Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:11:41.961Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE TRIUMPH OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

EDWARD J. BLUM
EDWARD J. BLUM*
Affiliation:
Department of History, San Diego State University E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the middle of the 1960s, Harold Cruse was angry with his fellow “Negro intellectuals.” “The Negro movement is at an impasse,” he wrote in The 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.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , April 2015 , pp. 253 - 263
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Cruse, Harold, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1967), 472Google Scholar

2 Cruse, Harold, Rebellion or Revolution? (Minneapolis, 2009; first published 1968), 100, 110Google Scholar.

3 Gordon-Reed, Annette, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.

4 Thelwell, Michael, “What Is to be Done?”, Partisan Review, 35/4 (Fall 1968), 619–24Google Scholar.

5 Drake, St Clair and Cayton, Horace Roscoe, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945)Google Scholar.

6 Fearnley, Andrew M., “When the Harlem Renaissance Became Vogue: Periodization and the Organization of Postwar American Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History, 11/1 (April 2014), 59–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 My reading of Miller is based, in part, upon Kaplan, Amy, “‘Left Along with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald E., eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC and London, 1993), 3–18Google Scholar.

8 Morgan, Edmund S., The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, MA, 1958)Google Scholar; Morgan, Edmund S., American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

9 Lewis, David Levering, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

10 Retman, Sonnet H., Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression (Durham, NC, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 235, 508.

12 Obama, Barack, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

13 See Blum, Edward J., W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (Philadelphia, 2007), chap. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Blum, Edward J. and Harvey, Paul, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill, 2012), chap. 8Google Scholar.

15 Azaransky, Sarah, The Dream Is Freedom: Pauli Murray and American Democratic Faith (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Hull, Gloria T., Scott, Patricia Bell, and Smith, Barbara, eds., But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Old Westbury, NY, 1981)Google Scholar.

17 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 267–84.

18 Blum, Edward J., “‘A Third Force’: The Civil Rights Ministry of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.,” in Preston, Andrew, Schulman, Bruce, and Zelizer, Julian E., eds., Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia, 2014), 82–100Google Scholar.

19 Smith, Paul Chaat and Warrior, Robert Allen, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Bates, Denise E., The Other Movement: Indian Rights and Civil Rights in the Deep South (University of Alabama, 2012)Google Scholar.

20 Douglas, Ann, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Miller, Monica L., Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC, 2009)Google Scholar.