The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual [Paperback]

Harold Cruse (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0688038867 | ISBN-13: 978-0688038861 | Publication Date: June 1984

Published in 1967, as the early triumphs of the Civil Rights movement yielded to increasing frustration and violence, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual electrified a generation of activists and intellectuals. The product of a lifetime of struggle and reflection, Cruse's book is a singular amalgam of cultural history, passionate disputation, and deeply considered analysis of the relationship between American blacks and American society. Reviewing black intellectual life from the Harlem Renaissance through the 1960s, Cruse discusses the legacy (and offers memorably acid-edged portraits) of figures such as Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin, arguing that their work was marked by a failure to understand the specifically American character of racism in the United States. This supplies the background to Cruse's controversial critique of both integrationism and black nationalism and to his claim that black Americans will only assume a just place within American life when they develop their own distinctive centers of cultural and economic influence. For Cruse's most important accomplishment may well be his rejection of the clich?s of the melting pot in favor of a vision of Americanness as an arena of necessary and vital contention, an open and ongoing struggle.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Eloquent, passionate, forceful — Harold Cruse has had an electrifying impact on an entire generation of African American intellectuals." -- Gerald Horne, author of Race Woman

"I think many of us received the call to be an intellectual through Harold Cruse." -- Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual...crystallized a moment." -- The New York Times --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From the Publisher

"[T]he most imaginatively documented and politically sophisticated working prospectus on the built-in contradictions and disjunctions of the Negro Revolution."—Albert Murray --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 594 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co (June 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688038867
• ISBN-13: 978-0688038861
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The book that changed my intellectual life period, August 31, 2006

By 

E. D. Daniels (tampa, florida United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

In this sparwling 500 page book, Cruse lays out his polemics against the Civil Rights movement for ignoring the economic issues that plagued us then and now,acusses black artists for betraying their own cultural gifts to gain wider credibility and lays down the basic ethos of American captialist life.. Every racial group for themselves. And on top of that goes first after black ministers who were more concerned about their own power than uplifting American- Americans and Norman Podhoretz practically calling him a fascist (he is) and the scared cow of all... Saying the so-called Black- Jewish alliance was a sham seeing all this by 1967. Unlike Black intellectuals of today, Cruse spares no one institution in American life in one of the great books in American Thought.



This one book I read 10 years ago along with the "Autobiography of Malcolm X" changed my life and committed me to a life of reading and seeking truth wherever it led me.Cruse who died last year, was America's last great intellectual unlike those today who appear on C-SPAN, Fox and other news outlets being "pop intellectuals" Cruse was searching for truth and solutions in the lives of African- Americans and for that we should be grateful.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He pretty much says it all., July 15, 2005

By 

Third World (Bronx, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

I don't think Black people can ever have a real conversation about unity until they read this book. Especially the chapter called 'Idealogy in Black'. The book is extremely honest about West Indian, African and African American behavior towards each other which ultimately leads to implosion. He covers everything, The Harlem Renaissance, Communism and many other critical topics but I think his thoughts on why Black movements fail (internal strife/lack of cultural, political and economic direction) are dead on.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A GROUNDBREAKING STUDY FOR ITS TIME, AND STILL OF CURRENT INTEREST, January 21, 2011

By 

Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (Paperback)

Harold Wright Cruse (1916-2005) was an American academic who was an outspoken social critic and teacher of African-American studies at the University of Michigan until the mid-1980s.

He writes in the first chapter of this 1967 book, "I have attempted to define what a considerable body of Negroes have thought and expressed on a less analytic and articulate level... There is, however, a broad strain of Negro social opinion in America that is strikingly cogent and cuts through class lines." He later summarizes, "The purpose of this study so far has been to explore the origins of the many factors leading to the impasse the Negro movement has reached as of this moment." (Pg. 402)

Here are some quotations from the book:

"Harlem is the black world's key community for historical, political, economic, cultural and/or ethnic reasons. The trouble is that Harlem has never been adequately analyzed in such terms." (Pg. 12)
"But Harlem also fostered something else which has not been adequately dealt with in the history books---a cultural movement and a creative intelligentsia." (Pg. 22)
"West Indians are never so 'revolutionary' as when they are taken away from the Islands." (Pg. 47)
"Unable to arrive at any philosophical conclusions of their own as a black intelligentsia, the leading literary lights of the 1920's substituted the Communist left-wing philosophy of the 1930's, and thus were intellectually side-tracked for the remainder of their productive years." (Pg. 63)
"It is true that the coming of Wright and Ellision marked new achievements in the novel, and Baldwin, did prevent that trend from losing its luster. But in QUALITY the Negro has retrogressed in every creative field except jazz." (Pg. 69)
"But not a single Garveyite settlement ... exists in Africa today. In 1926, the highly inspirational, but also romantic and escapist, character of the Garvey movement served to hide the fact that the movement was not facing the hard realities in a scientific way---either at home or in Africa." (Pg. 82)
"The tragedy of the black bourgeoise in America ... is rather that no class the world over sells out so cheaply..." (Pg. 91)
"Like most Americans, Negroes are profoundly anti-theoretical... it is all impatient action without much plan or deep reflection." (Pg. 92-93)
"In the 1950's the community of Harlem cried out for social analysis, with a whole raft of unresolved issues." (Pg. 234)
"One cannot have a black economy until the day comes when the bulk of profits accrued from commercial enterprises in Harlem are poured back into the community for further development." (Pg. 314-315)
"Not since Garveyism collapsed through Garvey's own personal economic ineptitude has a single Negro leader, with the exception of W.E.B. DuBois, presented a creative economic idea---good, bad, or indifferent." (Pg. 331)
"But the 'masses of our people' have not yet said they want a revolution. They want equal rights." (Pg. 392)
"The only real politics for the creative intellectual should be the politics of culture. The activists of race, nationalism, and civil rights will never understand this, hence the dilemma becomes another ramification of the manifold crisis of the Negro intellectual." (Pg. 543)