Harold Cruse

The first biography of a controversial, iconoclastic architect of Black Studies, from a leading scholar of the Black intellectual tradition

In the 1960s and 1970s, Harold Cruse (1916–2005) was one of the most prominent Black intellectuals in the world, mentioned in the same breath as James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, and Malcolm X. Today, Cruse is nearly forgotten. In this biography, Vincent W. Lloyd reclaims the story of an influential contrarian, a man who was beloved, feared, hated, reviled, praised.

Cruse grew up poor in Virginia and Harlem, worked as a critic and organizer, and then spent years making his living through manual labor while writing The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967). The book electrified Black America, and the activist who never finished high school became a tenured college professor, a founder of the field of Black Studies, and a mentor to countless student activists. By the 1980s, however, Cruse’s distaste for integration, liberal pluralism, and multiculturalism meant that his influential work was fading from view.

Drawing on Cruse’s letters and unpublished writings, along with scores of interviews, Lloyd offers a fast-paced narrative of an extraordinary life—and a new perspective on Black justice struggles. Ultimately, this is the story of a singular man: passionate, brilliant, strange, and visionary.