in the United States who writes books, plays, music, poetry; who dances, sings, paints, acts or performs, designs or creates in any way; who is a critic or a student of history - all of these are today faced with a great racial dilemma. very fact that we stand on the threshold of more democracy and freedom has posed a problem of a very complex nature. Put in the simplest terms, the problem is this: As Negroes of Afro-American descent, and as writers, artists, creative individuals, whose culture do we develop and uphold - an Afro-American culture or an culture? (Cruse, 49) One of the most promising of the young poets said to me once, want to be a poet - not a poet; meaning subconsciously would like to be white. And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little and as much American as possible. (Hughes 175) Harold Cruse's provocative question about African-Americans' choosing to develop and embrace Afro-American or culture initiated what came to be known as the Cruse-Redding controversy of 1958-59. Writing in an era of entrenched assimilationism, Cruse dared to proclaim the specificity of African-American culture. The American Negro, he contended, cannot be understood culturally unless [s/]he is seen as a member of a detached ethnic bloc of people of African descent reared for three hundred years in the unmotherly bosom of Western civilization (Cultural 49). Reckless according to his diagnosis, had landed the African-American in a cultural desert: the deracinating despair zone two opposing racial and identities - the Afro-American and Anglo-American (52). Cruse's quest was not for a naive return to the source. For even as he established connections between Africa and African-America - for instance, the nascent wave of political decolonization in the former, signaled by the Ghanian independence of 1957, and the budding nationalism in the latter - he emphasized the Americaness of the distinctive African-American culture that needed affirmation and invigoration. If culture is the of a race, nation, people or nationality, he argued, the African-American soul had lost its power of communication, stunted, as it were, by Caucasian idolatry in the arts, abandonment of true identity, and immature, childlike mimicry of white aesthetics (53, 56). Since he believed the future to be especially bleak for African-American dominance in U.S. politics or economics, he recommended a profound cultural rehabilitation and refurbishing as the only precondition for a proper assessment of problems and strategies and therefore for a firm grip on African-American destiny (66). When Cruse published An Afro-American's Cultural Views, the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 was just four years old. Its effects were yet to be fully absorbed, much less subjected to the kind of useful scrutiny only a critical distance could allow. International fame was emerging for Martin Luther Kin& Jr., the Civil Rights apostle who kept the embers of hope alive with integrationist fuel, and for a while, there seemed to be a - if we see consensus as an agreement among those who have the wherewithal to make themselves heard - that cultural integration, as King had crafted the elegant proclamation a year earlier, was the promised land of African-America (qtd. in Cruse, 60-61). Under these circumstances, the responses to Cruse's essay were predictable. One of the most cited is Saunders Redding's Negro Writing in America, an address given at the First Congress of Writers, organized by the American Society of African Culture in 1959. …