentile and Jew all joined together in heavenly discourse without
ethnic frictions—a world the average Harlemite never heard of and
certainly never experienced” (299; emphasis added).

And the “average Harlemite” shouldn’t even think about it. Liberation inside the
community, through cultural democracy, would occur in a ready-made place but
it was just as far off. Harlem, pure and black, would provide the limits of its
members’ knowledge of the world and make that knowledge seem boundless.
Cruse’s nationalist project localizes and domesticates African Americans in
order to simultaneously limit the range of their experiences and offer them
unlimited knowledge of the world: Live this way and I will tell you everything
you need to know to get along in the world, he seems to say. This is
nationalism’s oedipal complex, the delusion of African American omniscience
that fashions blacks after both God and our oppressors in their certainty of the
world. This omniscience would be a great wall of knowledge protecting Harlem
from the world beyond and calling the American black nation home to find
freedom there.
The idea of a home is an inadequate response to the problem of placelessness.
Cruse’s ten-point program to liberate the average Harlemite where she is
understands freedom as living without suffering for being black, which can only
occur in an all-black context (88–89). Every wish for a home seeks this quality
of acceptance, to live without being hurt for who we are. At home, ideally, we
can be authentically who we are without being punished for it. In advocating
 HOME TO HARLEM • 283

these proposals, Cruse aspires to have blacks build a home in Harlem, to have a
stake in where they live, and establish that measure of stability and security
people feel in the place they call home. These goals aspire to shape Harlem as
the site for blackness to flourish, where African Americans will thrive through the
proper (i.e., black) management and direction of institutions.18 Nationalism’s
major shortcoming is not that such goals have persistently failed both before and
since 1967. It is that such a worldview depends on living with complete failure
and denies the possibility of negotiating defeat democratically.
The idea of a home is an inadequate response to the problem of placelessness.
The physical home Cruse has envisioned is a static utopia arising from the
secluded no places of our collective imaginations, where African Americans feel
safe and prosper. This psychic home, in turn, inspires a retreat from public
engagement by closing off the capacity to imagine, debate, and participate in an
open-ended future. Both of these homes are sustained by an ideology of total
success or defeat, one that has marred African American political thought,
particularly its nationalist strains. Placelessness burdens those who live with it to
confront defeat not as a loss but as a condition that promotes ambivalence. In one
important respect, Oedipus and Cruse are opposed: Oedipus’s “crime of being”
erases essential, identifying distinctions while Cruse, as a nationalist, preserves
them. Neither, however, engages ambivalence because they are attached to an
idea of certainty that only understands the past and the future in terms of success
and failure, victory and defeat. Living with defeat, nationalists are nostalgic both
for a past beyond recuperation and for a future that won’t be in a vain attempt to
banish black ambivalence.
W.E.B.DuBois’s idea of double consciousness, of a black mind split between
a black and white world, has become the paradigmatic term for black
ambivalence. This interpretation is adequate only if we understand that mind that
thinks, loves, and imagines as though, in being both black and white, it is both
dead and alive. Confronting this state of suspension between life and death is the
great task facing black intellectuals. Contra Steiner, death is not “beyond
discourse”; black intellectuals must define the terms of death that dictate African
American life in the United States. This is an explicitly political task, one that
must be carried out in conjunction with the honest witness of ordinary black
Americans to life’s contingency. Black cultural expressions certainly
illuminate the terms of black death, but these terms demand a state-centered
critique and organized response that respects the individuality of responses to the
black proximity to death. This kind of respect demands that we be democratic in
our worldview and praxis as we imagine and mobilize toward a future where the
tensions between difference and equality are not matters of life and death.
Bringing death to light in this way must address the problem of race and
citizenship not rhetorically but politically, not strictly in terms of daily
frustrations and fears but in terms of the basic principles of American
governance.
284 • FRED MONTAS

Notes

1. This description of democracy is influenced by Michel Foucault and echoed by

Sheldon Wolin. Foucault writes, “For if it is true that at the heart of power relations
and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a
certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no
relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power
relationship implies, at least, in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two
forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally
become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point
of possible reversal.” See Foucault, “The Subject and Power” in Michel Foucault:
Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Eds. Hubert L.Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 225. Wolin writes,
“Democracy needs to be reconceived as something other than a form of government:
as a mode of being which is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed
only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility as long as the memory of the political
survives.” See Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 23.
2. Although one chapter is titled “Mass Media and Cultural Democracy” and another
“Cultural Leadership and Cultural Democracy,” Cruse uses the term cultural
democracy only to refer to a Rockefeller Brothers Fund report of 1963, The
Performing Arts—Problems and Prospects, which itself only used the term once.
See Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow,
1967), 66; hereafter, page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text.
3. Black nationalism, according to Alphonso Pinkney, consists of three components:
“unity, pride in cultural heritage, and autonomy.” While culture and consciousness
are central to Cruse, he never calls for blacks to be proud of being black. Although
he does not discuss it in these terms, Cruse recasts the notion of pride as ethnic
validation, where one believes in the legitimacy of one’s ethnic background and
culture. See Pinkney, Red, Black, and Green: Black Nationalism in the United
States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 7. In this essay,
“nationalism” will refer only to black nationalism.
4. See George Steiner, “Absolute Tragedy,” in No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1995
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 129–41. For a different (and extensive)
treatment of identity in Oedipus Tyrannos, see J.Peter Euben, The Tragedy of
Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1990), 96–129.
5. Richard Lattimore, paraphrased in Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory, 115.
6. Steiner uses this phrase in “Absolute Tragedy,” 129.
7. Cruse writes, “If the Harlem bourgeoisie were capable of giving real cultural
leadership, then redevelopment would not be for integration in reverse. But, to
repeat, the black bourgeoisie cannot give economic and political leadership because
it cannot give cultural leadership—the three sides of the question go hand in hand.
The tragedy of the black bourgeoisie in America is not that it simply “sells out,”
since all bourgeois classes are prone to compromise their sovereignty in a crisis. It
is rather that no class the world over sells out so cheaply as the American black
bourgeoisie” (p. 91).
 HOME TO HARLEM • 285

Twenty pages later, Cruse continues this theme, “What lurks behind the
disabilities and inhibitions of the Negro creative intellectuals is the handicap of the
black bourgeoisie. Unless this class is brought into the cultural situation and forced
to carry out its responsibilities on a community, organizational, and financial level,
the cultural side of the black revolution will be retarded. The snail’s pace of
bourgeois civil rights reform, and white power-structure manipulation, will
combine to stall it indefinitely. The problem of cultural leadership, then, is not only
a problem of the faulty orientation of the Negro creative intellectuals; it is also a
problem of the reeducation of the black bourgeoisie, especially its new, younger
strata” (111).
8. Cruse’s fear of Harlem, or significant parts of it, being extirpated was not
necessarily paranoid. San Juan Hill, which had been a large black community in
Manhattan’s Upper West Side, was razed to create Lincoln Center and luxury
housing complexes. Highway construction in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx
required the dislocation of thousands of poor black and Latino families in those
boroughs. Robert Moses, who was responsible for many of these developments,
studiously avoided developing any parks, complexes, or highways in Harlem. See
Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New
York: Knopf, 1974) and Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The
Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). On the other
hand, as is well known, integration would not hold when blacks moved into
previously white neighborhoods; residents fled to the still-white suburbs. See
Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the
Making of the American Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993).
9. Cruse continues by writing about the etiology of such a mood and the problems
associated with relying on it for a political outlook and program. It contains
prescient and still relevant criticisms of emotive, cathartic nationalism and is worth
quoting at length:

It is perfectly understandable why many new Afro-American

Nationalists in the cities of the North must experience a separatist
mood of withdrawal from any or all contacts with the white world. The
historical character of black and white societal relations in America
makes such a mood a prerequisite for positive reexamination and
reevaluation of the black personality. For groups as well as
individuals it is often necessary to retreat into isolation in order to
determine who one is. But in the world of realities such isolation
cannot be maintained too long, and there comes a time when one must
emerge from it and deal with the hard facts of life. People, no matter
how diverse, are interrelated and diverse peoples must, of necessity,
deal with the practical facts of their interrelationships.

So far, the Afro-American Nationalists have not distinguished the

difference between having a nationalistic mood and having nationalist
objectives in politics, economics, and culture that relate to how
Negroes exist as a people in America. The mere fact of self-
286 • FRED MONTAS

identification, of the ideology of pro-blackness, the glorification of

black skin, the idealization of everything African, the return to the
natural quality of African hairstyles, the rediscovery of black female
beauty, or the adoption of African tribal dress—all of these phases
and moods signify a return to the root origins of self which can also
be transformed into protective mystiques. If these black mystiques are
suffused with a contempt for, a hatred and rejection of everything
white, instead of being channeled into positive trends of action, such
mystiques are capable of veering off in dangerous nihilistic fantasies
of black supremacy that have little to do with the actualities of the
real world. In this world of fantasy, there will be a pecking order of
blackness—“I am more black and more pure than thou”—in which
case the enemy ceases to be whiteness but other black breeds. This
has already been manifested by the hate fringes of black nihilism—
more threatening to blacks than to whites. Long predicted, this
nihilistic black fringe was bound to develop when the Afro-American
Nationalists failed to transcend their mystical and romantic phase.
(439–40)

The discussions above and below show how Cruse’s arguments are themselves
susceptible to some of the criticisms he aims at the nihilistic nationalist mood.
10. Ralph Ellison, “Harlem is Nowhere” in Shadow and Act (1964; reprint New York:
Vintage, 1972), 296. This essay was originally written for the 1948 edition of
Magazine of the Year but it remained unpublished until its appearance in Shadow
and Act.
11. Ibid., 297; Ellison’s emphasis.
12. Ibid., 300.
13. Anyone who said, “Man, I’m nowhere,” most likely signified, or exaggerated, the
symptoms of dis-ease expressed by this statement, which Ellison, in turn, used to
illuminate a largely inarticulate response to racial subordination in the north and
south.
14. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),
88–89.
15. I am exploring this theme in my doctoral thesis, “The Color of Death: Blackness
and the Idea of Freedom in African-American Thought,” Department of
Government, Cornell University, in progress.
16. Even as Cruse claimed the prevalence of a mass nationalist ideology (4,6), this
ideology was not enough to move ethnic group consciousness to the kind of cultural
self-recognition or, in his words, “positive identification” that could form the basis
of the mass action Cruse thought was necessary.
17. Cruse analyzes a film projectionists’ strike at the Lafayette Theater in 1926 to
elucidate the centrality of (1) culture to the political and economic crises of black
communities and (2), Harlem as a community that is uniquely capable of satisfying
this triangular strategy of community development. The strike arose from “the
impact of the developing American cultural apparatus on the economics, the
politics, [and] the creative and social development of the black community” (81,
 HOME TO HARLEM • 287

Cruse’s emphasis). See Crisis, pp. 73–83 for details of the strike. Cruse assigns
great importance to the strike, claiming that the failures surrounding it doomed
Harlem for the subsequent forty years. To agree with Cruse on this point requires a
conspiratorial leap of faith.
18. Cruse’s conception of the new Harlem is driven by concerns of equality and
justice; one is tempted to describe it as an elaboration of the cultural basis of
equality and justice in the United States, but this characterization would be
inaccurate. Cruse conceives black communities in terms of their positions and
resources relative to white communities, so his political and economic goals are a
way of establishing and preserving the equality and justice experienced by stable,
bourgeois and working-class, white communities. Thus even, with their quest for
autonomy, the goals are determined by looking outside black communities. This
looking out in order to define that which ought to be within typifies efforts to
rectify the experience of displacement among African Americans. In addition, it
contains an obvious contradiction that reveals the futility of Cruse’s arguments to
establish ethnic group autonomy and consciousness: blacks cannot be autonomous
as they look to nonblack communities to determine the standards that black
communities ought to achieve.
288
 16
Cruse’s Dismissal of African
American Liberalism
JERRY G.WATTS

Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual can be endlessly mined for
insights into the political trajectories of various historical formations within the
twentieth-century African American intelligentsia. Cruse’s formulations have
inspired legions of scholars to reflect on the intellectual and artistic projects of
twentieth-century black intellectuals. The text is perhaps best described as a
focal point for reflections and analyses of the political significance of various
twentieth-century black intellectual creative thrusts. Unsurprisingly, any study
like Cruse’s, which attempts to provide definitive judgments on a wide span of
black intellectual and artistic projects, is bound to be riddled with unevenness,
rash judgments and even blatant ignorances. Yet, the boldness of Cruse’s
argument, its very dogmatism no less, makes it a rich focal point of debate.
One major oversight in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is the absence of a
serious consideration of the politics of liberal African American intellectuals
during the twentieth century. Such a consideration would have not only
necessitated engagements with some of the major African American liberal
theorists and political activists of the twentieth century but would have
demanded that liberalism as embraced by blacks be analyzed in terms of its
historical relevance to black political advancement during the twentieth century.
Cruse could not have pursued such an analysis without first situating African
American liberalism within the various historical contexts in which it arose,
flourished, and floundered. Only then could Cruse have discussed
the comparative viability of liberalism versus other ideological approaches to
black advancement. Mistakenly, Cruse analyzed African American liberalism
and various other black intellectual agendas as if black intellectuals were
confronted with an unlimited range of feasible ideological options at any given
time. Instead of trying to discern why African American intellectuals adopted a
specific ideological posture, Cruse merely informs us that the ones they usually
adopted were not in the best interest of African American emancipation.
Blatantly dismissive of African American liberalism, Cruse routinely assigns
African American liberal intellectuals to the dust bin of confused integrationists.
To the extent that liberalism is deemed to be reformist and not revolutionary,
Cruse implies that the liberalism championed by African American intellectuals-
constituted an embrace of the hegemonic status quo, albeit with minor variations.
290 • JERRY G.WATTS

