Harold Cruse; Social critic, essayist (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: Adam Bernstein, Washington Post Staff Writer
Harold Cruse, 89, a captivating, sometimes audacious voice
in black social, political and artistic life for five
decades whose best-known work was the essay collection "The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual," died March 25 at an
assisted living facility in Ann Arbor, Mich. He had
congestive heart failure.
Mr. Cruse had been a student of the theater -- stagehand,
failed playwright -- an Army veteran, a Communist, an
ex-Communist, a teacher, an essayist and a polemicist. But
overall, he saw himself as a dissident who offered political
critiques along artistic lines.
He used writing to explore issues of social justice and
equality; relationships between blacks and Jews (he resented
the idea that a great bond existed between the groups); and
black literature that appealed to mass, white audiences. He
considered it farcical that Lorraine Hansberry's play "A
Raisin in the Sun" would be considered a realistic portrait
of working-class Chicago life.
He criticized notable figures of all races, from the
Gershwins for "stealing" Harlem jazz to black scholar Cornel
West, whose fondness for quoting European philosophers
annoyed him.
A New Yorker reviewer was not far off when he wrote that
"The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual," published in 1967,
"will infuriate almost everyone." Viewed by some as a
brilliant rant and others as engaging but flawed, the book
established the author as a leading personality among black
thinkers of the day.
William Jelani Cobb, an assistant history professor at
Spelman College who edited "The Essential Harold Cruse,"
wrote that next to "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and
Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth," Mr. Cruse's book
was "required reading among Black Powerites."
Mr. Cruse held a dubious view of capitalism and its economic
influence over the working class and the media. But he also
believed that pragmatism was more influential in
contemporary life than the social and racial utopias
promoted by American Marxists and Communists.
Fascinated by the intersection of the arts and social
change, he slammed white pop and jazz musicians and
composers who "achieved status and recognition in the 1920s
for music that they literally stole outright from Harlem
nightclubs." He called for black performers and technicians
to boycott any future production of the Gershwin folk opera
"Porgy and Bess," which he considered "a symbol of that
deeply-ingrained American cultural paternalism practiced on
Negroes ever since the first Southern white man blacked his
face."
Neither did he feel the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic
movement of the 1920s, was a success. It was integrationist
in nature, he said, and did not meet his standards for
addressing black identity.
Because of the book's notoriety, Mr. Cruse was invited to
lecture at the University of Michigan in 1968. Within a
decade, he had risen to full professor of history --
reportedly one of the first blacks without a college degree
to receive tenure at a major university. In 1970, he helped
found the university's Center for Afroamerican and African
Studies. He retired in the mid-1980s as professor emeritus
of history and African American studies.
Harold Wright Cruse was born in Petersburg, Va., on March 8,
1916, and was taken to New York by his father, who had
divorced his mother.
He was determined to be a writer, but he also developed a
lifelong appreciation for the arts through an aunt who took
him to black vaudeville shows on the weekends. Early on, he
did technical work at the YMCA theater in Harlem.
After Army service during World War II, he attended the
George Washington Carver School, a Harlem institution run by
the poet Gwendolyn Bennett, where he heard civil rights
leader W.E.B. Du Bois lecture. He regarded the school as
"the Communist Party's cultural base in Harlem."
He had a short stint writing for the Communist newspaper the
Daily Worker and failed in his attempts as a playwright in
the mold of Abram Hill, a founder of the American Negro
Theater whose plays "Hell's Half Acre" and "On Strivers Row"
he admired.
He visited Cuba in 1960 as part of a delegation of black
intellectuals; wrote for newspapers and magazines; and
taught black history for the Black Arts Repertory
Theatre/School, founded in Harlem by the writer Amiri
Baraka.
After retiring from Michigan, he wrote "Plural but Equal"
(1987), a book that was damning of the 1954 Brown v. Board
of Education decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court
outlawed racial segregation in public schools.
"As it was implemented in the South," he wrote, "the Brown
decision eliminated black teachers, black principals, black
administrators, a whole generation of experienced
administrative public school personnel made superfluous by
integration."
He concluded that "the progress of racial integration as
public policy can be seen as a process that has left the
majority of the black population stranded and stalled at the
edges of power while the inner sanctums were protected from
change."
Survivors include his companion of 36 years, Mara Julius of
Ann Arbor, and two half-sisters.