| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered. Ed. by Jerry Watts. (New York: Routledge, 2004. xii, 322 pp. $90.00, ISBN 0-415-91575-9.)
Harold Cruse devoted his life to cultivating the image of "perpetual outsider" (p. 18), as Van Gosse notes in his contribution to the volume under review. It was often difficult to tell whether Cruse, as a social critic and public intellectual, was being provocative out of ideological or personal motives—or a mixture of both. Born in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1916, he spent much of his mature life in New York City, except for time overseas in the army during World War II. He was a member of the Communist party (CP) and wrote for the Daily Worker until 1952. Thereafter, he cultivated his image as a maverick and developed a "revolutionary nationalism" (p. 249) that, according to Peniel Joseph, was further energized by a visit to Cuba in 1960 with a group of black intellectuals that included the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones.	1
As the 1960s progressed, Cruse wrote for the black radical journal Liberator as well as for the New Left publication Studies on the Left. However, by 1967, when The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual appeared, the internationalist dimension of his position had receded and, according to Joseph, he had become an advocate of a kind of radical ethnic-racial cultural politics (p. 253). Aside from a book of essays, Rebellion or Revolution (1968), and then a late work, Plural but Equal (1987), he published little else. In 1968 he assumed a position at the University of Michigan, where he taught until his retirement in the mid-1980s. He died March 25, 2005, at the age of eighty-nine.	. . .

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