Unfortunately, Cruse’s knee-jerk dismissal of African American liberalism

became one of the most influential errors of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.
Many Cruse influenced commentators on African American intellectual life have
subsequently embraced and repeated Cruse’s dismissal of twentieth-century
African American liberal thinkers without ever independently interrogating the
historical record. Following Cruse’s lead, they displayed disdain for the political
and intellectual sensibilities of most twentieth-century African American
intellectuals. After all, African American liberalism was the preeminent
ideological posture of the politicized twentieth-century African American
intelligentsia.
Insofar as the idea of political liberalism has been thoroughly ensconced
within mainstream American political discourses during the twentieth century,
African American liberalism as a ideology of black advancement can easily (but
erroneously) appear to have been hopelessly embedded in defenses of the status
quo. The primary source of the misreading of African American liberalism is
that most students of black American political thought have assumed that African
American political thinkers and activists who embraced liberalism did so without
significantly assaulting and amending the hegemonic liberal idea. The
recognition of African American liberalism as a distinct genre of political thought
within the broader category of American liberalism is a necessary precondition
for rescuing it from the clutches of mainstream American liberal discourses.1
African American liberalism is simultaneously a subset and a revision of
establishmentarian American liberalism as embodied in the ethos of the New
Deal and its descendant liberal welfare state formulations.2 Yet, the origins of
African American liberalism predate the New Deal.
Borrowing from classical liberal thought, twentieth-century African American
liberalism has long supported impartiality or equality before the law and a focus
on freedom of the individual.3 While the idea of individual equality before the
law is adopted from classical liberalism, African American liberalism, a hybrid
liberalism, also borrowed principles from other strains of liberalism, social
democracy, and realpolitik practices. The various mutations and adaptations of
African American liberalism center around their usefulness to the ethnic
advancement of black Americans. African American liberalism is a political
perspective steeped in utilitarian and pragmatic sensibilities. Insofar as blacks
throughout most of American history including the first six decades of the
twentieth century were not subject to equal protection under the law as
supposedly granted by the post-Civil War amendments to the U.S. Constitution,
African American liberalism essentially championed the rerecognition and
enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In pursuit of the
implementation of the Fourteenth Amendment, African American liberalism has
also included support for a federal state with the necessary scope, power and will
to ensure its enforcement.
In Crafting Equality, Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites
describe an early manifestation of African American liberalism that emerged
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 291

following the termination of Reconstruction. They write, “They keenly

recognized that Equal Protection would involve substantial government activity.
They warned that “the concession of rights in a legal form is comparatively
valueless and often a mockery unless supported by the whole judicial and
military power of the country.” The issue of federal enforcement became the
crucial point on which they and their white allies would eventually part company,
and once that happened, it would take a full century before whites caught up with
the black view.”4
In the aftermath of Reconstruction, African American liberalism emerged as a
prototype of progressive American liberalism. Condit and Lucaites note of this
post-Reconstruction ideology that “African-Americans thus advocated the most
extensive version of Equality in the Western tradition to that time. The usages
were not yet as extensive as they would become in the 1960s, but they included
Equality before the Law, Equal Chance, Equal Justice, Equal Footing, Equal
Opportunity, and Equal Rights. These usages would require substantial
government action to bring them about, for they framed a far more vigorous
interpretation of the changing Constitution than even that which the mainstream
republicans were willing to acknowledge.”5
History has shown that the progressive liberal ideas championed by black
Americans during the latter half of the nineteenth century had little impact on the
dominant beliefs of white Americans. It would take approximately seventy to
eighty years before African American liberalism would exert significant
influence on the dominant liberal discourses of white America. This exertion of
black influence on a national discourse would not occur until three interrelated
events occurred: (1) the mid-twentieth century emergence of a protracted mass
based civil rights movement; (2) the creation of a leadership sector of that civil
rights movement (ie. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, Fannie Lou
Hammer) that skillfully fashioned African American liberalism as an articulation
of Christian morality and United States patriotism; and (3) the embrace of
African American liberalism by President Lyndon Johnson (a former advocate of
mainstream racist American liberalism) and other establishmentarian white
liberal power brokers.

African American liberalism and the State

Because racism was blatantly institutionalized in varying degrees within the
political systems of individual states, African American liberalism has
historically supported a strong federal government system rather than one that
protected the autonomy of individual states and local jurisdictions. Though the
federal government was also thoroughly racist, African American liberals
imagined the national white polity as the most likely historical driving force
behind improvements in the political status of blacks. Given the diversity of the
political status of blacks in different locales, black political leaders viewed the
national white electorate as potentially more sympathetic. Moreover, this national
292 • JERRY G.WATTS

white electorate could, by sheer numbers, overshadow or negate the white

Southern vote.6 The quest for equality before the law has historically led African
American liberalism to view advocates of a limited federal government as
handmaidens of a racist status quo. “State’s rights” became the rallying cry of
southern states interested in maintaining their legal Jim Crow practices.
It is a testimony to the desperate plight of many African American Liberals
that they chose to view the national government as a potential ally against the
racism of state and local jurisdictions. During the first half of the twentieth
century there was little reason to assume that the federal government, in any of
its branches, was committed to bettering the living conditions of blacks, much
less to equal black citizenship rights. To have assumed otherwise was at best
naive, and at worst willed escapism. Nevertheless, black political naivete and
escapism were commonplace. Even W.E.B.DuBois was able by some twisted
gullibility to fashion a rationale why black Americans should support for
president the southern-born, Democratic segregationist Woodrow Wilson.7 Was
it not naïveté that led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) during the 1930s to spend enormous amounts of its political
capital trying to persuade President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the U.S.
Congress to pass antilynching legislation? In such instances, the NAACP
appeared to have thoroughly misread the moral character of the president and the
U.S. Congress. While the NAACP appeared to view the federal government as
potentially an ally of the antilynching campaign, the federal government actually
functioned as the ultimate guarantor of white supremacy wherever it existed in
the United States. In this instance, the federal government passively endorsed the
toleration of racist lynchings.
The historical refusal to legally acknowledge and enforce the Fourteenth
Amendment during the hundred years following its adoption constituted one form
of “big governmental” intervention into our society’s race issue. It was, so to
speak, intervention via what appeared to be massive nonintervention. Insofar as
the federal government abdicated its responsibilities to recognize, endorse, and
enforce equality before the law for blacks within all states and local jurisdictions,
it engaged in a de facto recognition of legal inequality for blacks. Worse, to the
extent that the federal government did not actively seek to break historic
patterns of racist legal exclusion, (that is, declare racist state and local laws as
unconstitutional), it explicitly endorsed racial inequality before the law. Such an
endorsement was read by the nation, particularly those states and regions that had
historically mandated discrimination against blacks, as tantamount to a national
proviso to maintain localized racial inequalities.8
Despite contemporary rhetorics to the contrary, “big government” exists by
definition in the United States as it must in any modern, industrial,
technocapitalist society.9 Because a federal state has the authority to intervene in
any issue, the decision not to intervene in specific arenas must be seen as an
affirmative state policy. Moreover, the decision to intervene or not to intervene is
usually the result of various political struggles within the body politik. It has
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 293

always been a misnomer to think of those governments that are favorable to a

relatively unfettered free market as minimal states.10 Because “big government”
has long been a given in the modern world, the significant issue of debate centers
around the rationales and purposes used to justify particular types of interventions
and noninterventions undertaken by the state. In popular American parlance, “big
government” has become associated with that form of state intervention that does
not grant a sacred status to market forces. Specifically, “big government”
provides some type of support for the basic material needs of the nation’s
citizenry. Though “big government” is not opposed to inequality, it has, at times,
sought to maintain subsistence levels for some of those on the lowest realm of
the economic order.11

Toward the Formation of African American Liberalism

The origins of black support for an activist “big government” federal presence
stemmed from four interrelated but distinct tendencies. The first tendency was
rooted in the realpolitik workings of the political system. To the extent that
legally mandated black inequality was most extensively realized as a Southern
regional phenomenon, black advocates of a big federal government viewed the
national demos as potentially more sympathetic to the cause of black legal
equality than the various white voting populations of individual southern states.
During the first five decades of the twentieth century most citizens of the United
States lived in states that did not legally mandate black inequality though rigid
segregation, and substantive racial inequality was the norm throughout every
state in the union. Many black liberal thinkers thought that the white voting
publics within non-Southern states could be mobilized in behalf of ending legal
racism in the South through federal government intervention. These blacks
believed that a sufficiently clever appeal could be constructed that would entice
non-Southern whites to include the plight of Southern blacks within their national
moral compass.12 Furthermore, it was thought that black residents of non-
Southern states could exert voting pressure in key northern states in behalf of
applying federal pressure on southern racist practices. To the extent that the
black non-Southern vote could be mobilized, perhaps their senators
and congressional representatives could be mobilized to address white
supremacy in the South. Moreover, within African American liberalism,
presidential elections were deemed to be far more crucial to black concerns than
local, state, or congressional elections. Northern black voters were
disproportionately located in large industrial cities in states with significant
electoral votes. Because of the winner-take-all nature of individual state contests
for electoral college votes, during presidential elections clusters of strategically
located black voters entertained the possibility of challenging the powerful lily-
white voting bloc of the South.
The second tendency that led to African American liberalism’s support of an
activist federal government was the endorsement of federal welfare state
294 • JERRY G.WATTS

programs that expanded under Roosevelt’s New Deal. This expansion of the
welfare state was seen as a potentially ameliorative policy profile that could help
to stimulate black economic inclusion in the face of the racism that dominated
the “normal” workings of the private sector. In this regard, A.Philip Randolph’s
threat to lead a 1941 march on Washington provided sufficient impetus for
President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 which created the Fair
Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and prohibited racist hiring practices
in defense industries.13 That Roosevelt was able to directly mandate change in
the employment practices of private industries working on government contracts
gave rise to the belief that executive power could be utilized in an even far more
sweeping manner. Of course, African American liberalism would once again
learn that like constitutional amendments, executive orders meant little when
they were not enforced.
The third tendency that led African American liberalism to support an activist
federal government presence stemmed from the belief that the federal legal
system was much more attuned to issues of racial justice than the judiciary
systems of local and state jurisdictions. Though southern state courts had to be
used to combat certain forms of legally mandated segregation and racial
inequality, the NAACP lawyers maintained greater trust in federal courts.14 It
was thought that federal judges were more immune to local public opinion.
Moreover, federal law, as expressed in the Fourteenth Amendment, was seen as
potentially more responsive to the idea of equal black citizenship than any
clauses contained in individual southern state constitutions.15 This hope existed
despite the Supreme Court historical willingness to ignore the Fourteenth
Amendment in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and others that followed.
The final tendency of African American liberalism was an inarticulate but
resilient belief that the interventions of an activist government in the affairs of
black Americans could, at some future point, became ameliorative in content.
The seeds of thought that would later give rise to popular support for affirmative
action for blacks was present long before affirmative action emerged as a
national policy. Perhaps borrowing from the precedent of Reconstruction’s
proclamations about “forty acres and a mule,” many blacks believed that the
federal government would have to go beyond strict legal equality if blacks were
ever to attain a fair chance at succeeding in America. Equal opportunity might
necessitate activist state interventions on behalf of blacks. This idea was rarely
invoked in pre-1960s public articulations of African American liberalism for the
very fact that black advocates believed that there was little or no popular
support, among whites, for such an intervention at that moment. At that time, the
primary goal was equality before law. Once de jure equality was obtained,
African American liberalism began to concentrate its push for more substantive
economic and political equality and in so doing viewed the federal government
as a mechanism that could be used toward this end. Federal intervention on
behalf of substantive black political and economic inclusion would reach its
height during the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson.16
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 295

It is therefore important to delineate the differences between African

American liberalism as a guiding principle of African American political activity
and mainstream American liberalism as the dominant ideology of the existing
American welfare state since the New Deal. The difficulty of dissecting these
two distinct tendencies lies in the fact that many of the most emphatic black
champions of African American liberalism as an ideology of black advancement
were complicit in realpolitik establishmentarian liberalism. Yet,
establishmentarian liberalism as embodied by the New Deal was thoroughly
ensconced in white supremacy as practiced most explicitly in the South.17
African American liberalism never tolerated white supremacy.

African American Liberalism: A Thick Description

African American liberalism, like classical liberalism, was premised on beliefs
that center around full legal citizenship rights for blacks. By full citizenship
rights I mean equality under the law. Yet African American liberalism deviated
from classical liberalism in that it did not accept the rigidity of the division of the
political from the economic. Substantive economic concerns were deemed to be
almost as important as substantive political participation.18 While African
American liberalism historically did not seek to alter the structure of the
American economy, it did attempt to alter government’s relationship to that
economic structure and that structure’s relationship to white supremacy. African
American Liberals believed that the state was a far more receptive vehicle than
private enterprise for altering the economic status of black Americans. Though
many African American liberals believed that improvements in the legal status
of blacks would automatically lead to improvement in the black economic
condition, others thought that the state would have to do more once legal equality
was obtained. After all, those twentieth-century blacks who resided in areas
where there was no de jure segregation (à la Harlem), were still subjected to a
ferocious political and economic racism and intractable segregationist practices.
While legal changes were not sufficient, African American liberalism viewed
them as essential. Consequently, African American liberalism believed
that improvements in the economic status of blacks that were neither codified in
nor protected by legal statutes were vulnerable to white racist practices.
Moreover, African American liberalism assumed that the legal protection of
blacks was only as valuable as the quality of enforcement assumed by the local
and federal government bureaucracies. Their goal was not merely to place new
laws on the books but to alter the functional legal status of blacks. The
Fourteenth Amendment was on the books, but it had not been enforced. In this
sense, what locates Booker T.Washington outside of the African American
liberal tradition was his belief that full legal equality for blacks was not in and of
itself a paramount goal of black political activism or even a necessary precursor
for black economic mobility.19
296 • JERRY G.WATTS

By the 1930s, some black political figures began to view state intervention in
the marketplace as a potential mechanism for black advancement. In this sense,
most of those blacks who could vote (primarily non-Southern blacks) became
supporters of Roosevelt’s New Deal by 1936. As historian Nancy Weiss and
others have argued, this black voter shift away from their traditional allegiance to
the party of Lincoln was stimulated by their participation in some of the New
Deal’s efforts to relieve the worse deprivations of the depression.20 Herein
begins the black American linkages to the growth of the American welfare state
and the Democratic Party. As was the case with large sectors of the white
intelligentsia, the response of the New Deal to the Great Depression energized
black liberal thought and resolve.21
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for the presidency in 1932, the black
electorate did not consider him an ally of their cause. While they knew that
Hoover was not committed to doing anything substantive to advance their plight,
Roosevelt was thought of as a patrician northerner who could hardly have cared
less about racism. According to Weiss, following his election, black leaders (ie.
Walter White of the NAACP) were continually rebuffed by Roosevelt. He could
not find time to meet with them.22 Nevertheless black political organizations and
newspapers bombarded the administration and the public at large with a common
racial agenda. Describing this common black political agenda, Weiss notes:
“They looked to Washington for action. Speak out on racial problems, they
counseled the new President. Put an end to segregation and discrimination in
governmental departments, the civil service, and the military. Appoint more
blacks to diplomatic positions and federal offices. Enforce the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments. Restore the franchise to blacks. Put an end to Jim Crow
in interstate travel. Support legislation to make lynching a federal crime. Treat
blacks even handedly in the distribution of federal aid. Count blacks in on
programs to bolster the economic security of the American people.”23 Their pleas
fell on deaf ears. Establishmentarian American liberalism as embodied in
Roosevelt and his New Deal did not include white antiblack racism as a major
concern for social and political redress. Moreover, it did not consider the status of
blacks in the United States as an issue of national importance. A Roosevelt
administration spokesperson noted, “‘When Roosevelt came in 1933 there were
many more things to worry about than what happened to civil rights…. We
weren’t concerned with civil rights because there was so much more to worry
about’”24 Worse, the New Deal openly supported white supremacy in the South.
Some scholars have attempted to rationalize Roosevelt’s endorsement of white
supremacy by proclaiming his tactical need to maintain the electoral support of
the white South. Yet there was no reason to assume that Roosevelt ever cared
sufficiently about the impact of white supremacy on black lives. Other scholars
have attempted to elevate the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to a semipresidential
status in matters of race, by claiming that President Roosevelt addressed the
Negro problem through his wife. This is patently nonsense. Mrs. Roosevelt did
not have the political clout to impact public policies that directly affected the
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 297

laboring condition of black workers in the South. Moreover, there is no reason to

assume that her attempts to embrace African American liberalism ever took root
in her husband.
Eleanor Roosevelt was a very important, symbolic advocate of racial progress.
For this she was severely criticized by white racists throughout the nation, but
particularly in the South.25 However brave she may have been as first lady, she
nevertheless rarely affected the materiality of black everyday existence. As
President, Franklin Roosevelt never ran any political risks in behalf of black
equality. Worse, he was a supporter of the economics of white supremacy. In her
very important study of the federal government’s repressive response to migrant
farm workers during the 1930s and ’40s, Cindy Hahamovitch writes, “Federal
farm labor policies have certainly been discriminatory in outcome, but what is
more remarkable about them is the unthinking, reflexive, even automatic nature
of the racism that shaped them…. When African American workers in the East
and Mexican American workers in the West responded to labor shortages by
demanding higher wages or better housing, growers called on federal officials to
hold down farm wages or find other sources of cheap and uncontroversial labor.
Federal officials obliged, excluding farm workers (and domestics) from New
Deal collective bargaining legislation.”26 The decision of the Roosevelt
administration to exclude domestics and farm laborers from federal protection or
even social security was not arrived at passively but was done to placate white
racist power in the South.

