In 1967, Marshall Lee was living in Philadelphia and becoming a Black revolutionary. “We were crazy, involved in a whole lot of stupid stuff,” Lee told me. “If it had not been for The Crisis”—Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, published that same year—“I do not know what would have happened to me.” Lee thinks he might have ended up in prison, or dead. Instead, he became a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Cruse—“somebody who helped to bring some clarity to Black revolutionary movements.”
In the late 1960s and through the ’70s, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual helped give shape to the aspiring Black revolutionary movement. It also became a cornerstone of the new discipline of Black studies; Henry Louis Gates Jr. was assigned the book in three different classes at Yale. Cruse’s work circulated so widely in part because it cut across truisms of radical movements and therefore made people angry: Audre Lorde described The Crisis as rife with “inaccuracies, misrepresentations and plain lies.” In the 2010s and early ’20s, young Black radicals were again talking about the intersection of class and race, criticizing the politics of respectability, and questioning whether white liberals would ever concede power. But few of them were talking about Cruse, whose polarizing qualities had helped consign him to obscurity.
They should have been. The Crisis tells three stories at once: Cruse’s own story, the story of his generation of Black people in Harlem, and the story of Black America. All three narratives seem to culminate naturally in 1967, when militant Black nationalism was capturing the public imagination. Really, they’re all still culminating today. And Cruse, I think, might have helped explain why the Black struggle for progress—and broader American efforts toward equality—seem stuck in the same cycles that plagued the movement six decades ago. He might also have had some unwelcome suggestions for how to break out of them.
Harold Cruse was born in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1916. His mother worked as a domestic servant, his father in a factory. Petersburg, which before the Civil War had been home to more free Black people than any other city in the South, was a bastion of Black institutions. Later, Cruse would use his 1987 book, Plural but Equal, to ask what might have happened if, instead of focusing political energy on integration, Black Americans had directed it toward providing their own communities with the same level of resources that white communities had.
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Cruse’s childhood was itinerant. Eventually, he and his father ended up in Harlem, where he became enthralled by the characters of the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen taught at his junior high school, and as a young man, Cruse attended public lectures by Richard Wright, Claude McKay, and W. E. B. Du Bois. During World War II, Cruse joined the Army and spent time in Algeria—where the Arabs resisting the French felt an affinity with Black soldiers—and then Italy, where he was impressed by communism. The underground Algerian movement and the Italian underground partisans, he later wrote, were “professionals not amateurs”—a distinction that he used to dismiss much of the American activism he encountered in decades to come.
The characteristic that would make Cruse’s work exceptionally compelling would also block his path to public acclaim: His commitment to justice was mixed with a curiosity that defied doctrinaire thinking. In his first writing job, at the Communist Party paper the Daily Worker, he submitted articles that explored the complexity of Black life rather than simply celebrating heroes of the struggle for Black liberation. He was skeptical of integration and gravitated toward a circle of Black writers and artists who believed that they should first prioritize building a stronger sense of Black identity. He helped found the short-lived Harlem Writers Club, a collective of writers who felt a “need to break away from enforced interracialism”—a position that put him at odds with Communist leadership. Disillusioned, he critiqued the “cliquish remoteness” of a Black communist-aligned paper, Freedom, lambasting its writers as “intellectual prisoners of the dying left-wing movement.”
Cruse knew that his resistance to norms that defined American conversations about race was risky: When he was working on The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, he told friends, “If I publish it, I’m going to have to leave the country.” The Crisis insisted that although the United States imagines itself as a nation of individuals, it is really a collection of social, ethnic, and religious groups. The much-vaunted individual rights that the U.S. guarantees are actually secured by group power. White people as a group have more power, so white individuals have more rights.
Within this framework, integration into white society will always mean subordination—and a few privileges for compliant Blacks. The extreme alternative is similarly unpromising: Cruse argued that Black leftists compensate for their marginalization within political organizations by becoming even more militant defenders of sectarian orthodoxies, further alienating them from the Black masses.
