Past Imperfect: Sharp-Tongued Truths, a Tribute to Harold Cruse
By William Jelani Cobb, AOL BlackVoices columnist
Playwright, essayist, activist, professor and intellectual swordsman, Harold Cruse died in Ann Arbor, Mich., March 26. The news shocked me. But more than that, it forced me to contemplate the man, his work and what America needs to remember most about him.
I first encountered Cruse, who was 89 when he died, in the "politics" section of a bookstore in Washington, D.C. His massive 'Crisis of the Negro Intellectual' dominated the shelf, its stark black and white cover dared me to flip through. This was the late 1980s and I had just discovered an entire canon of nationalistic black writing -- Yosef Ben-Jochanon, J.A. Rogers, John Henrik Clarke, etc.
Cruse, on the other hand, was not an Afrocentrist. Neither was he an integrationist. He blasted the thought of fighting to get a chance to mix with white people. Instead, he traveled his own path, creating an intellectual middle road from which he attacked all schools of thought and picked apart a broad range of topics, always digging, trying to get at the bottom of black America's most entrenched problems. That night, I passed over Cruse's 'The Crisis', favoring some other now-forgotten piece of Afrocentria.
I came across the book again years later. This time I was in my mid-20s and the flair, originality and straight-up acidity of his prose left my head spinning. It was as if he had taken the dozens and applied them to intellectual discourse. Communists, liberals, muddle-headed race officials -- it didn’t really matter what they were calling themselves -- Cruse gin-su’ed them all. Neither Baldwin, nor Wright, nor Hansberry, nor Robeson escaped his pen unscathed. Unsentimental, unsparing and, truth told, uncharitable at times, Cruse wasn't concerned with the cotton-mouthed niceties. He wanted to speak sharp-tongued truths.
I would spend the better part of the next decade grappling with the questions he raised. He was one of the primary reasons that I wound up writing a doctoral dissertation on African-American anticommunists. While researching that project, I came across a cache of unpublished Cruse materials at NYU. I wrote him and asked if he would consider me as editor of a Harold Cruse Reader. I really didn’t expect him to agree, but when he did, I flew to meet with him in Michigan at the retirement community where he lived. What I found was a frail, old man whose quick admissions of failing health were like intellectual versions of Ali's rope-a-dope. Give him a minute and Cruse could still take you to school on the finer points of theater criticism, the failings of American Marxism, the farcical pursuit of reparations ("They'll give 'em to you right after you get on the boat back to Africa,") and the poor state of contemporary black intellectuals ("A bunch of god-#@% dummies!")
Cruse was born in Virginia in 1916 and moved to New York in his childhood. An aunt dragged him from Queens to Harlem as a child to attend the plays and musicals of the then waning Harlem Renaissance. He witnessed the tide of radicalism that swept the country in the 1930s, fought in World War II in the 1940s and joined the Communist Party for a brief period before leaving at the dawn of the McCarthy era. His first love was the theater and he hoped to make a go of it as a playwright. That didn't happen and, by the time his manifesto reached shelves in 1967, he was already well into middle age.
For decades, Cruse's central commitment remained the resolution of the issues he felt undermined black leadership -- and thereby black people. He continued his work in the 1970s at the University of Michigan as a pioneer in the field of black studies. Largely self-educated, Cruse was one of the few African-American university professors without a college degree.
Despite his incredible depth of knowledge, Cruse had his share of broad brushes and blind spots. He made big statements and in so doing ran the risk of having large flaws. His critics accuse him of biases against West Indians, women, Jews and the Left. He admitted that Crisis was a flawed work, but even now, three-plus decades after its publication, it remains a cornerstone -- chipped and cracked, but foundational nonetheless.
A few months ago, Cruse called to tell me he was working on a book that would respond to his many critics. He said he would need my assistance in researching it. By that point, though, his health was poor and I doubted if he was strong enough to see the project through to completion. He never wrote the book. Yet, there is much comfort to take in the fact that he lived his last days with the same audacity, keen mind and professorial curiosity that he brought to each of his intellectual brawls.
About the Author
William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College and editor of 'The Essential Harold Cruse.' He also posts articles at his Web site, www.jelanicobb.com. You can reach him at creative.ink@jelanicobb.com
April 6, 2005