Two Strains of African American Liberalism

If there has been any central theme that underlies the political beliefs and
practices of twentieth-century African American intellectuals, it would be the
quest for functional utility. African American intellectuals wanted more than
anything else to be able to contribute to tangible changes in the material and
cultural lives of black peoples. The quest for functional utility or what might
better be called functional usefulness led many African American intellectuals to
adopt variations of a crass pragmatic world view. Whatever appeared to have the
highest chance of improving conditions for black people generated support from
black leaders even if the policy was severely flawed.
One of the fundamental issues pertaining to African American intellectuals is
why so many blacks chose to work within the prevailing ideological boundaries
of American society rather than adopt a more radical ideological orientation.
Why was it that so few twentieth-century black intellectuals ever seriously
entertained leftist ideas? Perhaps the attraction of black nationalism was rooted
in a black distaste for taking risks in partnership with white Americans. Even in
those instances when liberalism failed to address black needs because white
liberals were too racist, black intellectuals did not run en masse to the Left. In
many instances the black intellectual response was to retreat from coalitions with
whites altogether.
298 • JERRY G.WATTS

The very marginality of blacks in American society influenced many black

intellectuals to minimize the willed appropriation of additional ideological
baggage that would increase their social and political marginality. Their hyper-
outsider status led many blacks to cling to vestiges of the status quo rather than
risk the costs of its complete rejection. In this sense, African American
intellectuals may have been quite different from the attitude of other marginal
intellectual communities such as those inhabited by Jews in postemancipation
Europe or perhaps even Jewish intellectuals in the United States during the first
five decades of the twentieth century. Unlike most black American intellectuals,
why did many Jewish American intellectuals in the United States utilize their
marginal social status to generate risky if not radical visions of an altered
status quo?
The valorization of pragmatic logics in the political thinking of most twentieth
century black intellectuals led many of them to embrace a lesser of two evils
logic. This logic was premised on the belief that given their dire plight, it was
always in the interest of African Americans to accept a piece of the pie rather
than protest for an entire pie that would never be given, even if blacks were
justifiably due the entire pie. While one could privately proclaim a belief that one
deserved the entire pie, one’s public utterances were such that the piece that was
received was accepted (read momentarily acceptable). This lesser-of-two-evils
logic led many black American intellectuals to sidestep even participating in
political movements that were deemed utopian or too demanding. As such,
communism never found a large receptive audience within the black American
intelligentsia despite the utter desperation of large numbers of the African
American populace.
Certainly, African American liberalism cannot be understood without placing
it is the contexts of black America’s long history of pragmatic politics. Yet, some
African American liberal intellectuals were more pragmatic than others. The
more pragmatic that a black liberal intellectual was, the greater the chance that
she would be moderate in her orientation toward conflict with whites. Varying
degrees of commitment to pragmatic politics gave rise to two distinct traditions
of African American liberalism: (1) the moderate, hyper-pragmatic liberalism,
and (2) the defiant, more militant, assertive liberalism.
Moderate African American liberalism is embodied in those blacks who for
pragmatic reasons closed ranks with establishmentarian American liberalism and
thus rejected any frontal assault on black inequality. Moderate African American
liberalism was represented in a figure like Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune
became a prominent figure during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt
because of her personal ties to the president and his wife. Though Bethune
imbibed the ideal of a racially egalitarian society, she was not committed to
pushing hard for it, particularly if it meant alienating “white friends of the
Negro.”27 Bethune assumed the political stance of a client in search of the
president as a patron. She was more committed to persuading President
Roosevelt rather than pressuring him to act in behalf of Negro rights. In a
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 299

revealing memoir published four years after Roosevelt’s death, Bethune’s

moderation becomes evident. She writes, “There are those who criticize FDR’s
slowness to move against basic evils in our midst and his obvious dislike of
extreme methods of achieving his objectives. But it is important to understand
that his methods were those of a man of great experience and insight. He was a
man of great depth of mind and seldom made rash moves…. Had he lived I am
convinced that he would have launched new, bold offensives against bigotry and
Jim Crow everywhere. But it would have been according to his plan….”28 All of
the code words of capitulation are here. Roosevelt is opposed to extreme
measures, had a plan of his own making, and so on. Bethune, like most moderate
advocates of African American liberalism, did not intend to collude with white
supremacy, yet her hyperpragmatism gave rise to an aversion to risk and conflict
which ultimately undermined her ability to function as a pressure point for
political change. Bethune acquiesced to racism almost as much as she fought it.
She did little in her position within the federal bureaucracy to place her job at
risk. Nor would she have ever resigned over any principled matter of policy for
her politics were sufficiently fluid that she was never bound by anything.
Instead, Bethune held the fort, believing that by her mere presence in an
administrative position, she was waging a struggle for black freedom. This
should not be interpreted as arguing that Bethune did not contribute to the black
freedom struggle. After all, she was instrumental in creating two institutions that
were quite significant: Bethune-Cookman College and the National Association
of Negro Women. Notably, crude pragmatists like Bethune were often institution
builders.29 The quintessential crude African American pragmatist was none other
than Booker T.Washington.
To the extent that moderate African American liberalism worked under the
assumption that blacks were relatively powerless to force whites into changing,
moderate African American liberalism valorized persuasion as opposed to
contention. African American liberals of this breed were masters of “grin-and-
bear-it” politics.30 NAACP official James Weldon Johnson was a
hyperpragmatic liberal.31 Sociologist Charles S.Johnson can also be added to this
list.32 Charles Johnson’s moderate African American liberalism led him to join
various moderate interracial organizations intent on changing the South. He was
on the board of the Southern Conference Educational Fund and the Southern
Regional Council, two organizations intent on bettering southern race relations
through the application of social scientific data.33 Nevertheless, the dominant
whites of the Southern Regional Council (such as sociologist Howard Odum)
could never bring themselves to endorse desegregation. When Bayard Rustin
attempted to convince the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to acquiesce in
the seating of the all-white anti-democratic Mississippi delegation at the 1964
Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, he did so as a hyperpragmatic,
thoroughly acquiescent black liberal. Not only did he relinquish bringing into
question the choices that the black Mississippians were offered but he utilized
the language of the crude black pragmatic in telling them to “bide their time.”34
300 • JERRY G.WATTS

More militant political thinkers and activists like Bob Moses and Fanner Lou
Hammer were surprised and disgusted by Rustin’s willingness to compromise
with white supremacy. They retained their assertive African American liberalism
and thus rejected the insulting compromise. Gradualism was the calling card of
the moderate African American liberal. Such persons believed that they could
effect change just by being present and active in organizations with whites. Their
sights were usually set on gaining minute victories.
In some instances, blacks were forced to stylistically embrace moderate
African American liberalism in order to navigate a racist social order. For
instance, crude pragmatists were found disproportionately among the ranks of
those blacks who presided over state-funded black colleges during the first five
decades of the twentieth century. Placed in a position of trying to obtain funding
from southern governors and legislators intent on maintaining their institutions
as second rate, black college presidents were forced to collude in racist practices
and rituals in order to obtain funding. Yet there were always black college
presidents who tried to push legislatures and governors to increase the funding.
Others acted content to receive whatever they were given. The distinction
between moderate African American liberalism and militant African American
liberalism lies in quality of the contestation of the racist social order.
The other strain of African American liberalism is the one that I call assertive
African American liberalism. Throughout the twentieth century there were
liberal black intellectuals who rejected the pragmatic logic of always choosing the
lesser of two evils. These African American liberal intellectuals used their
liberalism as a wedge against the system. They were not opposed to engaging in
fights that they believed they would lose provided the fight championed the
equality of black people. One such figure was lawyer and later judge William
Hastie. Another figure in this tradition was urbanist and later Secretary of the
Department of Housing and Urban Development Robert Weaver. Hastie and
Weaver were two prominent members of Roosevelt’s “black cabinet.” Hastie
was appointed as Negro affairs adviser to the Secretary of War, Henry L.Stimson,
during World War II but resigned his post when it became clear that the federal
government had no interest in addressing the systematic mistreatment of black
soldiers. He was not willing to allow himself to be used as a disempowered
symbol for a policy that did not exist.35
The ranks of practitioners of assertive African American liberalism
included figures like Monroe Trotter;36 Kenneth and Mamie Clark; Thurgood
Marshall and an entire cadre of black NAACP lawyers; sociologists like Horace
Mann Bond;37 Ira deA.Reid and Charles G.Gomillion;38 political scientists like
John Aubrey Davis, Martin L.Kilson, and Charles Hamilton; activists like James
Farmer,39 James Foreman, Ella Baker, Julian Bond, Joyce Ladner, and the early
Rustin; Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University;40 historians like
Rayford Logan;41 educators like Anna Julia Cooper and Benjamin Mays;42
lawyer and feminist activist Pauli Murray;43 and Judge Leon Higginbotham.
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 301

To simply claim that these people were acting in partnership with the
American racial status quo would be a distortion of immense proportions.
Though they were not revolutionaries, they were quite militant in their struggle
for black emancipation. Moreover, given the pervasiveness of white racism, they
were quite radical insofar as they defended black equality.

The NAACP and the Problem of a Black

Liberal Intelligentsia
Cruse spends an inordinate amount of energy lavishing criticism upon the
historical agenda and practices of the NAACP. For the most part, the criticisms are
well rehearsed versions of traditional radical critiques of the NAACP’s liberal
political agenda and bourgeois leadership cadre. Yet, the criticisms cannot and
do not account for the entirety of the NAACP’s political history. It is not true, as
Cruse implies, that the NAACP was monolithic in its orientation to black
advancement.44 Had Cruse been better versed in NAACP history he would have
known that the organization had undergone various attempts throughout its
history to broaden the scope of its political agenda. Beginning in the late 1930s
the NAACP had shed its original patron-client politics on behalf of far more
diversified political strategies. One of the major breakthroughs followed the
Second Amenia Conference, in which the NAACP finally accepted the idea that
economic concerns of blacks could no longer be marginalized from the
organization’s central mission.45 Pushed by the leftist sensibilities of younger
black intellectuals like economist Abram Harris;46 political scientist Ralph
Bunche47; sociologist E.Franklin Frazier;48 the old guard of the NAACP (Joel
Spingarn; W.E.B.DuBois; Arthur Spingarn; Mary White Ovington;49 and James
Weldon Johnson) found themselves under attack.50 These radical “young turks”
advanced the idea that the future progress of blacks depended on the development
of a multiracial class formation. In so doing, it was thought that the association
could begin to reach out to and attract the attention of the black masses.
Though leftists, Bunche, Frazier, and Harris were not favorably disposed
toward communism. As advocates of a multiracial class political formation, these
three intellectuals argued against the race-based politics that governed African
American political discourse and practice. They seemed to believe that blacks
should organize around class issues rather than racial issues in pursuit of a
transracial class political formation. Yet their agenda, however well
intentioned and radical, was decidedly escapist in its advocacy of coalitions with
the white working class. There was little reason to assume that the white working
class was interested in making class partnerships with black workers. Moreover,
contrary to the arguments of Bunche and colleagues, the NAACP’s race based
agenda had not been a roadblock to white working-class desires to establish
coalitions with black workers. After all, who could recall any moment when
blacks had rejected progressive overtures from the white working class?
302 • JERRY G.WATTS

Another response to the intransigence of racism among the white working

class was later developed by DuBois, who, by the 1930s had come to the
conclusion that racism was so thoroughly entrenched in American culture that
one could only realistically conclude that it would be here forever. Given the
ubiquitousness of antiblack white racism, DuBois argued it should pragmatically
be accepted as a boundary circumscribing black political possibilities. As such,
black political and economic strategies should be formulated in such a manner so
as not to rely on the good will or help of white Americans. Thus, DuBois called
for a variant of cultural-economic nationalism centering around black consumer
cooperatives.
Cruse does not grant sufficient significance to the highly successful NAACP
assault on the separate-but-equal legal status of blacks. The NAACP’s legal
strategy was premised upon assumptions that were fundamental to African
American liberalism.51 The successful assault on Plessy v. Ferguson helped to
broaden the space and increase the viability of black oppositional politics.
Charles Hamilton Houston, the Amherst College and Harvard Law School
graduate is correctly depicted in Genna Rae McNeil’s biography as an African
American liberal who devised a legal strategy that would establish the legal
grounds for assaulting the “separate but equal” logic of Plessy v. Ferguson.52
As dean of Howard University’s law school, Houston was the crucial
inspiration behind the use of the school as a place to train a cadre of black
lawyers to actualize the legal strategy. In effect, Houston created a black
controlled infrastructure to train lawyers in counterhegemonic legal practices.
The legal strategy of the NAACP was the centerpiece of its reformist agenda.
The importance of the political strategy of utilizing the legal process in behalf of
black advancement stemmed from the fact that the NAACP understood that it
could not depend on the popular will of the white mass public. When
desegregation was outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, there was little
reason to assume that the white American public would have terminated
segregation had the issue been put to a public referendum. One of the major
preconditions for the emergence of a mass civil rights movement during the late
1950s was the existence of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board
of Education.
There was certainly room to criticize the NAACP for its hesitancy to explicitly
adopt mass political organizing within black communities. Yet, on various local
levels, NAACP officials did just that. Houston intended for community
organizing to become a central tenet of the NAACP’s legal strategy on local levels.
He believed that the court cases should be used as focal points for organizing
local communities for only then could there exist any possibility that changes in
the law would result in substantive changes in behavior. Local NAACP officials
often excelled at community organizing. The case of Medgar Evers in Jackson
Mississippi is instructive in this regard,53 as was that of Lulu B.White in
Houston.54 The same could be said of Robert Williams in Monroe, North
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 303