The solution to this stalemate between ineffectual opposites was, he thought, for Black Americans as a group to seek cultural, political, and economic self-determination. Cruse argued that the Harlem Renaissance had marked a rare opportunity to build the sort of internally self-governing community that Petersburg had once been. But he believed that that movement had fallen short because, despite its artistic influence, it did not braid culture with politics and economics. White people owned the property and businesses that served Harlem residents, thereby appropriating the profit of those enterprises from Black communities.
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What the Black masses really wanted, Cruse thought, was not integration but rather resources that would meet their basic needs. The first political goal attached to Black group consciousness, then, ought to be to block white people from extracting resources that should serve Black people—with the second aim of Black communities building resilient community infrastructure, including cooperatively owned businesses and locally controlled third-party politics. The mid-1960s were a moment when those goals seemed like they might be achievable—if, Cruse warned, Black Americans could avoid falling prey to sectarianism and impatience. (“In the place of a matured social vision,” he wrote, “there will always be those who will gladly substitute the catastrophic and glorious act of martyrdom and self-immolation for a cause.”) On top of the dangers of rash action, Cruse feared that Black intellectuals, including leaders of the civil-rights movement, might be too interested in their own middle-class existence to genuinely encourage or arrange such radical change.
Cruse’s ideas about communal self-determination may have faded in prominence in part because of his knack for making enemies: The Crisis targeted the most venerated and powerful figures in the Black community, including leaders of the integration movement, and they had no trouble finding platforms to denounce him. Cruse also criticized those on the left, both Black and white; even some people who were most ideologically aligned with him found the book’s ideas unpalatable. Importantly, Cruse also had a record of bigoted statements about groups including Black women, southern Blacks, West Indians, and Jews. The Crisis includes, among other much-scrutinized comments, claims of “nationalistic aggressiveness” by Jews. Cruse also routinely stereotyped Black women writers as motivated by “axe-grinding against black men.”
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Or perhaps Cruse’s arguments were forgotten because his central message—that self-interest and a focus on individual rights will hamper any social movement—remains too challenging for many people to embrace. After publishing The Crisis, when he became the inaugural director of the new African American Studies program at the University of Michigan, Cruse began to question what a Black political strategy that considered the differences between Black communities nationwide might look like. During the program’s contentious first semester, he warned his students that if they came to class with their mind already made up, there would be no space for thinking at all: “We can’t allow dogmatism of any kind to be injected into our thinking about reality.”
He was unsuccessful. Amid protests over university policies toward Black students in the spring of 1970, Michigan committed to reshaping the Black-studies program, prioritizing Black-student demands over the longer-term goal of honing a rigorous new discipline. But in subsequent years, Cruse sensed that a “feeling of stagnation” was taking hold. As student protests subsided, he and other faculty members became mired in profound disagreements about pedagogy and department politics—disagreements in which Cruse himself fell prey to the kind of sectarianism he had once warned of. He feared that the memory of Black-justice movements was fading, and that Black scholarship was becoming clouded by nostalgia.
Cruse was a flawed man and scholar. He could be cantankerous, contrarian, and unaware of boundaries; late in life, the author and activist Grace Lee Boggs, a onetime collaborator of Cruses’s, said, “I seem to recall him being very mean.” Cruse aimed merciless polemics at seemingly every major Black figure under the sun.
But he understood that thinking carefully and appreciating history are essential to being able to better intervene in the present. He knew that insistence on ideological purity from any quarter runs counter to that mission, and that stalemates over partisan issues lead insiders to ignore the interests of the people at large. And as the political winds shifted around him, Cruse always had the same refrain: Understanding history at all levels—world, nation, and city—was essential to responding to the urgency of contemporary needs. He believed that, just as the activist requires physical courage to confront the police in a street protest, so, too, do they require intellectual courage to interrogate the views and presuppositions of comrades, as well as their own.
This article was adapted from Vincent W. Lloyd’s new book, Harold Cruse: Critic, Writer, Teacher.