Harold Cruse

[Chronicle Obit]

Harold Cruse: Author, activist and U-M professor

BY NIRAJ WARIKOO

DETROIT FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
March 28, 2005

Harold Cruse, one of the most influential writers on
African-American
politics, culture and history, died of heart failure Friday in the
Sunrise Assisted Living facility in Ann Arbor. He was 89.

Mr. Cruse is best known for his 1967 book, "The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual," an analytical look at the ideas of black writers and
artists.

Written during the tumult of the 1960s, the book urged black
autonomy and
became a pioneering work that is widely read today in academia. A
new
edition of the book was published last month, with an introduction
written by Stanley Crouch.

In 1968, Mr. Cruse became a professor at the University of Michigan
in
Ann Arbor, where he taught African-American studies. He was key in
starting U-M's Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS) in
1970, and was acting director in 1972-73.

He later became professor emeritus of history and African-American
studies at the university.

Mr. Cruse's life and writings encompassed the broad diversity of the
black and American experiences during the 20th Century. Communism,
slavery, nationalism, blues, Marxism, jazz, capitalism, civil rights
--
all were written about in his sharp prose.

"Cruse's legacy is awe-inspiring," the Library Journal wrote in
a review of the 2002 book "The Essential Harold Cruse," a
collection of writings by and about him.

Mr. Cruse was born in Petersburg, Va., in 1916, and moved with his
family
to New York City as a young child.

After graduating from high school, he held a variety of jobs before
serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, according to the
Robert F.
Wagner Labor Archives at Tamiment Library in New York City. In 1941
-45,
he was stationed in Italy, north Africa, Northern Ireland and
Scotland.

After the war, Mr. Cruse briefly attended City College in New York,
but
never graduated. "He was self-educated," said his significant
other, Mara Julius, an assistant research scientist emeritus at
U-M's
Department of Epidemiology.

"He was an avid reader, spending much of his time in the
library," she said. "He rounded out his education in arts and
music."

In 1947, Mr. Cruse joined the Communist Party, which was strongly
pushing
for integration and racial equality. Mr. Cruse contributed drama and
literary reviews for its newspaper, the Daily Worker.

But his writing was not tied down by party doctrine. In fact, he was
a
sharp critic of other black thinkers and artists for strictly
adhering to
philosophies, like communism, that he felt could constrict the black
experience.

In the 1950s, Mr. Cruse wrote several plays, but concentrated mainly
on
nonfiction. In a 1951 essay, he praised entertainer Josephine Baker
for
returning to the United States from France and not losing her
"native Negro idiom."

In his 1967 "Crisis" book, Mr. Cruse wrote about black figures
such as Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, arguing
that
their rigid politics restricted them.

The book also touched on "mass media and communism, black-Jewish
relations, and the revolutionary use of force," said the New York
Review of Books.

And decades before critics assailed Vanilla Ice and Eminem for
ripping
off black culture, Mr. Cruse wrote about white people in the 1920s
making
"music that they literally stole outright from Harlem
nightclubs."

Among his other books are "Rebellion or Revolution,"
"Marxism and the Negro Struggle" and "Plural but Equal: A
Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and America's Plural
Society."

In "Plural but Equal," he faulted civil rights leaders for not
learning from the failures of the black struggle in the late 19th
Century.

"There are some people who learn how to teach, and some people are
born to teach," said Julius. "He was born to
teach."

Mr. Cruse also is survived by two half-sisters and a cousin.

Funeral arrangements have not been finalized. Mr. Cruse is to be
cremated.


Copyright © 2005 Detroit Free Press Inc.

[Chrono Obit]

Harold Cruse
Author of 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual'
Published in The Independent 06 April 2005
By Thomas L Blair editor and publisher www.chronicleworld.org

Irascible, angry but gifted, the social analyst Harold Cruse was a leading black public intellectual of the 20th century, writing on the unresolved race-class issues that plague black and white America.

Cruse was the arch-enemy of integrationist black intellectuals as Harlem in the 1940s emerged from the depths of the Great Depression. He believed there was a profound leadership problem. Although briefly associated with the Communist Party, Cruse believed that black intellectuals and their white, socialist, particularly Jewish, allies, were misdirecting negroes from truly radical and creative actions. This hiatus arose, he claimed in his best-selling book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), because of their alienation from the masses and hence their inability "to specifically and independently define negro goals".

Cruse was ideally placed to make these observations. Born in 1916 in Richmond, Virginia, seat of the slave-owning confederacy, he was a migrant to Harlem, the Mecca of the New Negro, along with thousands of other poor black southerners, and from an early age lived with his working-class father and stepmother.

He served in the segregated US Army in the Second World War and then, largely self- educated, got most of his schooling in militant labour and Communist Party cadres.

Cruse was a formidable and audacious critic of black social, political and artistic life. But The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual established his place in American and African American Studies. It is probably the definitive critique of the negro intelligentsia and most lucid analysis of the impasse in race relations in America.

His analysis begins with the crucial clash in the 1920s between the black nationalist and pan-Africanist principles of the mass movement leader Marcus Garvey and the integrationist approach championed by W.E.B. Du Bois, then an officer in the white-influenced National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Cruse criticises severely the editors of Freedomways, the pre-eminent progressive black journal of the period, led by Du Bois and Paul Robeson. By contrast, he praises self-determined grassroots southern and northern black leaders: the armed self-defence committees of Robert Williams in Monroe, North Carolina, and the rebels of the Watts uprising in Los Angeles.

Cruse concludes with a "Postscript on Black Power" and a controversial question that still gnaws at the vitals of today's black intellectuals in white societies: "How do we measure up to the complex problem of being spokesmen on behalf of the black masses?"

New assessments of Cruse's work are under way at the Atlanta think-tank the Institute of the Black World, and the Black Policy Conference at Harvard University this month will keep his adversarial points of view alive.

The significance of his work - his suggestion that intellectuals must learn from the black masses and play a central role in movements for radical change - is still hotly debated. The Harlem intellectual Howard Dodson, Chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, concludes, however,
Cruse was probably right, the mid-century mass actions in the North, of Harlem negroes led by the Rev Adam Clayton Powell Jnr, and the brave vanguard of the civil rights movement in the South, were probably more productive in the equality struggles than the posturing of black and white socialist intellectuals.

Following the publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Cruse took up a position at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in African American Studies and retired in 1984 as Professor Emeritus.

His later books include Rebellion or Revolution? (1968) and Plural but Equal: a critical study of blacks and minorities and America's plural society (1987). His work is also celebrated in The Essential Harold Cruse: a reader (2002), edited by William Jelani Cobb.

Harold Wright Cruse, social critic: born Petersburg, Virginia 8 March 1916; staff, Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1968-77, Professor of History and Afro-American and African Studies 1977-84 (Emeritus); died Ann Arbor, Michigan 25 March 2005.

Thomas L. Blair
copyright 2005