Carolina, prior to his dismissal from the organization because of his advocacy of
armed self-defense.55
Despite individual successes at organizing in various southern black
communities, the national NAACP distrusted mass politics. This distrust was a
crucial weakness of the NAACP’s political philosophy for it was, in effect, a
hidden mistrust of democracy. Moreover, the national office’s unwillingness to
ever embrace radical political articulations led the organization into a myopia in
which it appeared to believe that social change could be managed from a top-
down approach. Certainly, Thurgood Marshall was imprisoned in this utterly
naive belief. It led him to declare, following the Brown decision, that the end of
racial segregation was on the immediate horizon. Soon he would learn that the
cultural struggle to elevate the status of blacks in the mind of mainstream
America would have to take a different approach than one premised on merely
altering the laws.
Given the dominant pragmatic core to African American political thought, how
has black nationalism retained popular appeal? The most perplexing aspects of
black nationalism as a political organizing strategy or even utopian goal, lies not
merely in its inability to develop realpolitik strategies for black emancipation but
in its enduring popularity despite its weak track record of accomplishments.
Black nationalist theorists like Cruse mistakenly believe that a black nationalist
project could have been viable in the absence of equal protection before the law
for blacks. Ida Wells would learn the limits of such claims early in her life when
two friends of hers who had opened and successfully operated a hardware store
were killed and their store burned to the ground precisely because the white
community of Memphis perceived the success of these black store owners as
detrimental to their own competing businesses.56 Without legal protection, black
self-help strategies (à la successful black businesses) were vulnerable to white
racist demolition.
African American liberalism certainly had many weaknesses. Yet, to the extent
that it emerged out of the give and take of realpolitik limitations and constraints
of the American political and economic arena, it cannot be compared to utopian
visions of a black nationalist minded collectivist Harlem as described by Cruse in
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Herein lies a problem with Cruse. Though
his writing is historically informed, he fails to contextualize black political
thought and activities. As such, at no point in Cruse’s discussions concerning the
various failures of previous generations of black intellectuals is there any real
consideration of the limited options confronting them at any given time. Instead,
Cruse writes as if black intellectuals conceived political strategies de novo.
Cruse implies that integration was not in the self-interest of black Americans.
He believes that African American thinkers misunderstood America insofar
as they did not see it as a country devised of separate ethnic groups. Cruse’s
black nationalism is merely a form of cultural pluralism. He believes that all
groups should be allowed to develop and control their own ethnic neighborhoods,
304 • JERRY G.WATTS

and so on. Ironically, what Cruse calls black nationalism is, in some respects,
orthodox American ethnic politics.
Cruse’s inability to systematically critique African American liberalism in a
nuanced fashion has not been the source of a sustained criticism of the text. This
gaping weakness in the Cruse text has been overlooked because it was a
conceptual error shared by many black intellectuals during the era immediately
following the demise of the civil rights movement. By the late 1960s the
dominant ideologies within black protest communities viewed African American
liberalism as a failed ideological approach because of the way that mainstream
liberalism was implemented within the political culture of the United States. It
would be similar to proclaiming democracy a failed ideal because it has never
been completely implemented in the United States. Worse, Cruse and his
followers did not recognize the existence of African American liberalism as
constituting a strain of thought distinct from mainstream American liberalism.
The emergence of black power rhetorics replaced invocations of the “beloved
community.” Curiously, black power rhetorics were often a hodgepodge of
various black nationalist ideas, all of which probably only shared a disdain for
African American liberalism. Substantively, black power was in many instances
little more than an unacknowledged extension of African American liberalism.
For instance, the highly influential book Black Power, written by Stokley
Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, was an African American liberal text that
utilized militant rhetoric.57
Cruse conflates liberalism with integrationism and integrationism with
assimilation. This linkage is both correct and wrong. First, to the extent that
African American liberalism was premised on a desire for blacks to receive
equal treatment within the public and private economic spheres, it did explicitly
dovetail with the quest for integrationism. The NAACP could have fought for the
implementation of Plessy v. Ferguson instead of its repeal. In practice, liberal
equality had to endorse the end of legally mandated racial segregation. After all,
blacks wanted the chance to work in businesses, factories, and retail outlets that
were owned by whites or primarily staffed by white workers. Whether these
were locally owned business establishments or national chains like the A & P, or
even larger organizations like General Motors, blacks wanted access to jobs that
they had historically been denied access to because of their racial identity.
Without the integrationism of unions, black workers would be denied access to
many stable working-class jobs. Organizing separate black unions would not have
facilitated black job mobility. Integrationism as a strategy to obtain greater
access to a broader job market was often ignored in post-civil rights era
condemnations of integrationism as a political strategy.
Without integrating the labor market, black workers would be severely
constrained. But, Cruse mistakenly gives short shrift to the economic analyses of
black nationalism and integrationism. By sidestepping a materialist analysis of
the African American politico-economic plight, Cruse writes as if black
intellectuals primarily needed to devise the correct ideology on matters of culture
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 305

which would then shed light on all other issues. Yet, he overlooks the fact that
black nationalism as a political ideology can only be viable once integrationism
has occurred in the labor force. Claims for the necessity of a “separatist” black
economy were thoroughly unrealistic. Moreover, Cruse, the black nationalist,
could easily reconcile his cultural ideology with his own employment at the
University of Michigan, an employment possibility that resulted from
integrationist agitation. In much the same way, members of the League of
Revolutionary Black Workers were employed in white owned automobile
iIndustry. Even the Nation of Islam had assumed that most of its members would
be employed by white-owned firms (at least until that future time when their
members could all be employed in Nation of Islam businesses).
The fight to integrate mainstream workplaces helped to fuel the growth of a
stable black working class and a black middle class. Blacks who migrated to
northern industrial areas from the rural South had to become sufficiently
acculturated to an industrial order. But this is weak assimilation and not the type
condemned by Cruse. What Cruse is opposing is the quest on the part of some
blacks to model themselves culturally on white Americans. These blacks, he
believes, are trying to culturally lose whatever might popularly identity them as
“Negroes.” Worse, in so doing, they often chose to distance themselves as much
as possible from their “culturally crude” poorer ethnic peers. Cruse’s analysis owes
a tremendous debt to E.Franklin Frazier’s polemic Black Bourgeoisie.58 Frazier
had written a scathing diatribe against the attitudes and behavior of the black
middle class. Frazier argued that middle-class blacks were caught in a world of
“make-believe.” These blacks were not only engaged in conspicuous
consumption but utterly immersed in vacuous rituals and practices that
reinforced their status of being “unlike the other blacks.”
But Cruse should have known that the world of make-believe was not the
dominant form of ethnic consciousness present within the black middle classes.
As Oliver Cox has argued, Frazier was wrong to suggest that the typical member
of the black middle class was obsessed with a life of consumerist “make-
believe.”59 Yes, bourgeois blacks often went to great lengths to divorce
themselves socially and economically from their lower-class peers. But even
many of those among the black middle classes who engaged in such status-
differentiation practices were still committed to ethnic group uplift.60 Perhaps
this sheds light on Cruse’s less than substantial treatment of DuBois in The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. DuBois, the hypereducated, Eurocentric, would-
be aristocrat, maintained throughout his life a strong ethnic consciousness. He
dedicated his entire life to black advancement.
Among his diatribes against integrationism, Cruse erroneously associates
support for integrationism with the absence of ethnic self-assertion. One can be
quite ethnic in consciousness and fight for racial integration. Mistakenly, Cruse
argues as if there is a contradiction between ethnic consciousness and a rejection
of black nationalism. He generalizes too much from his limited knowledge of the
Communist Party and the NAACP. In both instances, Cruse collapses the
306 • JERRY G.WATTS

substance of their political visions and instead proclaims them similar because
they supported racial integrationism.

Conclusion
The problem with liberalism is multifaceted. On the one hand, African American
liberalism as a political philosophy was never completely embraced by the
realpolitik of liberalism in American politics. Liberalism, as defined by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt through John F.Kennedy, never staunchly advocated equal
citizenship rights for blacks. As the dominant American political ideology after
World War II, liberalism was an ideology of gradual change and relatively
passive state intervention in behalf of black political inclusion. This would all
change, albeit momentarily during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Within his
Great Society, the rhetorics of African American liberalism were explicitly
embraced and utilized as legitimating mechanisms for the federal government.61
Herein lies the historic problem with black intellectuals who embraced
liberalism. Many of these individuals became intertwined with the realpolitik of
liberal politics in American society. Perhaps the most explicit examples of this
relinquishing of a critical liberal perspective were figures like Walter White,
Bayard Rustin, and Roy Wilkins. Many black Americans, including black
intellectuals, became so thoroughly enmeshed in the realpolitik of Democratic
Party liberalism that they lost much of their critical perspective. In so doing they
relinquished African American liberalism for mainstream American liberalism.
The realpolitik constraints on blacks and black intellectuals must be taken into
account when assessing the success or failure of African American liberalism.
First, insofar as the Roosevelt administration had established a winning electoral
coalition by explicitly sacrificing the citizenship rights of southern blacks, there
was no electoral pressure to generate activist interventions on behalf of black
civil rights. Roosevelt’s crude pragmatic logic not only displayed a lack of moral
courage, but was far more tentative than his popularity could have supported.
There was no reason to assume that Roosevelt could not have been elected to a
second or third term had he taken a more militant attitude toward a recalcitrant
white South. Simply put, Roosevelt chose not to run any risks on behalf of black
Americans.
What remains somewhat fascinating is that African American liberalism never
quite caved in to Roosevelt as he would have desired. The political logic of
African American liberalism understood that the success of their mission would
necessitate the destruction of the Roosevelt-New Deal political coalition. The
presidency of Harry S Truman was the first Democratic administration to run any
risks in behalf of embracing African American liberalism.62 In response to
Truman’s civil rights initiatives, the Democratic solid South created the
“Dixiecrat” movement, which almost cost Truman the election of 1948.
Undoubtedly, African American liberalism hit a major impasse in the
aftermath of the legal and political victories of the civil rights movement. It was
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 307

at that point that the limitations of African American liberalism became more
evident. Yet, African American liberalism remains a political idea that generates
a vision of society that is far more humane than the one we currently live in and
the one celebrated by presidents during the past twenty-five years. While it has
limitations, African American liberalism has not become exhausted.

Notes

1. For an excellent discussion of the historical evolution of a unique tradition of

African American liberalism see Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites,
Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993).
2. See the discussion of pre-New Deal, black liberal intellectuals as “radicals” in
August Meier, Negro Thought in America: 1880–1915 (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1963), 171–89. See also the discussion of W.E.B.DuBois and
Monroe Trotter in William Toll, The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory from
Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1979).
3. For an intellectual history of classical Western liberal thought, see Anthony
Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (New York: Basil
Blackwell, 1984).
4. Condit and Lucaites, Crafting Equality, 109.
5. Condit and Lucaites, Crafting Equality, 109–10.
6. This would not be tested until Harry S Truman’s campaign in 1948.
7. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B.DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New
York: Henry Holt, 1993), 423–24.
8. Of course, since 1896 racial segregation in the South was de jure. Because of the
Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the federal government became
committed to the maintenance of racially segregated social worlds, pariticularly in
the South. Of course, these segregated worlds were supposed to be equal, but once
again, the U.S. Supreme Court never attempted to enforce the “equal” component of
that ruling.
9. In this vein the popular belief that a small government is one that allows a
maximum of freedom to “the free market” ignores the reality of the state’s
protection of the market to “take its course.” In the United States, the “free market”
does not exist outside of the authority of the state nor for that matter did its reach
predate state authorization. The latter point is mentioned only to highlight the
misconception of those, in the age of Ronald Reagan, George H.W.Bush, Bill
Clinton, and George W.Bush, who seem to imply that markets were state-of-nature
creations.
10. Actual minimal states exist only in those societies in which the government has too
few resources or too little legitimacy to exercise control over the society.
11. For a convincing argument that the New Deal and other forms of the American
welfare state never intended to address the entire problem of hunger and poverty,
see Frances Fox Piven and Richard A.Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The
Functions of Public Welfare, [rev. Ed.] (New York: Vantage Books, 1993).
308 • JERRY G.WATTS

12. In some respects, the antilynching campaign of Ida Wells-Barnett during the early
twentieth century was premised on this black liberal belief that non-Southern
whites of good will could intervene in behalf of blacks provided their consciences
were pricked. Wells also traveled throughout Europe, where she sought the
intervention of white non-Americans. For an overview of the political project and
ideological appeal of Ida Wells-Barnett see Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B.Wells-
Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893–1930,
(Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990).
13. For a discussion of Roosevelt and the March on Washington movement of 1941,
see Russell L.Riley, The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation-
Keeping from 1831 to 1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 145–54.
14. In addition, to fight in the federal courts was sensible given the limited resources of
the NAACP. Local fights in state and local courts would only result in local
remedies. Certainly the NAACP could not challenge racism in the courts of every
racist city, town, and county in the South.
15. See Mark V.Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education,
1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), for a
discussion of the assumptions that pervaded the NAACP’s legal strategy. See also
Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers
Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution, (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
16. See James C.Harvey, Black Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1973) and Philip A.Klinker with Rogers
M.Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. chapter 8.
17. It is interesting to note that a contemporary attempt to revamp mainstream
American liberalism without its most blatant forms of racism has surfaced in the
response of many white intellectuals to black assertiveness in the post Civil Rights
era. Jim Sleeper’s The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in
New York (New York: W.W.Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (New York: Viking,
1997) are examples of a white liberal’s efforts to reestablish a mainstream
liberalism that does not include blacks as a justifiable special claimant group on
American resources. Sleeper writes as if white Americans, including the urban
white working classes, are racial egalitarians in waiting—waiting, that is, for the
moment when blacks cease to be politicized as blacks. It is a rather shallow
argument and indicates more of a wish in Sleeper’s psyche than a realpolitik
proposal that anyone should take seriously.
18. For an excellent study of African American liberalism, see Dona Cooper Hamilton
and Charles V.Hamilton, The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of
Civil Rights Organizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
19. Important commentaries on the political thought of Booker T.Washington include
Meier, Negro Thought in America, Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro:
From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997);
Wilson Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism: 1850–1925, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988); William Toll, The Resurgence of Race: Black
Social Theory from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1979); and, of course, the two-volume, Louis Harlan
biography of Washington, Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a
Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Louis
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 309

