The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual

Praise

“Harold Cruse wrote The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual for the moment and for the future. He succeeded in both….Cruse’s book not only reflected the frustration, anger and confusion of its time, it also promised an explanation and a solution…an enduring document.”
— TLS

“Eloquent, passionate, forceful—Harold Cruse has had an electrifying impact on an entire generation of African American intellectuals.”
— Gerald Horne

“Crisis dwarfed almost all other books of the period when it came to bringing together politics, art, and social movements related to or inspired by the Afro-American condition.”
— Stanley Crouch

“Cruse repositioned the interpretive axes of the study and conduct of black political debate. Where Malcolm X was the intellectual inspiration of Black Power and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Turé) was its principal ideological architect, Cruse was without question its definitive critical interlocutor.”
— Adolph Reed, Jr., New School University

“When all the manifestoes and polemics of the Sixties are forgotten, this book will survive as a monument of historical analysis—a notable contribution to the understanding of the American past, but more than that, a vindication of historical analsis as the best way, maybe the only way, of gaining a clear understanding of social issues.”
— Christopher Lasch, New York Review of Books