Eminent Social Gadfly, Harold Cruse, Passes Written by Herb Boyd Thursday, 07 April 2005
Harold Cruse
By Herb Boyd
Managing Editor, TBWT
The eminent social critic Harold Cruse, the late John Henrik Clarke once mused, “raises more questions than he has answers for.” Indeed, and some of those questions probed and pricked Black culture and Black leaders like no others have. Cruse, 89, died March 25 at an assisted living facility in Ann Arbor, Mich. according to several reports. He had congestive heart failure, said his companion Mara Julius.
When Cruse dropped his analytical bomb “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual”
(1968), a lengthy book of stinging indictments and rich untold history, he
caused a storm of outrage and consternation. Written at a time when Black
Power was at its peak, Cruse challenged that generation of Black leaders,
repudiating their theories and criticizing their practices.
“Black Power slogans reveal the depth of unpreparedness and the lack of
knowledge that go along with the eagerness of the new Black generation of
spokesmen,” Cruse wrote. “The farther the Negro gets from his historical
antecedents in time, the more tenuous become his conceptual ties, the emptier
his social conceptions, the more superficial his visions.” Obviously, this
critique of the radical and militant movement wasn’t taken kindly and for many
years there are still many who feel the thinker’s conclusions should have been
entitled the “Crisis of Harold Cruse.”
To some extent this was certainly some of the impressions Dr. Clarke expressed on more than one occasion, and perhaps expectedly, since he was included among those assailed by Cruse. The Harlem Writers Guild and “Freedomways” magazine were the meeting places for such intellectuals as Clarke, John Oliver Killens, Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson, and countless others, and they all were dressed down by Cruse, who charged them as examples of a failed Black leadership.
“While the book by Mr. Cruse offered no lasting solutions to the crisis, he has
at least put the major problems on the agenda and we can no longer ignore the
crisis or pretend we do not know what the crisis is,” Clarke wrote at the end
of African World Revolution (1991). “That by itself might be his finest
contribution to his people.”
The praise and controversy in the wake of the book’s publication endowed Cruse with the respect and credentials he needed to land a later tenured position at the University of Michigan where he would spend the rest of his teaching days and by 1970 he was instrumental in establishing the school’s Center for Afro-American and African Studies department. And all of this without an undergraduate degree.
As Cruse reports in his book, he had spent many years in and around the various political and artistic institutions and organizations in Harlem. It was from these meanderings that he began observing incidents and individuals as they exploded and then expired. He admits that he was more the observer than the participant, and only occasionally did he feel moved to publish what he had seen and heard. Some of those impressions can be found in Rebellion or
Revolution? (1968), a collection of eloquent and powerful statements on film,
music, theater, politics, and literature.
Some of Cruse’s summations in this collection of essays were revised and
expanded in the Crisis of Negro Intellectual. However, the central issue, the
main thesis of the book was to examine how and why Black leadership had failed.
Another theme that emerges throughout the book is a dissection of Black
history, which for him is “basically a history of conflict between
integrationists and nationalist forces in politics, economics, and culture, no
matter what leaders are involved and what slogans are used.”
Harold Wright Cruse was born in Petersburg, Va., on March 8, 1916, and was taken to New York by his father, who had divorced his mother. From his early years, there was the urgency to write. “As a boy I attended three kinds of educational institutions—the completely integrated schools of suburban Queens, the predominantly Black Harlem schools, and the segregated all-Black schools of Virginia,” he wrote in the Introduction to Rebellion or Revolution?
Cruse’s father took him to the theater and to vaudeville performances where he
was immersed in the song, dance and theater of the 1920s and 1930s. After a
military stint, he returned to his beloved Harlem and quickly resumed his
inconspicuous presence at rallies and clubs. “I spent the years from 1945 to
about 1952 wrestling with this perplexity (understanding what had happened
during the previous generation), and trying to understand why I was such a
glaring intellectual misfit—an incomprehensible gadfly to some, and a
pretentious neophyte to others, those whose politics I criticized.”
Such was the content of his days and nights until his retirement from the U. of
Michigan in the mid 1980s. Much more about Cruse has been deftly compiled by Spelman Prof. William Jelani Cobb in The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (2002).
Along with his companion, Mara Julius, Cruse is survived by two half-sisters. A
memorial service is being planned in his honor.
http://www.tbwt.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=445&Itemid=2
Author
