Cruse, Harold Wright, 1916-2005

Harold Cruse was an African American author and professor best known for his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), a Marxist-nationalist critique of the Communist movements influence and a call for an autonomous and revolutionary Black culture. Cruse was born in 1916 in Petersburg, Virginia. As a young child he moved to New York City with his father, where he graduated from high school and held a variety of jobs prior to World War II, when he served in the army in Italy. Following his discharge, he briefly attended City College. Cruse took classes at the Communist Partys George Washington Carver School in Harlem, joined the Party in 1947 (remaining a member for some seven years), and contributed drama and literature reviews to its newspaper, the Daily Worker. Cruse wrote four plays during the 1950s, but none were produced, and thereafter he concentrated on nonfiction. In the late 1960s, Cruse joined the faculty of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and helped found the Center for Afro-American and African Studies there. Cruses other books are: Rebellion or Revolution? (1968), a set of essays on Black nationalism, Plural but Equal (1987), a critique of the effects of integration, and The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (2002). He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2005.