Harlan, Booker T.Washington: The Wizard of Tuskeegee, 1901–1915 (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1983).
20. See Nancy Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of
FDR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
21. See John B.Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980); and Raymond Wolters, Negroes
and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Westport, CT.:
Greenwood, 1970).
22. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 34.
23. Ibid., 35.
24. Ibid., 35.
25. See Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 158–61.
26. Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and
the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1997), 12.
27. For a discussion of Bethune’s acquiesent black liberalism see B.Joyce Ross, “Mary
McLeod Bethune and the National Youth Administration: A Case Study of Power
Relationships in the Black Cabinet of Franklin D.Roosevelt,” in Black Leaders of
the Twentieth Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1982), 191–219.
28. Mary McLeod Bethune, “My Secret Talks With FDR,” in The Negro in Depression
and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945, Ed. Bernard Sternsher (Chicago:
Quadrangle, 1969), 54–56.
29. For a more comprehensive view of Mary Bethune, see Audrey Thomas McCluskey
and Elaine M.Smith, Eds., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World: Essays
and Selected Documents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
30. Unlike Anna Julia Cooper, an assertive African American liberal, Mary Church
Terrell was a moderate African American liberal. See her autobiography, A
Colored Woman in a White World (New York: G.K.Hall, 1996) and Beverly
Washington Jones, Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church
Terrell, 1863–1954 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990).
31. One can get a glimpse of Johnson’s moderate liberalism by reading The Selected
Writings of James Weldon Johnson, 2 vols., Ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
32. Richard Robbins, Sidelines Activist: Charles S.Johnson and the Struggle for Civil
Rights, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), chapter 8.
33. For an understanding of the political limitations of moderate Afro-American
liberalism in the South prior to the civil rights movement see Linda Reed, Simple
Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938–1963
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) and John Egerton, Speak now
Against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
34. Rustin’s astoundingly feeble justification for his willingness to compromise the
interests of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party can be found in Bayard
Rustin, Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of Black Protest (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 52–55. Jervis Anderson’s Bayard Rustin:
Troubles I’ve Seen (New York: Harper Collins, 1997) and Daniel Levine’s Bayard
310 • JERRY G.WATTS

Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2000) are overtly sympathic to Rustin’s moderation.
35. For an extended discussion of Hastie’s militant Afro-American liberalism, see
Gilbert Ware, William Hastie: Grace under Pressure (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984).
36. See Stephen R.Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York:
Atheneum, 1970).
37. See Wayne J.Urban, Black Scholar: Horace Mann Bond, 1904–1972 (Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 1992). See also Adam Fairclough, ed., The Star Creek
Papers: Horace Mann Bond and Julia W.Bond (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1997).
38. Unknown to many in the academic community, Gomillion was a scholar-activist at
Tuskegee Institute. In the early 1960s he was the driving force behind a landmark
civil rights case there, Gomillion v. Lightfoot, and he is briefly mentioned in James
E.Blackwell and Morris Janowitz, eds., Black Sociologists: Historical and
Contemporary Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
39. James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement
(New York: Arbor House, 1985).
40. Richard I.McKinney, Mordecai: The Man and His Message (Washington, D.C.:
Howard University Press, 1997).
41. Kenneth Robert Janken, Rayford W.Logan and the Dilemma of the African-
American Intellectual (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).
42. See Benjamin Mays autobiography, Born to Rebel (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1971) and a collection of critical essays on Mays edited by Lawrence Edward
Carter Sr., Walking Integrity: Benjamin Elijah Mays, Mentor to Martin Luther
King, Jr. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998). Unfortunately, Mays is far
better known as King’s mentor than as a serious activist-minded educator. His life
as a sociological scholar is even more obscure.
43. See Pauli Murray’s posthumously published autobiography, Song in a Weary
Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).
44. Even prior to the Second Armenia Conference, the NAACP had been engaged in
protests against the economic discrimination faced by blacks throughout the
country as well as the deplorable economic conditions of black American life. One
need only read the speeches, memos, lectures, and public writings of the James
Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins that are contained in In Search of
Democracy: The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and
Roy Wilkins (1920–1977), ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999) to see that the economic conditions of poor African
Americans were central to NAACP political concerns.
45. For a discussion of the second Armenia Conference see James O.Young, Black
Writers of the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); John
Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era; Wolters, Negroes and the Great
Depression; and Joyce Ross, J.E.Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP (New York:
Atheneum, 1972).
For a version of the recommendations that came out of the Second Amenia
Conference (August 18–21, 1933), see “The Second Armenia Conference Urges
Emphasis on Economic Problems” in Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth
 CRUSE’S DISMISSAL OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERALISM • 311

Century, 2d ed., ed. August Meier, Elliott Rudwick and Francis L.Broderick
(Indianopolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1971), 154–57.
46. For a profile of Harris and an overview of his work, see William Darity Jr., Race,
Radicalism, and Reform: Selected Papers of Abrahm L Harris (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 1989).
47. For an overview of the work of Ralph Bunche, see Ralph J.Bunche: Selected
Speeches and Writings Ed. Charles P.Henry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995); Charles P. Henry, Ralph Bunce: Model Negro or American Other?
(New York: New York University Press, 1999); and Benjamin Rivlin, Ed., Ralph
Bunche: The Man and His Times, (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990).
48. see Anthony M.Platt, E.Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1991).
49. For a collection of some of Ovington’s writings, see Black and White Sat Down
Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder by Mary White Ovington, Ed.
Ralph Luker (New York: Feminist Press, 1995). See also the Carolyn Wedin
biography, Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the
NAACP (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998).
50. See Jonathan Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E.Franklin
Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002).
51. See Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy.
52. Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for
Civil Rights, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
53. Myrlie Evers, For Us the Living (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967).
54. Merline Pitre, In Struggle against Jim Crow: Lulu B.White and the NAACP, 1900–
1957 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999).
55. See Timothy B.Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F.Williams and the Roots of Black
Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), esp. chapter 3.
56. See Thompson, Ida B.Wells-Barnett.
57. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation
in America (New York: Random House, 1967).
58. E.Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press, 1957).
59. See Oliver Cox, preface to Nathan Hare’s The Black Anglo-Saxons (New York:
Marzoni and Munsell, 1965).
60. See Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in
the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
61. Note, however, that African American liberalism also supported the empowerment
of black people as agents of their own lives. Consequently, even even when
Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey adopted the policy profile of African
American liberalism they did not support the self-determination and self-respect
aspects of it. Thus, Humphrey and Johnson colluded in repressing the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party and in so doing attempted to disempower black
Mississippians in behalf of their support for Johnson’s supposed African American
liberal policy profile.
62. See William C.Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970).
312
 Conclusion
Thirteen Theses Nailed to the Door of Cruse

JERRY G.WATTS

Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual does not lend itself to easy
summation. If there is any conclusion about the book that can be drawn from the
essays contained in this volume it might be that Cruse’s tome remains engaging
precisely because it raises numerous important questions about the politicized
African American intellectual life. The aggressiveness that Cruse embodies as he
pursues various intellectual fowl gave rise to a polemic that is in numerous ways
undernuanced, dogmatic, and tendentious. Yet these very qualities have given
the text a resilient ability to inspire responses from newer generations of readers.
While newer readers will be armed with an ever expanding body of scholarly
resources to utilize in their critiques of Cruse’s various arguments, they will
probably never be able to recapture the importance of the historical moment that
propelled The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual into immediate canonical status
upon its publication. Divorced from the idealism and urgency of the 1960s,
readers today are justifiably more interested in the accuracy of Cruse’s various
arguments than in his ability to inspire African American intellectual
engagement. The publication of The Crisis became an intellectual event due to
the highly politicized environment in which it was released.
The basic intelligence of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is such that even
when wrong, Cruse remains an engaging read. One cannot be sure that more
readers were not inspired by Cruse’s wrongheadedness than by his insights. It is
therefore no surprise that many critics view the sum of The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual as greater than its parts. No single chapter, whether it involves
the Communist Party and blacks; Richard Wright; Lorraine Hansberry; or Claude
McKay has stood up well in regard to new scholarship. Yet Cruse’s errors and
miscalculations have had the effect of generating rich scholarly responses. For
instance, Cruse’s rather ad hominem attacks on West Indian intellectuals in the
United States has given rise to a devastating rebuttal by Columbia University
historian Winston James.1 In his rebuttal, James has provided a new and more
accurate historical analysis of the role played by West Indian radical intellectuals
within twentieth-century American and African American intellectual and
political life.
Any attempt to reevaluate the political and social thought of twentieth century
African American intellectuals must take into account various arguments
314 • JERRY G.WATTS

presented by Cruse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Even in those

instances in which one disagrees with Cruse, the text serves as a focal point of
various debates. Many criticisms of Cruse should be read as revisions, rather
than refutations. The text has become sufficiently prominent that it continues to
serve as a coalescing agent for black intellectual debates and arguments. Simply
put, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual has become a canonical text. Yet, the
flaws in the book are numerous and of sufficient scope that perhaps the time has
come to reconsider its canonical status. This reconsideration may occur for the
wrong reasons. The politically disengaged sensibilities of many among the
younger generations of black intellectuals will probably diminish the
significance of The Crisis.
In conclusion, I thought it only appropriate to revisit some of the problematic
aspects of the text. Though my compendium of various problems is not
exhaustive, the criticisms are significant. Pretending to be a modern-day Martin
Luther standing before the door in Wittenberg, Germany, I metaphorically nail
the following comments to all copies of The Crisis.

One:
Absence of a Sociology of Intellectuals
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is weakened by the absence of a sociology of
knowledge conceptual foundation. The book suffers from Cruse’s lack of a
sociology of intellectuals. Unfortunately, Cruse tends to treat black intellectuals
as if they are disembodied carriers of ideas. This rather idealist conception of
intellectuals prevents Cruse from systematically investigating the material and
cultural self-interests of black intellectuals. On the one hand, Cruse does believe
that the middle-class orientation of many black intellectuals has led them to
endorse integrationism as a project. On the other hand, he claims that the black
middle class was only authentically middle-class in its status pretentious and not
in economic substance. Yet, Cruse does not treat all black intellectuals as a strata
within the black professional class (or intelligentsia) with its own distinct
interests that are not necessarily shared by the broader ethnic group. In other
words, he does not seem to realize that black nationalist intellectuals and black
integrationist intellectuals share similar interests in regards to protecting their
space to act as intellectuals and artists. All black intellectuals—and this is a
generalization—had a vested interest in protecting those venues that gave
importance to their voices. Cruse astoundingly thinks that any black nationalist
intellectual who wrote in the name of black nationalism had the generic interest
of the ethnic group at heart. Such astounding naïveté is accentuated by Cruse’s
belief that black communist intellectuals were, more often than not, dupes of
white folks. Why does he assume that black nationalism rarely functioned as
merely an ideology to legitimate the very self-interested concerns of bourgeois
intellectuals?
 CONCLUSION • 315

Two:
Assumption of Racial Uniformity
Throughout The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Cruse assumes that there is a
core of shared interests and values among all blacks—that is, all “authentic”
blacks (read nonintegrationists). This essentialistic presupposition allows him to
posit all intraethnic political struggles and fights as if they constituted
ideological and intellectual confusions. Worse, Cruse ascribes confusion to
blacks even in those instances when they are not in conflict but merely pursuing
different avenues to address different political issues. His desire to see black
intellectuals create a comprehensive theory to guide their intellectual/artistic
practices is effectively a call for black artistic/intellectual conformity. It is
unclear just why Cruse believes that intellectual uniformity as opposed to
intellectual diffusion is best for the black intelligentsia.

Three:
The Mistaken Centrality of Harlem
Cruse believed that whatever went on in Harlem embodied the most advanced
thought and behavioral tendencies emanating from all of black America. Though
he would claim that no single person or group of persons could speak for the
“Negro,” he still managed to designate Harlem and its intellectual community as
the quintessential representatives of African American possibility in America.
Ironically, the very factors that made Cruse think of Harlem as the essential
cultural center of black America—that is, its uniqueness, and so on—are the very
characteristics that made it unrepresentative of black America. As such, there
was little reason to assume that black intellectual activity in Harlem during the
1920s had anything to do whatsoever with the plight of blacks locked into a
world of neo-chattel slavery on tenant farms in Mississippi. Black intellectuals
who desired to devise a political program to advance the cause of blacks in the
Deep South could not have formulated a viable strategy utilizing Harlem as the
prototype.
Harlem was central to national politics to the extent that most national black
political organizations were housed there. However, this is quite a different point
than Cruse’s claim that the political workings of blacks in Harlem
were determinative for blacks throughout the nation. Black intellectuals who
were based in the South did not view the pronouncements of black intellectuals
in Harlem as central to their political and cultural agendas. Their problems and
opponents were quite different.
There is no reason to think that generations of twentieth-century black
Southern thinkers took marching orders from events and thinkers in Harlem.
Instead, black liberal southern thinkers were often more linked to political and
intellectual infrastructures within the South. Often, these infrastructures were
centered around Southern black colleges, Southern religious organizations, local
316 • JERRY G.WATTS

chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

(NAACP); or those moderate to liberal Southern interracial groups that emerged
with the specific purpose of advancing race relations. These regionally based
infrastructures had far more influence on black southern intellectual/political
thought than the various positions on the “Negro question” that were debated and
issued within northern Communist Party circles. For instance, black intellectual
liberals like Benjamin Mays, Horace Mann Bond Jr., and Mary Bethune were far
more influenced by their memberships in the Southern Conference Movement
than the position papers written by the Communist Party.2 After all, the
Communist Party’s “Negro Nation” thesis had little, if any, impact on the thought
of black southern-based intellectuals.
When Cruse describes the Communist Party organized interracial picket line
in front of the Apollo Theater because it was showing an anti-Soviet play, he
rightly wondered just what this had to do with blacks in Harlem. The irrelevance
of some of the Harlem based Communist Party activities to life in Harlem was
justifiably interesting to someone involved in Harlem Communist circles a la
Cruse. However, the irrelevance of the picket line to black life in Harlem also
speaks to the irrelevance of the entire episode to the concerns of black non-
Harlemites. Why is such a marginal event given such prominence? Cruse is unable
to perceive that events that may have been crucial moments of consciousness
raising for him in Harlem may have had no significance for most blacks in
Harlem and those living elsewhere throughout the nation. His inability to
perceive the importance of regionalism in the development of black intellectual
agendas becomes all the more pronounced given the centrality of the South to
black American political activity and thought at the very moment that he wrote The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. The South was home to the largest sustained
black protest movement in American history. Moreover, it became the focus of
the energies of most non-Southern politically engaged black intellectuals, even
many living in Harlem.

