THE TRIUMPH OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL

Abstract

In the middle of the 1960s, Harold Cruse was angry with his fellow “Negro intellectuals.” “The Negro movement is at an impasse,” he wrote inThe Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, “precisely because it lacks a real functional corps of intellectuals able to confront and deal perceptively with American realities on a level that social conditions demand.” When his book was published in 1967, American race relations seemed to be vectoring toward another nadir. Urban unrest, declining job opportunities for African Americans, the escalating war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movements’ divide over “Black Power” were only parts of the “crisis” Cruse identified. To him, black intellectuals had failed to wrestle with the particularities of racism in the United States and thus had failed to offer meaningful solutions beyond what he deemed to be the dead-end roads of integration and black nationalism.