Review of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual

I’ve been meaning to review The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse for quite some time. With it’s depth and breath of evidence and a forceful analysis it’s no surprise that following it’s publication it was a cultural touchstone amongst the cultural and political elites of the early 1970s. Truth is, whenever I’ve sat in front of an open Word document with the intent to respond to it’s arguments and evidence, I start to feel a bit overwhelmed. This despite the fact that I’ve had some pretty extended conversations on this book.

Thankfully, one of the Facebook groups whose posts I follow, the Society for United States Intellectual History, recently curated a Roundtable on the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Rather than provide you with my thoughts on the matter, I decided I’d share these instead:

• The Many Crises of Harold Cruse: An Introduction to The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Roundtable by Robert Greene
• Not a Classic by Daniel Geary
• Harold Cruse’s Ruthless Criticism by Andrew Hartman
• James Baldwin and The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Holly Genovese
• The Still Rejected Strain; or How Black Thought is Enough by John Meyers
• The Enduring Crisis of Black Intellectuals In America by Robert Greene

 

Along with two other insightful PDFs:

• Harold Cruze on Negro Intellectual
• Spiller’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date

and some random other links:

Beyond the Color Line: Jews, Black and the American Racial Imagination