Four:
Misunderstanding the Centrality of African
American religion
The absence of a consideration of African American religious discourses as
important influences on the development of African American political and
cultural thought is an appalling oversight in the text. Religious discourses would
be a central arena for grasping the ways that African Americans
developed critiques of American life and projected visions of an emancipated
future. Perhaps Cruse mistakenly thought that African American religious views
were more significant to the thought of the black mass public as opposed to black
intellectuals. Yet, if this was true, it would not invalidate some attempt to
confront African American religion. Moreover, many prominent black
intellectuals of the twentieth century were directly influenced by African
 CONCLUSION • 317

American religious beliefs: Alexander Crummel; Henry McNeil Turner; Ida B.

Wells-Barnett; James Weldon Johnson; and Howard Thurman. Black religious
ideas were central to the literary project of James Baldwin, who at the time of the
publication of the The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was probably the most
prominent black intellectual in America.3
Perhaps the single major shortcoming in the entirety of the Cruse text is the
absence of a serious consideration of the political beliefs that had given rise to
and sustained the civil rights movement. In this sense, the absence of a
considered commentary on Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and even Ella
Baker is somewhat unbelievable.
When one realizes that Cruse supposedly celebrates self-sufficient black
political and intellectual infrastructures one is shocked by Cruse’s omission of
the black church as one institution that African Americans have been able to
sustain over a long period of time. Moreover, the church often provided the
settings in which blacks could contest various political ideas. The point here is
not to celebrate the church as a vibrant space for intellectual exchange. Such
would be myth. The point is that the institutional church was one mechanism
that some black intellectuals used to reach a black mass audience. Though
African American religious discourses were probably as frequently reactionary
as they were progressive, the church was one black institution of fundamental
significance to the development and transmission of various ideologies that were
embraced by black mass publics. Moreover, the church provided a home to many
black intellectuals, including figures like George Washington Woodbey andR.
R.Wright.
Given the historical uses of Christianity in the subjugation of African slaves
brought to these shores, Cruse’s suspicion of the religion is quite rational.
Moreover, there were more than enough black charlatans who utilized
Christianity as a mechanism for generating therapeutic forms of religious
escapism and sociopolitical acquiescence. Certainly, Father Divine and Bishop
“Daddy” Grace and their kin were not unknown to Cruse in Harlem. Yet, there
were Christian ministers who utilized the church as the site for black protest and
agitation. Even Harlem’s own Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and his son are ignored
in the text.4

Five:
The Role of Black Intellectuals in the Civil
Rights Movement
Cruse does not grasp the extent to which James Baldwin and other black
intellectuals were crucial for generating the liberal climate of support for the
civil rights movement within large sectors of white America. Instead, he
writes as if this liberal support for black civil rights activities was a status-quo
given. It wasn’t. Moreover, Cruse seems to think that the only proper audience
for black intellectual activity was other blacks. He severely underestimates the
318 • JERRY G.WATTS

influence of black intellectuals on white reading publics and white intellectuals.

There is nothing in the entire Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that appears to
address the black intellectual’s impact on whites. Perhaps Cruse believed that
black intellectual had little impact on whites. However, it seems more likely that
his black nationalist assumptions almost by definition restricted his vantage
point of black intellectual to fights waged within the ethnic group.

Six:
Using Anecdotal Data
If there is a single scholarly shortcoming to the Cruse text it might well be that
the evidence that he marshals to support his various arguments and assertions is
quite anecdotal in character. The Crisis can only be understood as a testimony to
Cruse’s attempt to give his personal historical experiences a centrality to black
intellectual life. Cruse never explains why he chooses certain events as defining
moments in black intellectual life. Whatever one might think of the correctness of
Cruse’s description of the ludicrousness of black communists in Harlem
protesting a theater because it would not show Russian plays, it is not clear just
why this event, however hilarious and ill-conceived, should be seen as a major
moment in black intellectual life. Similarly, Cruse repeatedly makes judgments of
the thoughts of black intellectuals based on some eclectic statement that they
may have made when participating in a public forum. He performs such
anecdotal condemnations of James Baldwin and John Henrik Clarke, among
others.

Seven:
Where is Black Music, Particularly Jazz and the Blues?
Given the centrality of culture to Cruse’s claims, how is it that he does not
discuss the role of black music in black life? In particular, Cruse overlooks the
political importance of the blues and jazz. He does point out the crime that the
economic beneficiaries of the music were usually not other blacks, but he does
not interrogate the music as a source of black affirmation and/or opposition. Music
as a source of human meaning and engagement is lost on Cruse because he
ultimately retains a rather doctrinaire Marxist understanding of the value of art
lying in its political usefulness as an organizing tool.

Eight:
Marginalizing Female African American Intellectuals
Evidently Cruse did not think highly of black women as artists and intellectuals.
The only black female artist/intellectual who attracts sustained attention in The
Crisis is Lorraine Hansberry, and the attention she does attract is disparaging.
Cruse’s treatment of Hansberry, however uninformed, does not appear to
 CONCLUSION • 319

have been blatantly sexist. Instead, the discussion of Hansberry is as doctrinaire

and predictable as any other Cruse discussion of a middle-class, black
intellectual who frequented left-wing circles. It seems too simplistic to merely
state that Cruse’s omission of any discussion of the peculiar plight of black
female intellectuals is but a product of the times. Yet, in fairness to Cruse, this
major shortcoming of his book may have been a product of his parochial
intellectual outlook, which was a projection of “the times.”
The omission of a discussion of the black militant journalist-intellectual Ida
B.Wells-Barnett, is troubling.5 After all, Wells-Barnett constituted one radical
black figure who never gravitated to left-wing circles but who was able to
maintain a political militancy that made the NAACP nervous. A Cruse text that
foregrounded Wells-Barnett could have gone a long way toward violating the
constrictures of the overly simplistic typology of nationalist versus integrationist.6
And where are Anna Julia Cooper or Mary Church Terrell? It is also incredible
that Zora Neale Hurston is ignored in the text, though the recovery of Hurston in
American arts and letters would not take place until years after the publication of
The Crisis. However, an inexcusable omission is the writer Alice Childress, who
was a contemporary of Cruse. Childress’s work, even in the theater, is ignored by
Cruse. Childress is mentioned several times in The Crisis, but only as an
intellectual confrere or follower of a more significant black male thinker. But
even that is better than the treatment of Esther Jackson and Shirley Graham
DuBois who are mentioned only as the wives of important men.

Nine:
Ignoring Black Intellectuals Outside of the
Culture Industry
Cruse proclaims that the appropriate sphere for black intellectuals lay within the
realm of Culture. The meaning of this claim has remained ambiguous as Cruse
never defines the boundaries of culture. Yet I suspect that Cruse uses the idea of
the cultural realm to highlight black intellectuals who were expressive artists of
various sorts, whether it be playwrights, actors, novelists, poets, essayists, or
critics. Black painters and sculptors are not discussed. While this is an
unnecessarily limited notion of “the intellectual,” Cruse had a right to limit his
study to expressive artists. Why, however, did Cruse spend so little energy
commenting on the artistic productions of black artists, save playwrights? Most
black artists express their cultural and political ideas within the body of their
works. Cruse celebrates Ralph Ellison as a writer but does not analyze Invisible
Man or Shadow and Act. How could Cruse ignore the poetry of Sterling Brown;
the drawings of Charles White; the paintings of Jacob Lawrence; or the short
stories of Langston Hughes? Cruse is more concerned about the statements made
by black intellectuals when addressing “the role of the black writer” than what
these individuals actually produced in their work. Cruse’s chapter on Richard
Wright does not include a discussion of any of Wright’s novels or nonfiction
320 • JERRY G.WATTS

books. Cruse pretends to offer a cultural critique of black artistic production

without discussing the actual artistic works. He condemns
Baldwin’s contributions to various public forums, but never discusses Another
Country or The Fire Next Time.
Cruse’s limited discussion of black intellectual production becomes even more
problematic when we realize that he excluded all social scientific and historical
scholarship produced by blacks. Despite Cruse’s fondness for E. Franklin
Frazier’s deeply flawed Black Bourgeoisie, there is no mention of the substantive
scholarship of Frazier; Oliver Cox; Ira deA.Reid; or St. Claire Drake. Ralph
Bunche’s A World View of Race and DuBois’s Black Reconstruction are also
ignored.
The narrowness of Cruse’s construct of cultural work can best be seen in his
omission of a serious discussion of the project of Carter G.Woodson.7 Woodson
was the single most important figure in the development of an antiracist
historiography in America. Though his political beliefs were somewhat
contradictory and continually in flux, he embraced a variant of black nationalism
in his advocacy of ethnic uplift. Moreover, Woodson was decidedly intent on the
development of a black-controlled intellectual infrastructure. His creation of the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History is perhaps the quintessential
twentieth-century example of a black intellectual infrastructure. Not only did the
association sponsor conferences but it produced a scholarly journal of high
quality, the Journal of Negro History. In addition, Woodson founded a
publishing house, Associated Publishers, that issued many works by black
scholars that would otherwise have been ignored by white publishers. Moreover,
Woodson believed that an antiracist historiography could have profound impact
on a black citizenry in need of a positive self-image. In creating the Negro
History Bulletin and Negro History Week, Woodson valiantly established
mechanisms whereby black and white scholars could share their antiracist
historiography with a black mass populace. Jacqueline Goggin writes,
“Woodson’s fervent belief that blacks’ enlightenment about their history was
fundamental to overcoming economic and political powerlessness led him to
devote his considerable talents to expanding the base of the Negro history
movement…. Woodson ardently believed that education in black history, rather
than participation in black protest organizations, was the primary vehicle for the
political empowerment of black Americans.”8
Woodson could have been the prototype for an ethnic-centered black
intellectual intent on creating a viable intellectual community. Yet, because
Woodson was not a political essayist or playwright, Cruse cannot grasp the
magnitude of his cultural significance. What text authored by a black intellectual
in the 1930s could have had greater cultural significance to someone of Cruse’s
political sympathies than Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro?
 CONCLUSION • 321

Ten:
Misconstruing the Booker T.Washington Project
Following in the footsteps of Booker T.Washington, Cruse argues that DuBois
erred in fighting for political rights before southern blacks had obtained
a foothold in the southern economy. Cruse writes, “As far back as 1900, Booker
T.Washington counseled the Negro to seek economic self-sufficiency; to soft-
pedal civil rights and social equality until he was on the road to achieving his
own “economic” base for survival. Although the ordinary Negro has always
understood the fundamental wisdom of this advice, his middle-class civil rights
leadership (both Left and Reform) has chosen not to.”9 What remains obviously
baffling about Cruse’s statement is his claim that Washington advised southern
blacks to seek economic self-sufficiency as if some other leaders were arguing
something else. What other option did black southerners have? Cruse writes as if
southern blacks could have developed a dependency on the “welfare state,” even
though that would not come into existence until twenty years after Washington’s
death. DuBois also endorsed economic self-sufficiency in terms of blacks taking
care of themselves, but he did not endorse trading-off political rights for
economic inclusion. And why did Washington believe that southern whites
would care less about economically prospering Negroes than voting Negroes?
Cruse is captured by one of the greatest myths about Washington, that he
advocated ethnic self-sufficiency and/or ethnic autonomy. But who, I ask,
begged white folks for money more frequently and more obsequiously than
Washington? Washington was an unceasing black client in search of white
patrons.

Eleven:
One-Dimensional Critique of the Communist Party
Cruse is so intent on displaying the bankruptcy of the Communist Party as it
related to “Negro” affairs that he does not even grant them any recognition for
their successes. For instance Cruse at no time mentions the crucial role that the
Communist Party played in educating a cadre of black intellectuals. Cruse
himself was a product of this Party-facilitated education, as was Richard Wright,
John Henrik Clarke, Henry Winston, Claude Lightfoot, and Harry Haywood. The
Communist Party was a major way station in the development of many black
intellectuals, including many who, like Cruse, would later condemn it. Ralph
Ellison first published through Communist Party organs. Similarly, insofar as he
restricted his analysis to Harlem, Cruse cannot admit to the heroic attempts of
communist labor organizers throughout the country, but particularly in the
South.
No one needs to doubt that racist paternalism was alive and thriving within the
Communist Party. That black intellectuals were subservient to white party
officials does not appear invalid. Yet, Cruse fails to historicize the attempt of the
322 • JERRY G.WATTS

party to develop an interracial organization. In the chronicles of twentieth-

century American political history, the Communist Party, among predominantly
white political organizations, was unrivaled in its attempt to seriously confront
the issue of blacks. No other interracial organization of similar size has such a
track record. One of the ironies of the intellectual left in the United States
during the twentieth century is that no left-wing spinoff from the party ever
attempted to be as racially inclusive as the party had. Yes, the Communist Party
failed to treat black party members and black peoples in an egalitarian fashion,
but when placed within the historical contexts of American society during the
1930s and 1940s the party’s efforts must be considered extraordinary and
thoroughly unusual.

Twelve:
The Limitations of Black Nationalism
Cruse does not consider the rich diversity in the types of black nationalism
historically embraced by black people. On the one hand, he writes from a generic
assumption that black nationalism is that idea that blacks have collective shared
interests—politically, culturally, and economically—that are best advanced by
collective racial bargaining. However, in eliding mention of the various strains
of black nationalism, Cruse elides a discussion of the vastly different political
agendas supported by these visions. While much of the recent scholarship on
black nationalism was not in print at the time when Cruse wrote his book, he
certainly could have discovered that the ideas of Alexander Crummell were
vastly different from those of Elijah Muhammad and others.10 Moreover, had he
done his scholarly homework, Cruse could have known that black nationalism
was often crudely deferential to white and/or European culture. Wilson Moses, a
premier contemporary scholar of black nationalism, refers to this strain of black
nationalism as “assimilationist black nationalism.”11 In Cruse’s mind, only the
blacks intent on mimicking whites were integrationists. This is a massive error.
In fact, many prointegrationist positions within black America were not
culturally deferential to whites or Europe. One could be an integrationist merely
on the grounds that one believed that black should have access to all jobs,
schools, and neighborhoods that whites had access to. In this sense, was Cruse
acting like an integrationist when he accepted a faculty appointment at the
University of Michigan? Does he think for a minute that the initial decision to
desegregate the faculty of the university wasn’t initiated in the name of racial
integration?

