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Book

The crisis of the Negro intellectual : a historical analysis of the failure of Black leadership

Call Number

  • 305.896 C9571 (CEN)

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Publication Information

New York : New York Review Books, 2005.

Physical Description

xiv, 594 pages ; 21 cm.

Summary

"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 cliches of the melting pot in favor of a vision of Americanness as an arena of necessary and vital contention, an open and ongoing struggle."--Jacket.

Notes

Originally published: New York : Morrow, 1967.

Contents

  • Individualism and the "open society"
  • Harlem background
  • the rise of economic nationalism and origins of cultural revolution
  • Mass media and cultural democracy
  • Cultural leadership and cultural democracy
  • 1920's-1930's
  • West Indian influence
  • Jews and Negroes in the Communist Party
  • The National Negro Congress
  • Richard Wright
  • Artists for Freedom Inc.
  • dialogue off-key
  • Origins of the dialogue
  • Freedom newspaper
  • From Freedom to Freedomways
  • Richard B. Moore
  • Lorraine Hansberry
  • Paul Robeson
  • Freedomways, summer 1963 : black economy
  • self-made myth
  • Freedomways, summer 1963 : capitalism revisited
  • Freedomways, summer 1963 : nationalism made respectable.

Subjects