Thirteen:
Contradictions in Argument
There are numerous blatant contradictions in the Cruse text. The Crisis
sometimes reads as if it was not written as a whole book but as a series of
 CONCLUSION • 323

smaller segments that were cut and pasted together. For reasons of space, I will
provide only one example, where Cruse writes:

A social movement of combined forces in Harlem must press relentless for

Harlem autonomy in politics, economics and culture. The first step toward
economic autonomy must be in the nature of a Harlem-wide boycott that will
wrest ownership of all cultural institutions (theaters, halls, club sites, and
movie houses) out of the hands of private, outside concerns, for the key
idea is owned and administered by the people of Harlem; they must
become nationalized, operated and administered for the education and
cultural benefit of the Harlem community, under the control of Harlem
community-wide citizens’ planning commissions.12

Later, however, Cruse posits that:

the direct actionists advanced to the slogan of Black Power, as if to

convince themselves that they were taking a revolutionary step forward, to
wit: Instead of radical integrationism the theme became economic and
political control by blacks in the black ghettos and in geographical areas of
black majority in the South. But is this a step forward or backward…or
perhaps a one step-backward-two-steps-forward sort of gambit? Whatever
it is, it is essentially another variation of the old Communist leftwing
doctrine of “self-determination in the black belt areas of Negro majority”—
but with certain innovations…. The old Communist Party doctrine did not
include the Northern ghettos in this scheme as the Black Power exponents
do…. Except for time, place, circumstances, plus a few innovative,
ideological twists, there is very little that is new in all of this.13

As published, The Crisis was almost six hundred pages in length. Without
knowing anything about the production of the book, one can justifiably assume
that the original text that Cruse submitted to his editor was at least twice that
length. Perhaps the unwieldy size of the manuscript prevented close readings by
editors that could have corrected some of the contradictions in the text.
Finally, the major limitation of the The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is that
Cruse continually hits black intellectuals and artists over the head for their
abdication of their responsibility to develop a cultural theory that would place
black artists and intellectuals in the service of the black struggle. Yet nowhere in
the book besides in some vague advocacy of black nationalism does Cruse put forth
his version of this cultural ideology. In effect, Cruse is far more adept at pointing
out the limitations of others than at generating a creative theory or ideology.
Unfortunately for Cruse, one does not become a saint by pointing out the sins of
others. We must ask, Where is the cultural theory?
324 • JERRY G.WATTS

Notes

1. See Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Carribean Radicalism
in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998), 262–91.
2. See Linda Reed, Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference
Movement, 1938–1963 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). For an
exhaustive survey of interracial networks frequently by black southern intellectuals
prior to the 1950s see John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation
Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1994).
3. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow,
1967), 10.
4. Cruse only mentions Congressman Powell as the initial person to use the term,
black power. In some respects, Cruse’s elitism precludes him from viewing any
black minister as an intellectual, though a few of them were. Powell Jr. probably
was not an intellectual, but he was too important a figure in Harlem political circles
to go unmentioned.
5. Linda O.McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B.Wells (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
6. The same could be said for Monroe Trotter, who, like Wells, was not a leftist nor was
he at home within the NAACP.
7. For a comprehensive study of Woodson’s contribution to the black freedom
struggle see Jacqueline Goggin’s excellent biography Carter G.Woodson: A Life in
Black History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).
8. Ibid., 140.
9. Cruse, Crisis, 174.
10. Over two decades after the publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
Wilson Jeremiah Moses would publish an outstanding biography, Alexander
Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989).
11. See Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Wings of Ethiopia: Studies in African-American
Life and Letters (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990), esp. chapter 6,
“Assimilationist Black Nationalism, 1890–1925.”
12. Cruse, Crisis, 86–87.
13. Ibid., 547.
 Index
A Association for the Study of Negro Life
A Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry) 150, 203
(n.7), 230
Adamic, Louis 92–93 (n.47)
African-American musical modernism
113–115
African Blood Brotherhood 55–56
African National Congress 178, 184
African Review 199
Afro-American Association 254
Afro-American Cultural Society 250
Afro-American Realty Company 60–61;
65–66; 68; 70
Afrocentricity 11, 235–244
Afrocentricity (Asante) 235
Ain’t I A Woman (hooks) 229
Allen, Bazel 228
Allen, James (aka Sol Auerbach) 148
Allen, Robert L. 6, 14, 260
Alternative Newport Festival 115
American Jewish Committee 128–130
American Jewish Congress 128–131
American Negro Theater 151
American Society for African Culture 22,
25, 84, 251
Angelou, Maya 30
Anti-colonialism 78
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith
128–132, 138 (n.l4), 139 (n.20)
Aptheker, Herbert 84, 148
Arabs 77–78
Arlen, Harold 98
Arvey, Verna 100
Associated Publishers 320
Association for the Advancement of
Colored Musicians (AACM) 115
325
and History 320
Association of Artists for Freedom 257
B
Baker, Ella 300, 316
Baldwin, James 21, 23, 30, 46, 189, 190,
192, 196, 199, 203 (n.9), 228, 253, 274,
316, 317, 319–320
Bandung Conference 17, 251
Baraka, Amiri (see LeRoi Jones)
Bass, Charlotta 177
Belafonte, Harry 249, 250
Bell, Daniel 185 (n.4)
Bell, Roseann 249
Berlin, Edward 101, 106 (n.l8)
Berlin, Irving 98, 100, 101
possible theft from Scott Joplin 101
Berliner, Paul 114
Bethune, Mary McLeod 177, 298,
308 (n.27, n.29), 315
Beveridge, Lavell 31
Black Artist Group in St. Louis 115
Black Arts Repertory Theater/School 34;
40 (n.50); 118–119; 256
Black Awakening in Capitalist America
260
Black Bourgeoisie (Frazier) 57, 71, 201,
228, 258, 304, 320
Black capitalists in Harlem 59–60
Black Church 10, 11, 209–227, 315–316
black ministers as intellectuals
209–227
sexism of 209, 227
326 • INDEX

Black expatriates/exiles in Ghana 18, Butcher, Margaret 36

188–206,
Black-Jewish relations 97–109, 125–141, C
141–161 “Cabin in the Sky” 97
Black Marxism 141–149 Cade, Toni 228
Black Metropolis (by Drake and Cayton) Calverton,V.F. 145
72 Campbell, Grace 55
Black Nationalism 1, 3, 4, 6, 10–12; 17, Camus, Albert 84
44–51; 53, 55, 61–62; 65–70; 76, 78, Carmichael, Stokely (Kwam Ture) 3, 133,
81–82, 85, 86, 125–127, 133–134, 135 167, 168, 170 (n.l5), 231, 245, 303
(n.4), 163, 166, 197, 229, 245–266, cathartic-leadership 45
271–286, 322 Cesaire, Aime 242, 252
Black Panther Party 25, 133, 192, 266(n.73) Chaney, James 132
Black Power movement 3, 17, 151, 164, Childress, Alice 152–153; 159–161(n.37),
166–167, 197, 200–201, 206 (n.42), 319
216, 245–266 Chrisman, Robert 7, 14, 17, 73, 146, 259
Black Power (Carmichael/Hamilton) 133, CIA and black intellectuals 205 (n.
303 20, n.38), 206 (n.44)
The Black Scholar (magazine) 2, 7 Civil Rights Act of 1964 2–3, 179
Black Studies Programs 2, Civil Rights Movement 2, 8, 17, 216, 290,
Black Swan Records 117, 119 316–317
The Black Woman (Cade) 228 Clark, Ed 176
Blackmun, Harry 133 Clark, Kenneth and Mamie 300
Blake, Eubie 100 Clarke, John Henrik 21, 30, 193, 198, 251,
Bland, Edward 20 254, 317, 321
Blesh, Rudi 97 Cleage, Rev. Albert 29
Blyden, Edward 235 Cleaver, Eldridge 3, 216
Boggs, James and Grace Lee 26–29; 37, Clinton, George 117
254 (Parliament and Funkadelic)
Bond, Horace Mann 72, 300, 315 cold war 245, 250
Bond, Julian 300 Cole, Nat King 250
Borstelmann, Thomas 180 Coleman, Ornette 114
Botkin, Benjamin 103 Coltrane, John 114–115
Botkin, Henry 103 Committee for the Negro in the Arts 151,
Boutelle, Paul 255 248, 250
Brandeis, Louis 128 Committee on Negro Art 192
Braxton, Anthony 115 Communist Party (USA) 5, 6, 9, 10, 14,
Breitman, George 256, 265 (n.60) 17–19; 23, 52–54; 81–82; 103, 112, 135
Briggs, Cyril 55, 56, 165 (n.3), 135 (n.5), 137 (n.8), 141–148, 158
Brown v. Board of Education 195, 197 (n.18), 161–170, 247–249, 251, 253,
Brown, H.Rap 3 258–262, 313, 315, 321–322
Brown, James (entertainer) 9, 116–117; and blacks 161–170
Brown, Lloyd 155–157(n.2); Condit,Michelle 290
159–161(n.37) Cone, James 216–218
Brown, Sterling 319 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 69,
Bunche, Ralph 300, 320 132, 133
Burroughs, Nannie Helen 223 Constitutional Moralism 85–87
Busia, Dr. Kofi 200

Cooper, Anna Julia 229–231, 300, 319
Cordero, Ana Livia 198
Council on African Affairs 176–184,
Cox, Oliver 81, 304, 320
Crafting Equality (Condit & Lucaites) 290
Creative Musicians Assoc of Detroit 115
Crummel, Alexander 316, 322
The Crusader 254
Cruse, Harold biography 17–40, 248–256
as cold warrior 175–188
as lyricist 20–21
as playwright 20–21
as precursor to Afrocentrists 235–244
as sexist 5, 11, 228–231
at B.A.R.T. 34–36
in Greenwhich Village 19–20, 249
on black capitalism 59–61
on black modernist dilemma 44–46
on black separatism 276–277
on Cuba 18, 19, 23–24, 26, 36, 197,
248, 251–253, 258, 259
on cultural democracy 7, 271–286
on culture 7, 79–81
on ethnic politics 48–51, 85–89
on Harlem 5, 19, 148–151, 277–282,
283–285(n.7), 285 (n.8), 286 (n.17),
314–315, 322–323
on interracialism and black thinkers
51–54
on Jones’s Blues People 111, 113
on West Indian intellectuals 4, 53–57,
157 (n.14), 202 (n.4), 313
on white jazz critics 113
Cuban Revolution 18, 23–24; 26, 36
D
Daily Worker 19, 21, 163, 248
Damas, Leon 242
Davidson, Basil 198
Davis, Allison 72
Davis, Angela 150, 159 (n.26), 165, 168,
231, 240, 245
Davis, Ben 165,
Davis, John Aubrey 300
Davis, Ossie 31, 54, 150, 192
DeBerry, Clifton 29, 255
Dee, Ruby 54, 150, 192
INDEX • 327
Delany, Hubert 130
Delany, Martin 177, 235
Diddley, Bo 117
Diop, Alioune 242
Dolphy,Eric 114–115;
domestic colonialism 77–78
Domingo, W.A. 55
Douglass, Frederick 58, 70, 231
Drake, St. Clair 29
Draper, Theodore 157 (n.13)
Duberman, Martin 175, 177, 181–182
DuBois, Shirley Graham 196, 319
DuBois, W.E.B. 1, 10, 56–57; 61–62; 66,
70, 81, 92 (n.31), 99, 165, 168, 176,
177, 180, 183, 188–194, 196, 228, 231,
236, 247, 300, 301, 304, 320, 321
DuBoisian double-consciousness 236,
282
W.E.B.DuBois clubs 167
Duke Records 116
Duke-Peacock Records 117
E
Ebony magazine 184–185
Edelstein, Nathan 131
Eisenhower, Dwight (administration)
195–196
Ellington, Duke 110–112, 177
Ellison, Ralph 63, 81, 84, 161 (n.40), 228,
278–280, 285 (n.10, n.13), 319, 321
End-of-ideology debate 175, 185 (n.4)
Epps, Archie 63
Epstein, Melech 148–149
Essien-Udom, E.U. 36
Evers, Medgar 302
F
Fair Play for Cuba Committee 18–19; 24,
30, 39 (n.40)
Fanon, Frantz 83, 200, 241, 253
Farmer, James 290, 300
Father Divine 57, 316
Fauntroy, Walter 213
Fauset, Jessie 230
Felder, Cain Hope 218
Finkenstaedt, James 32–34; 39–40(n.44);
40 (n.49)
328 • INDEX

Finkenstaedt, Rose L.H. 32 Gordon, Milton 87, 145

Foley, Barbara 159 (n.32)
Ford, James 165
Fortune, T.Thomas 59–60
Foucault, Michel 283 (n.1)
Frankel, Philip 128
Franklin, Robert Michael 219
Frazier, E.Franklin 57, 65, 71, 81, 89,
93(n.65), 201, 228, 258, 300, 304, 320
Freedom (newspaper) 21, 175, 193,
248–250
Freedom Now Party 18, 26, 28–29; 30, 33,
37, 248, 255, 256
Freedomways (magazine) 7, 151, 189, 193,
254, 260
Freeman, Donald 25, 33, 255
G Harlem Renaissance 275
Garvey, Amy Jacques 231
Garvey, Marcus 7, 44, 56, 57, 64, 126,
164, 166, 168, 176, 231, 235, 259, 261
Gaye, Marvin 117
Genovese, Eugene D. 6
George, Nelson 116–117
Gershwin, George 8, 9, 97–112.
“Blue Monday as “nigger opera” 102
possible theft from Eubie Blake, 100
possible theft from William Grant Still,
100, 106 (n.17)
Gershwin as “white Negro” 101–105;
108 (n.24); 108 (n.26); 108 (n.37)
Ghana 188–206
Gibson, Richard 19, 21–25; 30
Giddings, Paula 229
Gilbreth, Frank 103
Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend 221–223
Gillespie, Dizzy 113, 114
Gilroy, Paul 237
Glazer, Nathan 87, 147, 158 (n.19)
Gleason, Phillips 87, 88
Goggin, Jacqueline 320, 324 (n.7)
Goldberg, Isaac 102
Golden Gate Quartet 177
Golden, Harry 129
Gomillion, Charles G. 300
Goodman, Andrew 132
Goodman, Benny 110
Grace, Bishop “Daddy” 57, 316
Grant, Jacqueline 213, 219–221
Guinier, Ewart 63
Gullahs on James Island 104
Guy, Rosa 192
Guy-Sheftall, Beverly 229
H
Hahamovitch, Cindy 296
Halle, Kay 105
Hamer, Fannie Lou 290, 299, 300
Hamilton, Charles 133, 300, 303
Hansberry, Lorraine 4, 11, 21, 46, 150,
159 (n.29), 188, 189, 192, 199,
203 (n.7), 228, 230, 248, 249, 251, 259,
274, 313, 317–319
Harlem Writers Club 151, 248, 263 (n.27)
Harlem Writers Guild 119, 151
Harper, Frances E.W. 230
Harris, Abram 300
Harrison, Hubert 177
Hastie, William 299, 309 (n.35)
Haywood, Harry 165, 321
Herndon, Angelo 165
Hertzberg, Rabbi Arthur 135 (n.6)
Heyward, DuBose 97, 99, 102, 104,
108 (n.24)
Hicks, Calvin 23, 24
Higginbotham, Leon 300
Himes, Chester 9, 141–150, 155–157(n.2),
157 (n.11), 190
Hip-Hop 117
Holt, Len 31
Hollinger, David 87
hooks, bell 229
Hoover, J.Edgar 27, 184
Hopkins, Dwight 219
Horne, Gerald 150, 159 (n.26)
Houston, Charles Hamilton 12, 301
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black
America 260
Huggins, Nathan 63
Hughes, Everard 128, 137–138(n.10)
Hughes, Langston, 21, 23, 149, 29
Humphrey, Hubert 311 (n.61)
 INDEX • 329

Hunton,W.Alphaeus 176–180 K
Hurston, Zora Neale 219, 229, 319 Kaiser, Ernest 7, 8, 260
Hutchinson, Earl Ofari 158 (n.22) Karenga, Maulana 6, 239–240
Kawaida 240
I Keil, Charles 116
I’ll Take My Stand x, 12 Kelley, Robin D.G. 150, 261
Integrationism or interracialism 4, 8, 9, Kennedy, John F. (administration) 27, 32,
43–47, 51–55, 58, 64, 66, 85, 86, 125, 196–197, 305
133, 135 (n.4), 201, 229, 238–239, 276 Kenya Africa Union 184
International African Service Bureau 177 Kern, Jerome 105
International Socialist Review 255 Killens, John Oliver 23, 46, 150, 153–155;
Israel 127, 137 (n.9) 158 (n.28, n.29), 161 (n.40)
Kilson,Martin 300
J King, Martin Jr. 3, 29, 32, 70, 133, 168,
Jackson, Esther 319 180, 192, 197, 200, 231, 290, 316
James, C.L.R. 81, 154, 176 Kochiyama, Yuri 34–35; 37 (n.11, n.15)
James, Winston 4, 14, 55, 202(n.4), 313 Kohn, Hans 36
Jazz 9, 110–120 Kwanzaa 240
Jazz Artists’s Guild 115
Jerome, V.J. (aka Jerome Isaac Romaine) L
148 Ladner, Joyce 300
Jewish Labor Committee 130 Lamming, George 253
Jewish Leftists 51–52; 55, 82, 86–87, 89, Lasch, Christopher 1, 5–6, 12–14, 87, 203
97–98, 125, 135(n.3, n.5), 146, (n.8), 260
147–148, 153 Lattimore, Richard 272
Jewish Life magazine 147 Lawrence, Jacob 319
Jews 6, 9, 88, 125–141 Lawson, James 24
Jews in music business 97–101; 106–108 League of Revolutionary Black Workers
(n.19) 304
Johnson Publications 119 Lee, Dr. Robert 196
Johnson, Charles Spurgeon 71, 298 Lewis, David Levering 99
Johnson, Hall 97 Lewis, John 33
Johnson, Jack 194 Liberalism 12, 131–134, 137 (n.8)
Johnson, James P. 100 African-American Liberalism 287–311,
Johnson, James Weldon 56, 59, 65, 70, 308 (n.18), 309 (n.33)
298, 300, 309 (n.31), 316 Liberation Committee for Africa 24, 30,
Johnson, Lyndon (administration) 290, 32;
294, 305, 311 (n.61) later became Afro-American Institute
Johnson, Mordecai 300 liberation theology 217–218
Jolson, Al 100, 102 Liberator magazine 18, 21, 26, 29–33; 37,
Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) 6, 19, 20, 23, 189, 248, 252–256
25, 34, 46–48; 51, 111, 113, 116, Lightfoot, Claude 166, 321
119 (n.2), 228, 231, 245, 252, 262, 263 Lincoln, C.Eric 211
(n.26), 274 Lipsitz, George 120 (n.13)
Jones, Major 217 Little Richard 117
Joplin, Scott 101 Little Rock crisis (1957) 195–196
Journal of Negro History 320 Locke, Alain 228
330 • INDEX

Logan, Rayford 300 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party 17,

Lorde, Audre 192 132–133, 299
Lost in the Stars (a play) 192 Montgomery Bus Boycott 17
Lott, Eric 102, 114 Moon, Henry Lee 177
Loury, Glenn 68 Moore, Carlos 241
Lubiano, Wanheema 90 (n.29) Moore, Queen Mother Audley 254
Lucaites, John Louis 290 Moore, Richard 31, 55, 56
Lumumba, Patrice 18, 24, 179, 199, 252, Morrow, E.Frederic 195–196
255 Morrow, Edward 97
Lunes de Revolucion 21 Moses, Bob 299
Lynn, Conrad 26–29 Moses, Wilson 83, 322, 324 (n.10)
Motown Records 116, 117
M Moynihan, Daniel P. 87
Malcolm X 17, 24–26; 29, 32, 33, 63, 133, Muhammad, Elijah 322
164, 167, 168, 190–194, 197, 200, 254, Muhammad Speaks 254
255, 262, 265 (n.60) Mullen, Bill V. 4, 14
Mallory, Mae 31 Murphy, George Jr. 31
Mamiya, Lawrence 211 Murray, Albert 6, 14, 63
Manchester Pan-African Congress 177 Murray, Pauli 300
Mandela, Nelson 241, 243 Myrdal, Gunnar 43
Mao Tse-Tung 255
Marable, Manning 17, 37, 150, 159 (n.26), N
230, 240 NAACP 25, 45, 57, 62, 63, 66, 69, 99, 125,
March on Washington (1963) 27, 33, 196 129, 130, 165, 166, 177, 181, 197, 291,
Marshall Plan 181 293, 295, 300–303, 308 (n.14, n.15),
Marshall, Paule 274 315
Marshall, Thurgood 12, 300, 302 Second Armenia Conference 309 (n.44,
Marxism 6–8; 37, 76, 82–83 n.45)
Matthews, Ralph 97–97 Naison, Mark 4, 14
Maxwell, William J. 4, 14 Nation of Islam 18, 63, 69, 131, 166–168,
Mayfield, Julian 10, 17, 21, 30, 46, 54, 304
150, 176, 180, 188–202, 202 (n.3), 248, National Association of Colored Women
251, 254, 259–260 129, 130
Mays, Benjamin 300, 309 (n.42), 315 National Council of Jewish Women
McKay Claude 4, 43, 54, 313 128–130
McNeil, Genna Rae 301 National Council of Negro Women 130,
McWilliams, Carey 92–93(n.47) 177
Mellers, Wilfred 105, 109 (n.46) National Negro Business League 60, 62
Mercer, Kobena 103 National Negro Congress 165
Michaux, L.H. 31 National Urban League 58, 69, 129, 130,
Michaels, Walter Benn 99 133, 165, 166
Micheaux, Oscar 119 nativism 41–43
Mills, C.Wright 36, 79, 84 Neal, Larry 35, 116
Mingus, Charles 114, 115 Negritude 241, 242
The Mis-education of the Negro Negro History Bulletin 320
(Woodson) 320 Negro History Week 320
Negro Playwrights Company 151

New Leader magazine 252, 254
Newton, Huey 133
Nietzche, Friedrich 279
Nixon, Richard 195, 200–201, 206 (n.42)
Nkrumah, Kwame 10, 179, 190–194, 196,
198–202, 255
Novak, Michael 87
O Revolution Action Movement (RAM) 25,
Obenga, Theophile 243
Ochs, Phil (folksinger) 26
Oedipus Tyrannos 271–272, 282
Olney, Warren III 184
On Guard 23, 24
operational-leadership 45
Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 71
Organization of Young Men 23
Ovington, Mary White 300
Owen, Chandler 55, 56
P Rollins, Sonny 114
Padmore, George 81, 164, 177
Palestinians 127, 137 (n.9), 141 (n.25)
Pan-Africanism 175–188, 188–206
Parker, Charlie 113
Payton, Philip A. 60–61; 64–66; 68, 70
Pells, Richard 1, 12
Pettiford, Oscar 113
Pinkney, Alphonso 283 (n.3)
Piven, Francis Fox (Richard Cloward) 3,
12, 306 (n.11)
Plessy v. Ferguson 293, 301, 303,
306 (n.8)
Poitier, Sidney 192
Popular Front 149
Porgy and Bess 9, 97–105, 112
Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr. 316
Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr 32, 132,
139 (n.20), 316, 324 (n.4)
Powell, Annie Ruth 213–214, 219
pragmatism among blacks 59, 79, 297–299
Presence Africaine 22, 25, 252
Pulitzer Prize rejects Duke Ellington 110
R Sklar, Martin 25, 26, 39 (n.25)
Radano, Ronald 115, 120 (n.8)
INDEX • 331
Randolph, A.Phillip 55, 56, 132,
139 (n.20), 164, 168, 196, 293
Rebellion or Revolution (Cruse) 17, 19, 21,
22, 33, 37, 39, 76, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 90
(n.19, n.21, n.27), 175, 235, 235, 243
Redding, J.Saunders 22
Reed, Ishmael 87
Reid, Ira de A 300, 320
33, 35
Reynolds, Quentin 146–147
Rhapsody in Blue (1929) 102
Roach, Max 115
Roberts, J.Deotis 217
Robeson, Eslanda 158 (n.22), 176, 177,
231
Robeson, Paul 10, 11, 21, 46, 105,
109 (n.44), 112, 132, 150, 158 (n.22),
159 (n.29), 175–194, 231, 248, 249, 251
Robinson, Cedric 149–150
Roosevelt, Eleanor 296
Roosevelt, Franklin D. (administration)
289, 291, 293, 295–298, 305,
306 (n.11), 306 (n.13)
Rosenwald, Julius 58
Ross, Roger P. 183
Rowan, Carl T. 184–185
Runnin’ Wild (Broadway show) 98
Rustin, Bayard 196, 299, 300, 305,
309 (n.34), 316
S
Salt of the Earth (film) 152
Sanchez, Sonia 231
Schappes, Morris U. 147
Schwerner, Michael 132
Scottsboro Boys 146, 149, 158 (n.18), 165
Seldes, Gilbert 112
Senghor, Leopold Sedar 241, 242, 252
Shoat, Ella 109 (n.43)
Shuffle Along 100, 112
Sidran, Ben 116
Singer, Barry 98
Sklare, Marshall 138 (n.12)
Sleeper, Jim 308 (n.17)
332 • INDEX
Smallens, Alexander 105
Smith, Judy 90 (n.4); 93 (n.64)
Snellings, Rolland, 33
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) 28–29,
255, 256, 265 (n.60)
Society for African Culture 22
Sollors, Werner 87
Sophocles 271–272
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
69
Soviet Union 10, 168, 178, 182
Sowell, Thomas 68, 228
Spelman College 229
Spellman, A.B. 116
Spillers, Hortense 75–79
Spingarn, Arthur 300
Spingarn, Joel 99, 300
Spiral painters 119
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 92 (n.41)
Stalinism 151, 159 (n.32), 241, 250
Stax Records 117
Steele, Shelby 68
Steiner, George 279, 282
Stettinius, Edward Jr. 180
Still, William Grant 100, 106 (n.17)
Stimson, Henry L. 299
Stone, Sly 117
Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee 25, 132, 133, 167, 190, 254
Stuckey, Sterling 175, 180–181
Studies on the Left 25, 26, 77, 252, 254
Sturdy Black Bridges (Bell and Guy
Sheftall) 229
Such, David 115
Sun Ra 115
Sutherland, Bill 195, 196
T Welsh, Kariamu 234
Tales of Lido (Mayfield) 197
Taylor, Billy 114
Taylor, Cecil 115
Terrell, Mary Church 308 (n.30), 319
Thomas, Tony 266 (n.80)
Thompson, Virgil 97
Those Other People (Childress) 152–153
Thurman, Howard 316
Tin Pan Alley 97, 100, 101, 103
Torgovnick, Marianna 103, 108 (n.27)
Toure, Sekou 255
Treemonisha (Joplin) 101
Trotter, Monroe 44, 66, 300
Trotsky, Leon 231
Truman, Harry (administration) 179,
305–306
Truth, Sojourner 229
Tubman, Harriet 229
Turner, Henry McNeil 316
U
Umbra Poets 119
Underground Musicians of Los Angeles
115
V
Vietnam War 3, 133, 192, 200
Von Eschen, Penny 159 (n.32), 188
Voting Rights Act of 1965 2, 3, 12, 179
W
Wade-Gayles, Gloria 229
Wald, Alan 202 (n.4)
Wald, Lillian 128
Walker, Alice 219, 220, 229
Walker, Margaret 230
Washington, Booker T. 58–62; 64, 66,
68–71, 164, 231, 298, 320–321
Washington, Joseph R. 217
Wattley, Pernella 27–28
Watts Riot/Rebellion 3, 17
Watts, Dan 24, 30–33
Watts, Jerry Gafio 12, 84, 159 (n.33), 249
Weaver, Robert 299
Wells-Barnett, Ida 12, 44, 70, 230, 231,
302, 306 (n.12), 316. 319
West, Cornel 11, 212, 239, 240,
When and Where I Enter (Giddings) 229
White, Charles 319
White, Lulu 302
White, Walter 12, 70, 130, 177, 181, 305
Whiteman, Paul 110
Wilkins, Roy 168, 305
Williams, Delores 223–224
Williams, Mary Lou 114, 177
 INDEX • 333

Williams, Robert 24, 31, 176, 190,

197–198, 251, 254, 255, 302
Wilson, Ernest 228
Wilson, Michael 152
Wilson, William Julius 228
Wilson, Woodrow (administration) 291
Winston, Henry 321
Wise, Rabbi Stephen 128
Wolin, Sheldon 283 (n.1)
Womanism 219–224, 226 (n.34, n.35,
n.36)
Woodard, Komozi 262
Woodson, Carter G. 72, 228, 235, 243,
320
Woodson, Robert 68
Wortham, Ann 68
Worthy, William 26–32; 39 (n.37)
Wright, Richard 4, 22, 23, 46, 54, 81,
92 (n.31), 143, 164, 188–192, 228, 249,
252, 313, 319, 321
Wright, Sarah 176

Y
Yergen, Max 176
Youngblood 153–155

Z
Zionism 6, 125, 126, 137 (n.9)